Weird Grieving

My wife and I have been purging the basement. It's a good practice in general and, hey, we might move sometime in the next few years. I decided it was time to get rid of the stacks of archaeology reports I had from my previous life. I wanted to recycle them, but I also didn't want to dump the maps showing site locations in the regular recycling bin for any ol' looter to find. So, I went through each report, pulling out all maps and site-location data. It was a surreal version of “This is Your Life” as I went through ripping out select pages. I could remember lots of things about each project. Strange things stuck vividly in my memory – motels we stayed in, excavating an ancient firepit in the side of a pipeline trench, what a certain valley in Nevada looked like, pulling historical glass fragments out of a muddy screen in the rain. I felt rather odd through the whole purging; very quiet, very subdued.

Mixed in with all the boxes of reports I found what appeared to be a box from my last years of classes in anthropology graduate school at the U. of Chicago. It was full of pages and pages and pages of handwritten course notes and notes for research papers (this was the pre-laptop era after all). Much of it I couldn't remember writing. Here's something I thought worth quoting “Colluvial storage is the most difficult of all the sediment stores to estimate. This is, firstly, because colluvial storage is an inherent component of the distribution and pattern of soil cover, ...secondly, because it occurs in relatively minor volumes in many locations, and thirdly, because the boundaries between the processes of colluviation and alluviation are often not clear.” (1) For some now-unknown reason, I double-underlined the “secondly” and “thirdly” parts. It was an odd feeling to look upon all the note-taking, all the literature research. I filled an entire banker's box with this stuff.

The odd feeling, I think, can rightly be called grieving. It's a weird grieving. I chose to give up archaeology of my own volition. I spent considerable time thinking about it and making peace with the decision. I do not regret the choice. I may yet occasionally do some archaeology, if only for the sheer fun of it. But, nonetheless, for the most part, it has to go so I can do something else. The reports need to make room for my growing theological library; the notes need to make room for my files of liturgical materials. The truth is, I don't really want to crank out any more reports or copy out pithy quotes about colluviation. But, it is hard to not feel a bit sad to say goodbye, bit by bit, to the guy who did so much of that for so long.

Sherwin Nuland points out in “How We Die” that with death, “The operative word here is process, not act, moment, or any other term connoting a flyspeck of time when the spirit departs.” (2) It has been harder than I thought to let the archaeologist in me go. It has been a process. It still has a ways to go.

(1) A.G. Brown, “Long-term Sediment Storage in the Severn and Wye Catchments.” In Palaeohydrology in Practice, ed. by K.J. Gregory, J. Lewin, and J.B. Thornes, pp. 307-322. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1987), 321.

(2) Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections of Life's Final Chapter, New Edition (New York: Vintage, 1995), 42.