the briefcase

All that is left is a briefcase filled with items you chose to keep.
The will, the bank brochure from the 90s filled with promises of low rates and premium services, the wallet with a solar-powered calculator. The photos of Halevy Liquors, our home away from home, the business you prided yourself on – the one that so sharply exhibited your meticulous attention to cleanliness and inherited OCD. The photos of our home, when you first purchased it, as a young family.
There’s a promise of potential that filters these analogue remnants. If a stranger were to stumble upon this briefcase, what deductions would they make?

It obviously belonged to a person who thrived on organization, worked within business, enjoyed golf tournaments. He must have had children, due to the cards scribbled with ‘I lOvE DaD’ in fluorescent milky-gel pens, complete with badly drawn illustrations of a house and a family. His cultural background affirmed by the old escudo bank notes and local Portuguese club memorabilia.
I relish in the role of the stranger.

Frequenting flea markets where photographs slip from faded albums and as you open them you are invited to another world; one where nostalgia tinges every memory and you are granted access to people who you will never know, perhaps and most likely, those who no longer are here with us. There’s a common theme of cake, smiling, weddings, beaches, picnics, flowers, grandfathers holding grandchildren, teenagers huddled in small rooms holding beers through cigarette-smoke haze, workplaces, monuments.
At times, the family member turned photographer is well-versed at composition and framing; and at other times the frame vehemently cuts off a forehead or renders a building lopsided. I wonder how these items found their way here nestled in between vinyl and vases. A brown and orange floral patterned album showcasing the highlights of one family in Berlin in the 70s. Their walls are plastered with a wallpaper that screams of the times and their frames are filled with laughing, social faces.
They seem happy.
A card displaying multiple ID photos collected by one man of his progression from childhood to old age, each individual image recording a moment of time that translates itself into visible emotion: the early 20s face of the carefree, the 40s face of a realistic weariness.

Who is he?
Where was he from?
What hopes and fears weaved their ways into his daily life?

But when it comes to this briefcase and these documents and photographs, I am no longer the stranger.
I become the daughter of the deceased, a role that is stabbing and continuous. I search for you, holding each object as you once did as if they may magically invoke a memory forgotten.
Death does that to those left behind. The tangible transform into totem, more personally precious than any of those housed in museums. This briefcase of my fathers is the only physical portal left. I rummage through the papers and feel the briefcase for hidden compartments, maybe that’s where you left your final words, even though I know that – you being a silent man – there are no words written.
You see, the past and present tense still mingle.
Loss places the bereaved in a suspended state of living between two worlds.

28 September, you would have turned 61.
20 August, you decided to end your life.

The anniversaries begin to tally.
It’s been a while.

I am rifling through your possessions to have a conversation with you in the only way that is possible. We could talk about all the things we never did.
Initiated into adulthood with the proverbial pressures bearing down, I finally have the capacity to understand you, not as a parent, but as a person, removed. We could talk about the addiction, the debt and the expectations that weighed without release.
Perhaps you would be pleased to know how the times have changed and we can openly admit our sadness. I could tell you that I accept your departure, and that you’re still the strongest person I know. I could remind you just how much light you brought to those around you, simply by just standing there and that you were never defined by the standings of success we all get lost in and succumb to.
We could have one last Sunday of tradition where you'd cook soup and listen to the Gipsy Kings on full volume. Your love language of soup has been passed on and I think of you while I cook caldeirada, canja, caldo verde.

To sit with these pieces of paper, plastic, leather is to sit in a meditation aided. What will come of such vestiges as they turn digital and lose themselves in the incessant stream of renewing algorithm? In seventy years, who will sit with this briefcase and ponder on a life determined by material evidence?

Maybe the briefcase will be separated from the wallet, the photos from the will, the lighter from the coin – just as you were separated from us, just as we were separated from a world as we once knew it.
Maybe this separation will entrust the wallet, the coin, the briefcase to another, a stranger, who will flow within the webs of this world.
May they also have close ones who will, in an indeterminate future, sit with these belongings in a differently new, but same, conversation.