The Half-Used Things

It is not the photographs that undo you, in the end, or the jewellery, or the things a person meant to leave behind. It is the half-used things. The bar of soap in the dish, worn thin and curved, shaped by the specific way their hands moved over it. The lipstick worn down at an angle — their angle, the exact geometry of their own mouth pressed into the wax over months. The reading glasses on the nightstand, still smudged with the oil of their face. The tube of hand cream rolled up from the bottom, a quarter left. The toothbrush. The slippers gone soft and splayed in the shape of two particular feet. The hairbrush. These are the things that stop you cold in the days after, going through a house, because they were never meant to be relics — they were meant to be used up, finished, thrown away and replaced — and they were caught, instead, half-finished, mid-use, at the exact point the using stopped.

The keepsakes are bearable because they are already keepsakes; a person set them aside to be kept, and grief knows what to do with a thing meant for keeping. But the half-used soap was not meant for keeping. It was meant to be used until it was a sliver and then gone. It is the purest evidence there is of an ordinary day expected to be followed by another ordinary day — because you do not ration soap, you do not save the last third of the hand cream, you use these things freely and without thought precisely because you assume there will be more, more soap, more mornings, an endless supply of ordinary days in which to wear things down and buy them again. The half-used thing is interrupted continuation made physical. It is a life caught in the middle of the most mundane possible act, assuming, correctly until it wasn’t, that the act would go on.

The shape of the body

But it is more than interruption, and this is the part that reaches in past all your defenses, because the half-used things do not just record that a life stopped — they hold the actual physical shape of the body that is gone. This is what the soap does, and the lipstick, and the slippers, and the worn place on the handle of a favourite mug: they are shaped by the body, slowly, unconsciously, over time, and so they are a kind of reverse-sculpture of the person, the negative space where they pressed. The soap curved to their palm. The lipstick angled to their lip. The chair cushion holds the weight they put in it. The reading glasses sit, still, at the exact spread their face required. These objects are the closest thing there is to a cast of the living body — not a photograph of how they looked, but an imprint of how they were, physically, in the world, the daily unthinking shape of them pressed into ordinary matter by nothing more than repeated use.

And that is why they are unbearable in a way a portrait never is. A portrait is a picture of them. The worn soap touched them — was in their hands, that morning or the morning before, shaped by their living body in the most intimate and ordinary way — and it still holds the shape, warm-seeming even when cold, the last impression of a hand that will not press it again. To pick it up is almost to hold the hand. The body is gone, cremated or buried, the physical person removed from the world entirely — and here, in a soap dish, is a small exact record of that body’s daily motion, a thing shaped by their flesh, outliving the flesh, holding its form. It is the most present the dead can be, physically, in a house: not their image but their imprint, the ordinary matter their body wore to its own shape and left behind, mid-use.

What you cannot do with them

And so you cannot throw them out, and you cannot use them, and the half-used things enter the strange permanent limbo that the most ordinary objects of the dead all seem to reach. You cannot bin the soap — how could you, it is worn to their hand, throwing it away feels like discarding the last of them, and it is only soap, and it is not only soap. You cannot use the soap either — it is theirs, worn to their shape, and to wash with it would be to wear it down past them, to erase the imprint, to use up the last curve their hand made. You cannot use the toothbrush, obviously, or the lipstick, and you cannot throw them out, and so they stay, half-used, in the bathroom, on the nightstand, exactly where they were, for a long time — a shrine nobody built on purpose, made of the least ceremonial objects imaginable, the soap and the glasses and the hand cream, kept not because anyone decided to keep them but because neither of the two available actions, using or discarding, is bearable.

There is no advice in this, and I would not offer any, because the day a person can finally use up the soap, or gently throw it away, is a day that arrives on its own schedule and cannot be hurried by anyone, least of all a writer. I only want to name the half-used things, because they are the quietest and most overlooked of all the things a death leaves in a house, and they carry more of the actual person than almost anything on the mantel — the ordinary matter the body shaped by daily living, caught mid-use, holding the imprint of a hand. The photographs show you what they looked like. The soap remembers what they were: a body, in a house, on an ordinary morning, washing, and expecting, entirely reasonably, to wash again tomorrow — worn to their own shape and set down in the dish, half-used, waiting for a hand that had every reason to think it would be back.