Drowning in Downsizing

     I'm trying, I really am, to restore some order in my life. The first step is to organize.  In the past, even when I would decide to finally get rid of an accumulation of utility bills or old bank statements, I would first put them all in chronological order before disposing of them. I figured that was the least I could do for them after all the time we'd spent together.
    I knew it wouldn't be easy to sort through more significant items, for  example the ton or so of books that have been in my house throughout the various life stages.  We weren't provided the luxury of book-owning when we were children beyond a tattered old Bible, a Webster's dictionary, and an old  World War 1 book that had been my father's.
   The first books accumulated enmasse were my college texts, and then a number of books from my teaching days. At the time, teachers were gifted with free offerings for their personal collections from book companies hoping to convince the teachers to order their texts.  That was the procedure then: each teacher submitted  preferred selections of classroom textbooks. A teacher in my department retired to move to Arizona, and offered me free choice of books from her personal library, even handing me the key to her summer camp where her books were stored.  I remember carrying out only a dozen or so, because books are heavy and I didn't want to seem greedy, though her hundreds of books were to be donated or discarded anyway.
   Naturally, you can't organize books without leafing through them, as I am presently doing with "Recognition of Robert Frost." It was edited by Richard Thornton in honor of Frost's 25th Anniversary, copyright 1937.  It has slowed my would-be organizing down to less than a crawl.
   In the book is a torn in half sheet of paper with the following poem written in longhand, placed in the book some years later.  Discarded, but evidently saved as an afterthought:

                  The Obverse:  Waiting

     If reality exists, if all is a sum of parts,
     You spend hours, days, months
     Waiting for someone to come home,
     Endless hours spent thinking, knowing
     That your child is gone,
     And one brief moment of realizing that he is here.
     Years from now, when all the comings and goings
     Are in the past, history, deeds and days gone by,
     Yes, you have the memory of the joy of his presence,
     But also the truth  of anxious, empty moments
     Of dread, of fear, and the certainty
     That separation is forever.
     
     At the end, all is but memories anyway.
      "Remember the good times," is the cry,
     But how to select one memory over all the others?
     And, finally, did not what was dreaded come to be?
     Did you not lose first the body and then the spirit
     Of what was most precious?