Stuff Keeps Going On

I find myself wasting a lot of time and not concentrating well, and sometimes I wonder whether I'm using the bereavement as an excuse to be lazy and unfocused. Whatever I do or feel, I wonder whether it's connected.
As long as I'm so unfocused, I decided to do something useful, so I began cleaning up our basement storage room, which tends to become unbearably cluttered.
Fixing up his physical surroundings was something Asher was good at (in huge contrast to me). He never just moved into a space and left it as it was - just as, when he was a child, he almost never simply played with new toys. He usually broke them, creatively, to make them more interesting. That was part of his energetic character.
The studio apartment that we rent out, originally part of our apartment, was Asher's place for a while. Before he moved in, he persuaded us to enlarge it, and after he moved in he put up shelves and plywood panels on the wall, for his art work. The young couple we've rented the apartment to now are also making a serious nest out of it, removing some of the things Asher put in and some of the furniture he left, including a computer table that Asher designed and had made for himself: a metal frame with a glass top.
Just seeing that table again made Judith weep. So much is associated with Asher.

The state of the cellar was daunting, but I decided to go at it a little at a time. So far I've rearranged some shelves and thrown away about four cartons of old papers, financial records more than a decade old, and volumes and volumes of the journal that I kept, more or less assiduously, for decades.
I lost interest in keeping a journal three or four years ago, because I realized that it was part of my distorted image of myself: I thought I was such an important person that people would study my journals! Only sons think they of huge interest to the world.
My blog is an outgrowth of that habit, but different, I feel. With the journals I wasn't reaching out, trying to establish communication, sharing. I was just filling up pages with longhand and then shoving the notebooks into drawers when they were full. The old journals piled up, and I never had the patience or interest to reread them. Once in a while I would glance through them, and the few sentences that caught my eye always embarrassed me.
Nevertheless, I couldn't bring myself to jettison them.
Now that I've done it, I feel only the slightest regret. If they weren't even of interest to me, how could they possibly be of interest to anyone else?
I found myself shoving the old journals into the recycling bin with violence. I was getting rid of something I should have gotten rid of years ago. Perhaps the violence was directed against the me that couldn't get up the courage to get rid of all that verbiage.
Perhaps the big loss of our son enabled me to let go of them - but the violence of my movements tells me that it wasn't a letting go so much as an expulsion.
I don't think I was being honest with myself in my journals. I was self-conscious without being self-aware. Now I'm more self-aware, at least self-aware enough to get rid of that junk.
Asher's death has ripped open my heart, giving me depth I never asked for, precious though it may be, because the cost was unacceptable. I must neither refuse what I have received nor deceive myself that it compensates in any way for the loss. I'd rather be shallow and have a living son.