September 15, 2020The Whole of Him CollectedGregory Loselle

“Some of the information here is documentary—two years after his death, the children of my grandfather’s second wife returned to us the keys to the house their mother had continued to occupy. It had been looted, stripped even of ceiling fixtures (though, tellingly, my grandfather’s books were undisturbed, and while salable compact discs had been taken, the vinyl records from which I’d first learned music with him, during wonderful long evenings in the den, were left behind). A drawerful of half-burnt candles had been dumped onto the living room carpet. But some of the information here is mythic or poetic: the sort of scene we imagine in a simple human preference to remember things as they weren’t. His clothing, for instance—for as much as it forms the subject of this sequence—had been disposed of by the time I reached his closet, though a box of family papers and his shoeshine kit were indeed there, as were his shoe trees. The saints’ relics were, more properly, in his dresser drawer, though I’ve relocated them for my own purposes; and to my chagrin I found a stack of my manuscripts, from adolescence through my first fully realized works, on a shelf behind where his clothes had hung.”