An Old Grey Sweatshirt

It started with a sweatshirt. An old, fraying grey hooded sweatshirt with green lettering on the chest; the neck is cut and there are small knots tied in the ripping fabric of the cuffs. The sweatshirt had clearly been around for years before it became part of my track warmups. When it was time to turn in my uniform at the end of the season, I parted with the rest of my issued items but I couldn’t part with the sweatshirt.

I pretended that I had lost the sweatshirt. My mom had seen it still in my room when the school sent home a letter about it. But she paid the fine so I could graduate the eighth grade and keep the sweatshirt after I had explained why I had wanted to keep it. It had been my sister’s track sweatshirt for her two years in middle school; then it was mine for two years. It had been in our home for four years and I didn’t think it needed to belong to anyone else after that.

Nineteen years later, the sweatshirt is still in my closet. No matter how many other sweatshirts have come and gone from my various closets over the years, I know that I will always keep room on my shelves for this one. Technically the sweatshirt was no longer stolen once my mom had paid the fine, but I’m still glad I kept it in middle school.

It’s the first item I remember holding onto for the simple reason that it had been her sweatshirt. I’m sure there were plenty of other things passed down from older to younger sister, but this is the first one I remember choosing to make my own. I could have picked a different set of track warmups, but I picked that one because it had been hers. I kept the sweatshirt at the end of the season because I believed it was ours. It was something we had shared, and that mattered to me. 

Now, I hold onto more things simply because they were once hers. I chose to keep things that will always be a little more hers than mine. But like the sweatshirt, they are also things I knew I could make ours. 

Maybe if life had happened differently I would have donated the sweatshirt by now. I imagine I’d have fewer of her things to hold onto if she had been around to keep them herself. If things were different, I wonder if I’d have fewer reasons to hold onto any one thing in particular.

But things are how things are, and that sweatshirt is one of the few items I have from the time we had to grow up together. My sister died not that many years after I stole it. She died when I was eighteen, when I was still young enough that I had never questioned if I should get rid of a middle school sweatshirt. So I keep it now because it was ours, and that still matters to me.

After she died, I started holding onto things that, in a different life, would have remained hers. I keep them, but I don’t think of them as my things. They are pieces of her life I’ve incorporated into mine. There is her framed picture of Detroit on my wall and her red windbreaker in my closet. I keep her set of four wineglasses and her purple hand-painted plates in my kitchen; they are items she had gotten for her future kitchens. Beyond that, I have a handful of her movies, a couple of her books, and a few pairs of her earrings mixed in with my movies, books, and earrings.

I guess over time they have all become ours, but I like to keep thinking of them as hers. I know I’d remember my sister regardless of whether or not I kept holding onto her stuff. But I like being able to wrap myself in a sweatshirt that used to be ours. When I wear it, I miss her a little less. When I keep her things close enough to use, it’s easier for me to see the parts of her that have become parts of me.

So I keep our grey sweatshirt folded on the shelf, next to her old maroon sweatshirt. Some mornings I drink coffee out of an N-initialed mug that better belongs in her kitchen. I keep her things mixed in with mine, the same way I keep pieces of her mixed in with me. They are my constant reminders of how someone keeps on living in the people they leave behind.