Letting Go

What Really Matters in The End

My Magic Bullet

My husband and I have never been “collectors” of physical items, unless you count the corks we’ve collected from many, many bottles of wine from all over the world. We have traveled the world together for over 32 years, and if we had brought home souvenirs from every place we’d visited, we would need a mansion to house them. The reality is that, for us, the most important souvenirs we bring home from our travels are the photographs and videos we take along the way.

I cannot begin to describe how important these are to me, and how appreciative I am to be able to take out my phone or tablet and be instantly transported through time and space to specific moments that captured our imaginations, our creativity, our love, and lust for life. I have over 15,000 photos and about 800 videos on my iPhone, and I must admit that I scroll through them daily. Even before my cancer diagnosis in 2024, my photo library was my magic “happy bullet”. Now I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have them to turn to, the images on the screen morphing the hours of chemo drips, endless waits in doctors’ offices and emergency departments into something manageable. With a few taps, I am transported back to a time when it was easy to smile, laugh, and be goofy.

Barbados, Ocho Rios Jamaica, The Blue Lagoon Jamaica, Tuscany, Florence, Eze France, Monaco, Paris, COVID Travel: Photo's by Author, The Wistful Neo-Druid

Each photo is a magical time capsule, bringing back the most precious moments of my life. Each country we visited during our world travels, every gathering with friends and family, all the sweet moments with our fur-babies over the years. Even if the photo is unflattering, or too dark and grainy, or even blurry, to my husband’s dismay, I keep them all. These are my beloved souvenirs.

I bring this up because, along with the unpleasant knowledge that I have reached my “Best Before” date (see my early post of the same name), I have come to realize that I need to get rid of things that I have dragged around with me for the past 50+ years or so. The reality is, just because our partners and families love us very much, there is little chance that they want to wade through leather-bound diaries, cards and photographs from our high school days once we are gone. It is only fair to free them from having to deal with the boring minutiae of who we had a crush on in Grade 10, unless we know for a fact that they have a vested interest or desire in this. I would guess that, unless you are blessed with children who have always wanted to know everything about you when you were young, having to purge through these types of documents could be stressful.

While I bring up the words “blessed with children” here, I feel I need to address my feelings on children out in the open before continuing with the real purpose of this post. When I made my original decision not to have children at the age of 33, I knew that although it was the right decision for me, I was going to regret not having a child in my life. Don’t get me wrong. It was the right decision, and I stand by it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t wish it could have been different, wish that I could have a loving daughter to spend time with and cherish, or a son to champion and celebrate. And yes, I am jealous when I speak with friends who have children and grandchildren. But having a family would never have been a good idea for me. I choose not to go through the reasons here in this post because I have already written about them in earlier posts (see my series “The 2nd Daughter”). Suffice to know that it was not an easy decision, and it was not made casually.

I knew I had to throw these books, these memories away. Even my husband would not have the slightest interest in these chapters of my life, just as I would not have wanted to go through his adolescent past.

And so last week I decided to go through a large box overflowing with beautiful childhood memories. Glittery cards from my mom, dad, and siblings with sweet birthday greetings. “Just because I Love You” cards from my beloved sister 13 years my senior, whom I lost to cancer back in 1991 when she was just 42 years old. The photo album my mom put together for me, done for each of her children, complete with a lock of hair and the Birth Announcement from the hospital. On the bottom of the box, my thick, black-leather volumes of diaries that I began writing when I was about 10 years old, filled with large, loopy handwriting, plenty of sparkly hearts and some very terrible drawings. And high school yearbooks - oh my God. Isn’t that a trip down Memory Lane. Crammed front to back with comments, complete with speed bumps and potholes, those faces of our past who were actually once people who mattered to us in one way or another. Good, bad, sad, ugly, poignant, beautiful; we spent so many of our formative years building friendships, and learning hard lessons about the human condition. Perhaps the hardest lesson of all that we learned? That sadly, not everyone we trusted with our fragile hearts and souls during those formative years showed or shared their true selves with us.

The first few steps down memory lane are slow and leisurely. I flip the pages, pausing to scour for familiar faces from my first year at Brookfield High in Ottawa, Ontario. I cringe at the tiny, thumbnail photo of myself, my hesitant 14 year-old smile. There were no second chances at a better photo in those days. No “Healing” tool to improve our pimply skin, no “Glamourize” option to show your seductive side! You walked into the gym, sat on a stool in front of a plain screen background and - click. You couldn’t see how you looked until the photos were developed. If it was completely awful, which was almost always the case, that was just too bad. Other girls always looked better in their yearbook photos, that’s for sure, and that’s what I believed.

Here I am in my absolutely worst-ever yearbook photo. I have to look away! Squinting my way through the pages of Grade 9ers, I spot one of my friends. Serena, a pretty girl with a wide face framed by long, straight blond hair, the kind of hair I prayed for every single night. Her smile always seemed to be pasted on her face, though, never quite reaching her eyes, and I often wondered what the shadows were behind them. Then there is Tammy. A perfect, tall, athletic specimen oozing with the kind of confidence you have when you are the star player on the girls’ basketball team. It didn’t hurt that she had three older, very cool, protective brothers, also tall, also athletic and also with names starting with T. Todd, Trent, and Trevor (all very good looking too, of course) had the same striking blonde hair and blue eyes, each possessing a swagger born of good genes and confidence, causing every girl they walked by to almost swoon. I never did find out why their parents had a thing for the letter T. They even had a white poodle called Teacup. Dad was a Psychiatrist, and they had a library that would shame some Community Libraries. Tammy would often invite me to her popular “sleepover” parties for some reason. I found it strange because I really didn’t fit in with the family image of white privilege, which in the 1970’s was not even something people talked about. I suspect my rather famous penchant for exploding into contagious giggles may have been the draw. There were usually six or seven of us; after Tammy’s ridiculously beautiful mother served us a five-course meal with Baked Alaska for dessert (of course), we would all curl up in sleeping bags beside a roaring fireplace in their enormous rec-room, shrieking hysterically while listening to ghost stories, and playing Truth or Dare. I remember the painful crush I had on Trent, a senior who, of course, was the star quarterback on the football team, tall and lean, with ice blue eyes that could pierce a young girl’s heart and kill her just with a glance. Luckily, I don’t think he ever saw me, even when I was in his house making a complete fool of myself.

