She was visiting her husband’s mother when a neighbor asked how she was about gently used clothing. A dear friend of the neighbor had died recently. “I have a few things that look like they would fit you,” the neighbor told her.
They items fit perfectly, as though they were tailor-made for her! She felt such a connection to this woman she had not previously met. “It is like we are soul sisters,” she said.
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~ Excerpt from “The Clothes of the Dead”, posted on October 13, 2021by Gail Crowther
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about clothes of the dead. This is partly because I am writing about them, but also generally I’ve been thinking about the status of a dead person’s objects. I’m curious about their value and their meaning….
Margaret Gibson writes eloquently about the powerful immediacy that clothes can offer us — sometimes containing a trigger of memory, sometimes a record of the past, often returning the dead to the spaces inhabited by the living. She says clothes mobilize our emotions because they are partly how the dead person chose to construct their identity. After their death, we are left with these fragments, which we can piece together to somehow reanimate, resurrect.
In this sense then, clothes of the dead offer some sort of continuity.
Three-Martini Afternoons at The Ritz: The Rebellion of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (20 April, 2021) by Gail Crowther: Simon & Schuster: New York.