My only son, my youngest child of four, died ten years ago at the age of 35 after a long battle with cancer. He left us memories, his wonderful wife and his daughter, who was 15 months old. I’ve written about how it feels in the years after you lose a child, but it’s always different.

One of my grandsons was available to help me, although it was a very hot, humid day, so we tackled a little bit of the stuff in my garage. There were four shelves that were full of my son’s things, but I didn’t know if some of them were just things he collected when my mother or his father died or what was in the containers. We started pulling them out and found all kinds of treasures that warm a mother’s heart.

There was a plastic box with clothes and my college age grandson grabbed an old fanny pack and a red corduroy lined hat with flaps. If there was one thing my son had, it was his own style along with a vast knowledge of everything pop culture. He collected vintage clothing and lunch boxes and Scottish things and whatever caught his fancy. His old Star Wars toys are in other boxes and he would know the name of every character to this day. The original was his first movie when he was about a year and a half and all of it was such a huge part of his life. I also have his Lego blocks, having stepped over them and picked them up for years.

There’s a box out there with photos and school papers and notebooks that I just closed up for another day. I did move it from a cardboard box to a plastic container. Here are some of the other items we discovered in our archaeological garage dig:

There was a big box with his teddy bear collection. Again, he would know all the names. There was the little panda we got when we visited the pandas at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. when they had first arrived in the USA. There was the bear that he posed with in his one year photo. There were some other animals and puppets that actually came from the gift shop I owned when he was in high school and college. And this one was on top:

I needlepointed this for him when he was about three or four years old. His father was a sailor in the Navy, so it was a special bear for many reasons. He’s on my bed for the moment.

There were several books that he loved from his childhood. He didn’t have our copy of “Where the Wild Things Are,” his favorite, but he had taken this one that I must have read hundreds of times.

There were magazines from pop culture, such as a People magazine with Jerry Garcia on the cover along with others that are probably collector’s items today. There was an anthology from Tulsa Public Schools that I swear I had never seen with this published poem of his.

I now have a sealed valentine box of chocolates with Elvis to make me smile. The fact that they are Russell Stover chocolates is also fun since those were his father’s favorites.

I will sit down on days when I want to go back and learn more about my son and explore his drawings and writings. He tended to doodle, which his father did and his daughter does, in his notes, although most of his notebooks seem to be only used for a few pages, which matched what his attention span was. There is so much to explore.

One of the big pieces was an art project from his high school days. I think he was President of the school Art Club. Anyway, it was a big open box with lots of strips of film clipped to the sides. I had my grandson throw it in the dumpster that my son-in-law and daughter across the street were filling from their garage. A piece of plaster had dropped out of it and, when I picked it up, I realized that it was a plaster cast of the bottom part of my son’s face. This took me a minute because my son’s face had changed due to the treatment he received for the cancer he had in his mouth. I took it inside and my grandson threw the rest of the project away. I had seen other bits of plaster still in there, but didn’t look. Now I got curious and had my son-in-law climb into the dumpster and retrieve the plaster pieces. What we found were a complete face along with a sculpted piece of it. Pretty amazing. I have taken the pieces to be framed, but here they are.

I’ve always said that one of the nicest things to find is a photo of a lost loved one that you had never seen before. It’s like getting a piece of them back. I’d say that our little bit of cleaning in the garage brought me more pieces of my son than I realized were on the shelves. It seems there is a reason I sentimentally keep so many things that others throw out without a thought.

Now that I know what’s out there, I know I will return to the boxes to dig through papers and objects and recover little memories and new knowledge of who my son was and what his impact was on so many. It’s so comforting to know he can return to us through our memories and these pieces of him. I wish you had known him. I’m glad to know there is more for me to learn about him. We all miss him.