what makes a life

As part of the clean-up of the "garage room" (the attached 2-car garage that the previous owners converted into a game room) it's time for me to dispose of a lot of paperwork. Among the things I brought here from my mother's house are a couple of boxes of financial information pertaining to my Aunt Grace Whitehill's estate. She died in 1993 or 1994, and my mother was the executrix of her estate. She also wasn't a relative, but a lifelong friend of the family. (I have three Aunt Graces: my father's brother's wife, my mother's brother's wife, and this dear family friend.)

I'm not sure exactly what's in these two boxes, and I frankly don't care. It's none of my business. There are bank statements, deeds, bills, tax forms and the like. I'm only in the first box. This is one of the reasons we purchased a shredder. Aunt Grace and Harry are long gone and had no children. Her estate is long distributed. But there can still be SSN's and credit card information and I don't feel comfortable just recycling this paper.

But I see her handwriting on bills and correspondence. I see her care in managing and tracking her money. I see effort and focus and attention to detail. Aunt Grace Whitehill was a sweet woman, a lovely person, soft and kind and with a quiet, lady-like laugh. Now she's reduced, in this dimension, to a couple of boxes of papers. This is all that's left of her life, as far as I can see. This is all that's left of a lifetime of friendships and successes and tragedies and love and loss. Someday, that's all that will be left of me and hobbitt. I'm sad about it, of course. I miss sitting with her and sipping herbal tea and feeling embraced by all the warmth that my parents' circle of friends created. And I'm puzzled. What makes a life, and what's left - and what's the point of all this? Right now I just don't know.