Never borrow anything from the dead. Destroy their belongings, or they’ll come looking for those possessions eventually.
My memory is blurry to the point that you should not trust me, but I recall the first time I became . . . aware of death.
I was five, going on six. I was in the backyard, doing nothing, or nothing visible to the eye—basically wandering around and daydreaming—when my dad came home. He had been on a gardening job for some rich old lady. I saw that the car was full of boxes, and when he got out I asked what was in them.
He told me that the husband of his client had passed away—that phrase again, a sentence we say over and over—and she had given him her husband’s clothes to donate to St. Vincent de Paul. Dad opened up the back of the car to grab his cooler and went inside, so I began to investigate.
The boxes contained the clothes of an old man, attire from another era: porkpie hats, black dress shoes, argyle socks, suspenders, ties with tiepins, starched shirts with the cuff links in the holes in the cuffs, and dark suits with pinstripes fine as the strings that manipulate the limbs of puppets. The clothes were pristine, though a few of the white shirts had faint brown stains in the underarms.
I doubt if I fully comprehended what I was touching, but the clothes drew me in. There was something magical about these garments. It was as if our off-white station wagon had been transformed into a pale hearse. I sensed the man had gone somewhere where he didn’t need all his things, so he left them behind, like a snake sheds its skin.
There was one small box, black with a company’s name in gold lettering. I opened it up. In the box were five pairs of glasses. I picked up a pair of black horn-rims and put them on as my mom came up behind me.
“Don’t wear those,” she said, snatching the glasses away. “You might catch something.”
I don’t know what she thought I would catch. Some eye disease, I suppose. The more I think about it—and I think of those dead guy’s clothes at least once a week—my mother wasn’t concerned with contagion or infection. I suspect it was a more general superstition she had in mind, that it’s bad luck to wear the glasses of the dead, that if you put their glasses on it will wreak havoc with your vision: you might see something only the dead should see.