To be clear, I am not a hoarder. I have downsized more often than I can count and I regularly donate items to the thrift store. At the same time, I have some things that are very hard to dispose of.

This week, my focus is on the artwork created by my late husband. He was very talented at drawing and painting and he occupied a lot of his work time and personal time being creative. Some of his works are excellent, some are okay, and some are . . . well, not great. That’s what the creative life is like. Variable.

At some point, I forwarded some of his best works to family members and friends so that they all could have a creative remembrance of him. But even after that, I still have a lot of drawings, paintings, and notes to make decisions about.

There are some excellent pieces, some okay pieces, and some not-so-great pieces that all occupy a space in my apartment, and I don’t know what to do with it all. The not-knowing is the hard part. I emailed my children to see if they wanted any of it, and they declined. So, the choices are left to me but they are not easy choices.

When I mentioned my dilemma to a friend she shared her own question about what to do with her late husband’s many award plaques that were of value to him, and appreciated by those who loved him, but otherwise not destined for display.

How do you dispose of artwork, or certificates of excellence, or plaques for awards, when their recipient has passed on? They all belong in the category of too-extraneous-to keep-but-too-good-to-trash, and they cannot easily be thrown in a dumpster.

As such, today I chose a compromise. I met with a photographer who specializes in artwork to have some of my husband’s illustrations digitized. Many decades ago my husband created two books for children on watercolour paper, but they were never published. Since then they have languished in a portfolio which has been relocated multiple times and now sits under my guest-room bed.

When I showed the pages to the photographer we discussed how best to deal with the stains from moisture, the leaching from adjacent pages, and warping. We were talking about many decades of neglect. Ultimately, though, he thought that he and his computer could do them justice. I will be interested to see what he comes up with.

The question I am still left with now, though, is what I should do with the originals.  I don’t know if I am capable of putting them in the garbage containers in my apartment building. I don’t even know if I could put them in the paper recycling bin. Does anyone know? Perhaps they are just trash. Either way, I think I’ll simply ask the photographer to do it. I might even pay him to do it. That’s a good hoarder’s solution, don’t you think?