Everyday I look at it differently and try to make sense of it all, the stacks of boxes and files, the neatly organized and voluminous paperwork that made my father's meager estate uniquely his own.
He had been working on a history of the military service of his family members. Seeking out information on deployments and transcribing letters from WWII, an ambitious project for anyone. He didn't get to finish.
But from there it veered off track. I knew he was a strict adherent to protocol, I expected to find good record keeping and a kind of "forms in triplicate" approach to financial matters. I dismissed and dumped boxes of files going back in time to the 60's, 70's, employment records, tax returns back to the nineties, the bank statements and balanced checkbooks too. I even found the dozens of "Day-Timers", completed years, neatly lined up in their little plastic boxes kind of endearing.
Oh Daddy.
I knew he printed out emails, older people do that, heck even I've been guilty a few times. Yet he printed out both the sent and replied, reams of them. And here I thought he always went to his desk phone so he could sit while we talked, it turned out he was taking copious notes of every phone call, along with his talking points. All printed out. He did this for all of us, his friends, his family. It was there in our files. Extensive files.
Then I found the pages and pages, small pads of papers, notebook binders, records of his everyday life. What he had for breakfast, a squirrel he saw outside the window, mundane occurrences and then the sad, single word, "depressed" sandwiched in between jotted doctor appointments and choir practice times, long tomes of scratchy handwriting. People journal, I told myself. Samuel Pepys had nothing on my dad.
It was the lists that finally got me. List of what he ate every day for years. Finally it was the "mail log" that brought me to tears, every piece of mail, even the ads and junk received, all typed up and categorized by day, month and year.
Oh daddy.