💗 wear clothes that belonged to loved ones 💗
Reflecting on loved ones lost and how to channel them (and time travel) by wearing their old clothes.
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My grandfather’s closet was larger than I thought it would be, like a small square bathroom doppelgänger for your clothes. The space gave the illusion of standing within a column because the three walls were lined with shelving and racks to hang clothes — but there was nothing shelved, nothing hung up, save for some of my grandmother’s things. Everything was in a heap on the floor, a scalable soft pyramid that I sat at the top of.
It was the start of my senior year of college. I had transferred the year before, to a school in D.C. I was studying theater and was cast in an ensemble where I played a giant evil bird who stalked a town of smaller birds, who eventually drove himself to madness before tearing himself to pieces in a finale involving life-size origami. The play interpreted the mid-century works of Japanese manga artist Osamu Tezuka, which were about World War II. This part of the play was inspired by Sacred Square with the bird I played serving as a metaphor for America. It was a remarkable production that I didn’t fully understand at the time: I was having fun. I was “straight” with an ironic bisexual tendency, which the director and my peers were very aware of. There was a scene involving a tango — and I was paired with another guy. He was gay. “Are you okay with this?” the director asked. I told her I was, that I was open-minded, progressive. It was the late 2000s! Who wasn’t bi? He and I started hooking up not too long after this — and something clicked. There was this feeling that a light was shining down on me, that I felt found despite never realizing I was lost. This is who I am. My past, present, and future clicked into place, a context finally being given. Moments like this are sublime, rare gifts, beautiful eye-welling times of truth. To live is to be in pursuit of such truths, to race toward realization. I wasn’t fully gay (Yet!) but I knew that my liking women had been the performance of a lifetime.
I was plucked out of this moment, out of rehearsals and hookups, by my parents driving from Georgia to New Jersey for the funeral. Our task was to mourn the loss of the Fitzpatrick patriarch. This was the first “big” funeral in my life, the first time seeing family cry, the first time seeing that life doesn’t exist in a solid state. He was sick. We knew he was going to die! Wasn’t it obvious? We all die. And yet here we were, all in black, talking about how he was here days and weeks and months ago. I was a pallbearer. I shook a lot of hands, gave a lot of hugs. My mother and my aunts and I drank wine and toasted to him. We ordered pizza, in his name. He called me Butch because I was not. He was a Marine, my father was a soldier, and I was in theater. I was also thinking about the boy, the tango. I wanted to call him. Was it wrong to text? I wanted to be in that life despite the fullness of family, the blessing of reunion that comes with death.
I sat on that pile of clothes in that closet and hoped he was thinking about me. I couldn’t call him. I couldn’t talk about him. I could just keep him in my mind, wearing the idea of him like glasses, to see the world as he might. All of this is garbage, my grandmother told us. It would be given away, thrown away, taken away. That’s why I was there, in the closet: I wanted to go through his clothes. It felt wrong to throw it all away. Could I keep his shoes? Could I keep his shirts? Could I keep his ties? My grandmother didn’t care. He was dead. It had finally happened and she had to figure out living in his shadow. I took a pair of black wing-tipped oxfords, mahogany tassled loafers, a few ties, an oversized white Ralph Lauren flannel, a fitted plaid red Pendleton over-shirt. I took them back with me to D.C. I started wearing the shoes and the white flannel with the American Apparel Slim Slacks that I asked for Christmas. I wore that outfit for years. I noticed that the sleeves on the shirt were fraying. The elbows had been worn out. The shirt was a tent, an XXL to my typically S or M.
The shirts and the shoes I wore — and still wear — to think about this time in my life. I think about the life of my grandfather. Butch. He didn’t want me to transfer to that college, to go to D.C., because he thought that was a dream that was too big to achieve. The debt, the city, the dangers of autonomy. I had quite literally almost died a few years before, after being diagnosed with a blood disorder that had me unconscious and in intensive care for days. My family’s priest was brought in to give last rites. I wasn’t allowed to go to college out of state no matter how great the scholarship because of my own proximity to death. The entire family thought I was following my biological grandmother, a homemaker with strong visual arts skills who died of cancer when my father was a boy. Everyone thought I “had” what she had. I thought what I had was just one of life’s many flings. I was tired of going to a college “not far from home” where I had to get blood tests every month, all while taking 18 hours of classes and playing a sport and partying and waiting tables and somehow maintaining a 4.0 despite never studying. I wanted a challenge. I wanted more. And yet: the clothes. I put on his shoes and I think about this history. Only a few close loved ones in my life have died. I’m lucky, in that way. For each of them, the same thing happened: I was “in the middle of something,” I made my way to them, and I left carrying their clothes, to wear the moment, to keep a part of them with me.
When my aunt Ro died, I had just started a new job producing a news show. It was a major benchmark in my life, the first time I had been seen and recognized and hired to do something I actually wanted to do. It was the first “job” I landed from my writing and television experience — which wouldn’t have been possible without Ro. She lived thirty minutes from New York City by bus and there was a time in my life where I lived with her, commuting into the city for my first entertainment job: working at MTV, which I did on and off for roughly a year, working my way from intern into a hybrid office and production assistant. She always said I could be a television host. She told me I was like a young Jack Paar. She took me out every weekend to a Friendly’s, to have breakfast and talk about networking and the importance of your pocketbook. When I graduated from the college I transferred to, she came down to see me. Her and my grandfather both. She was so happy. She drank Malibu Bay Breezes. She helped my mom get through college, to pursue her degree in her forties. Ro didn’t have any kids and lived alone with a giant cat named Joey. Her death brought me back to Jersey, to dig through piles of sweaters and old wigs. She was a bit of a hoarder, thanks to the ease of QVC and HSN and the fact that she worked as an accountant well into her seventies. She was my grandmother’s sister. She lived alone and lived the dream that Working Girl promised — but all alone. She had an entire room that was her closet. It was a cat hair-covered dome with a bed somewhere underneath all the clothes she had phoned in. I pulled out tees, a few sweaters, as we cleared out the mess. I’d wear them out and on the weekends.
