My Deceased Dad's Glasses and the Temporary Curse

I tried on my Dad’s glasses last week and in doing so, I think I must have unleashed some kind of temporary curse.

Stay with me on this.

My Dad died in the February of 2018. It was all pretty awful and sudden. He didn’t have much with him, when it happened, but somehow his little travel bag of belongings made its way back to me to be dealt with appropriately. Rich informed me (I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to look) that the bag contained a set of my Dad’s clothes, some notebooks, his passport and his glasses.

So I was too sad to look at these items at the time, and I was still too sad to take a look at them when we moved house two years later, and then eight years passed by and the little bag sat in the back shed, clothes neatly folded inside, waiting for me to decide what to do with them.

What is the appropriate way to deal with someone’s possessions when they are all you have of them, but at the same time the possessions are very mundane things that you can’t very well frame and hang on the wall, or have standing on the mantelpiece, or what have you?

‘Why have you got an Asics half-zip fleece jacket displayed on a mannequin in your hallway?’

‘Oh, it was my Dad’s.’

It felt wrong to throw the clothing items out, but also very weird to keep them. The well-worn shoes, the jeans, the Asics half-zip fleece. In the end, nature made the decision for me, by treating everything to a dose of damp and so, last week, when Rich was clearing out the back shed, he asked me whether it might be time to dispose of the garments - and, indeed, the travel bag itself, which had mildewed and musted.

The things I decided to keep?