A few more pages and I come across Roddy (top right photo below) with his prized possession, a guitar. A lonely, long-haired, nerdy boy, Roddy insisted on carrying my heavy textbooks from the bus stop to my house every day after school, even though his house was in a completely different direction. Roddy knew that I was a soft touch and would never be mean to him, and if anyone understood the word mean, it was Roddy. He and his older brother, Darren, carried the haunted, panicked look of boys from a home that was so broken by alcohol, ignorance, and blind rage that even his shadow quivered with fear when he left my house. He had a shy smile and a wicked wit, and he could play a banjo like he came out of the vagina strumming one.

Photo Courtesy Brookfield High Year Book: My Friend Roddy (Top Right Photo) Author Deborah Thompson: The Wistful Neo-Druid

To this day, I am certain that his interest in me had more to do with the kindness of my parents, and the fact that my gentle, soft-spoken dad also played the guitar - well, pretty much any stringed instrument he could find. As Roddy would place my heavy armful of textbooks on the dining room table, my mom would be busy gathering some chocolate chip cookies for him to take home with him, and I could see him glancing around, hoping he would catch sight of my dad. My dad had a “Dobro”, a guitar featuring a cone-shaped, steel resonator giving it a unique sound, an instrument favored in Bluegrass and Blues music. My dad seldom disappointed Roddy. Many nights they would often spend an hour or so talking about guitars, and he would always let Roddy play the Dobro, his pride and joy, I think it made him feel good to share this love of music.

Unfortunately, I had developed a bit of a crush on his older brother, Darren for a while, a tall, dark-haired daredevil with mischievous eyes and a disarming smile, and so NOT nerdy. Sadly, Darren’s only real talent was being a daredevil, and I’m afraid my fascination with him was crushed after he lost an arm one weekend when he decided hitching a ride on the back of a garbage truck on his skateboard would be a fun idea. I always found it strange that, for some reason, they did not remove his arm. He had to wear it in a sling every day, but it was dead and over time began to atrophy, causing him to walk with one shoulder lower than the other with an awkward gait. It was just so sad, and if he is still around today, I hope he was able to have it properly dealt with.

I pause as I flip the pages slowly. There was Richard Hemphill, a quiet, shy boy who amazed me with his ability to draw. He would often gift me with doodles on the back of study notes and in my Year Books. His talent made me envious, and I wonder to this day if he was ever able to find a way to use his artistry.

I pause at one name specifically and stare momentarily at the round, smiling face of Deirdre (Sami) L. She was my absolute best friend during the last two years of high school; she was hysterically funny, and once one of us started laughing, the other could not help but join in. Friends and teachers called us “the broken blender” because we could not stop laughing once we started. She was a heavy-set girl and did not care for fashion or makeup, but her personality, easy-going nature, and quirkiness made her appealing to boys. As far as I knew, I was the only female friend she had. She preferred the company of the male persuasion, and made that clear by being nasty to most of the girls I knew. I turned the page quickly, not wanting to unpack the memory of how our friendship ended. After being best friends for more than 17 years, she took advantage of my trust by attempting to steal my husband away from me, or at the very least, sow jealousy and distrust between us. To be honest, I was aware that she had this dark side to her; I had seen her go after the boyfriends and husbands of other girls and women many times, but I defended her in my mind, choosing to believe that the relationship she was breaking up must not have been good to begin with, and she just took fair advantage. But when it happened to me, it was different. One day, I will write about this very sad chapter in my life, how what was once such a treasured friendship ended, but it will have to wait.

Photo of Author, Debbie LaBelle (Maiden Name) second row, far right.

And so I continued to turn the pages, flipping through memories of people I’d known 50 years ago. I read the silly inscriptions that friends and teachers had written inside the front and back covers and smiled at so many of them. Seeing the small, rectangular faces of old class-mates and reading their comments catapulted me back in time. By the time I’d reached the last page of the last yearbook, all that was left was a series of photo’s on my phone. Only pages that meant anything to me got snapped. The books were gently sealed inside the garbage bag, off to the great yearbook grave in the sky. It felt so weird to see them fall, four years of my life thudding to the bottom of the trash, sinking beneath the discarded egg carton, paper towels, and tissue boxes.

There are many more memories that will need to go into the trash, words and pictures from other iterations of my life. When the time comes for me, I don’t want my husband of now 32 years to have to comb through the years of my life before he met me. So as strange as it felt to let all those years fall through my fingers, it also felt like the right thing to do.

What will you do with all your old books and cards and letters? I understand keeping them if you have any family who might want to keep your memory - and your memories - alive, but if not - will you try to simplify life for your partner by paring down the physical objects? Let me know in your comments!