When my aunt Sharon died, I just started graduate school to study fiction. She had left her life behind in the Pacific Northwest to go back home, to be near my grandmother, her mother. She knew she wasn’t well. We all did. She and I started a book club as she entered assisted living. We would read books and talk about them on the phone. We didn’t like Edan Lepucki’s California but both agreed that The Handmaid’s Tale was prescient. When she could no longer speak, I would give my one-sided thoughts about the books. She would text back her thoughts. It was a risk going to grad school in the middle of your “career” — but she insisted I had to, that I could balance it all. And I did! She had studied to be a lawyer and always wanted to be an artist of some sort. She volunteered at points for local theaters and had a painting practice that she filled her home with. But she never made the leap toward the arts as she could never step out from the umbrella of expectations that her father, my grandfather, had placed above her. The day she died I was leaving for a queer summer camp for one of my first big on-site stories. The following January I went to Portland, to clear out her storage unit, to close her bank account and tie up all of her loose ends. I found a box of band tees. I assume she wore them to Lilith Fair, with her then-wife. I took two Melissa Etheridge shirts and one of Terri Clark. They were in perfect condition, with some wear on the prints, one or two bleach stains toward the hem. They were cool then and they’re cool now. It’s hard to find an excuse to not wear them.
I kept other things too: my grandfather’s birdwatching book, a bottle of his cologne; some of Ro’s cat books, one of her wigs; some of Sharon’s paintings, all of her journals. It’s the clothes that seem the most significant, the most obvious, the most literally lived in. Whenever I want, I can put myself in my grandfather’s shoes. As I prepared for my last move, I did a deep purge. I decided that the red flannel that belonged to my grandfather would go. Ro’s sweaters too. They were unworn, they weren’t pulling their weight in fashion: they were now “trash” — but they weren’t really.
Every few years, something snaps in my brain and I feel obligated by the world to sacrifice part of my closet to the landfills that poison the earth. This is followed by years and years of regret, that I parted with something that I actually loved, that I didn’t need to get rid of. Why do we clean out our closets? When did we start to think of the things we worked for, the things that we’ve lived in, as nothing? This confusion resulted in this clothing from people I loved entering the donation-to-trash pipeline too. Did you know that every second a truckload of clothes is destroyed? Clothing and furniture, all the stuff of someone’s life, tends to be reduced down to dumpsters of stuff. I know the quality of goods is low but that doesn’t mean we can’t take them seriously, that we can’t aspire to pass them on. I wrestle if a brand name, consumer good anything can be an heirloom — but isn’t there a point of transubstantiation, where the everyday, the mass produced becomes uniquely a person’s, that their hands and time inspires them to be born again? The brave little Toaster knows this, as it climbs out of the garbage heap to tell you that it loves you, placing itself between you and the jaws of disposability so that you both may be redeemed. And yet we buy, buy, buy only for the bulk of our “stuff” to be thrown out once our context is removed. Ashes to ashes, garbage to can.
In my last move, I did the best I could to divert waste, to give things away before throwing things away. There was a weekend where we opened house and had friends over, to take whatever they could and whatever they wanted. Amanda took a plant. Lynn took a suitcase. David took the couch. Angelina and her sons took the television and some hats and some books and all the video games. It was nice but uncanny, to bequeath things while continuing to live. Should gifts always be things you give away? Then there were the clothes, which people thought was weird to give away. Why should our clothes go to strangers before they go to friends? I had to insist people take them: I gave Jenny some shirts and she texted me weeks later that she loved that they still smelled like me; Lukas I gave sweaters too, which I’ve seen him wear and wear and wear; Rax got to keep the basketball shorts that I bought for basketball practice in middle school, which they snuck out well before the move. These clothes that I wore — that I spent days in, that I saved money to buy, that I often hand-dyed to make custom — found new lives with my friends. Time capsules you can wear, sense memories of a person. I hope people think of me when they’re worn, or at least are able to make their own good memories in them.
That’s the thing about clothing despite the more, more, more economy: we spend our lives in them. For many of us, our clothing are how we express our personality, our dreams, our best understanding of ourselves. People who thrift know that clothing belonged to characters, clothing are a way of sharing history. Knowing this, shouldn’t we seek to wear more of each other’s clothes, sizing and geography permitted? After all: those sisters had those pants that travelled. Who’s to say we can’t do the same thing? We can’t take these things with us but we can share them, to give away a story instead of “stuff.” What a considerate way to be! What an ideal culture of heirlooms at a time designed to make relationships — to make ourselves — disposable.
If you read this essay and are like “Wow, something like this would be cool to publish in X place that I work at…” let me know as there is certainly a version of this that is more reported. And there’s more where this came from too! Send me a note at 1234kyle5678@substack.com.
Loved this so, so much