“For at least three years,” my accountant told me. Most of the files I have been trying to pare down and simplify in my office over the past several weeks I am told I must keep for at least three years – some even longer. “Why?” I wonder. I look at them and shake my head that any of this will matter in the long run. That any of it should matter even in the present escapes me.
I look at the stacks of boxes of files I am still maintaining for my parents – both of whom are now beyond any caring about how much was spent on doctors’ visits for the last years of their lives, or how much they paid in taxes five years before that.
Of far more significance to most of us was that my mother kept every Mother’s Day card we ever sent her, along with our letters, and birthday greetings, and other gestures of thoughtfulness from family and friends and people who loved her. The recordings of my father’s beautiful singing voice hold far greater value than the records of selling his house. And yet, I am bound by law to keep the one. While my heart treasures only the other.
I suspect many of us reach an age when we are going through our parents’ lives, closing up their daily worries by putting lids on cardboard boxes and carrying them to the attic or basement for safekeeping for the required number of years. And this prompts in us a desperate need to look at our own paper existence. We urgently want to reduce it to its minimal intrusion. And, by doing so, reorganize our priorities. I suppose this is exactly what has been driving me into the depths of my office, and coming up with drawers and boxes full of critical matter I still want to label: “Why am I keeping this?”
Perhaps as an antidote, I tried to fall asleep the other night noting the things that we never seem to keep records of, or even mark “important” in the file drawers of our own minds. As much as I can remember, my list included such things as: how many people we forgave; how much patience we showed to old dogs and young children; how many shoulders we hugged; how many times we didn’t honk the car horn; how many prayers we said for somebody else; the number of times we sang “happy birthday” to others; the times we said “please and thank you,” and “I’m sorry” or “I was wrong;” the dirty hands we held; the times we held our tongues; the food we shared; the good thoughts we shared; the stories we read to the very old or the very young; the stories we read to ourselves; the people we lifted above ourselves; the places we gave in line; the happy tunes we whistled; the times we danced barefoot in the kitchen; the number of people who called us friend; the number of people who called us a person of integrity; the times we listened; the times we comforted; the number of stars we counted and rainbows we looked for; the songs we sang for a dying soul; the peace we made.
In the end, I suspect such things as these will be far more significant when it comes to the ultimate accounting of our lives. And will be valued and kept far longer than three years.