I’m not sure what came over me.

It was probably a combination of things.

I finally decided it was time to take Steve’s clothes out of the closet and pack them away.

Our bedroom had two closets, and we had each taken one. At the time of Steve’s death, it made it easy to just not open one of them.

Gradually, as we cleaned, reorganized, and remodeled, I just sort of started putting everything of his in that closet, too. A few weeks ago, I realized that I could barely close the closet door.

A had been looking for memorabilia items to take with him to school, and G has grown, yet again, and needs a “new” set of hunting clothes. I knew I could probably find an assortment of those items in that closet.

Now, there are many of Steve’s things that we’ve left throughout the house. I’ve tried to keep some part of him in our lives, mementos, photos, or even his hat left hanging on the hat rack. There is always some small part of him in our pictures, or something we can touch to keep connected to him in the smallest of ways.

At the same time, constantly seeing certain things where he left them was a continual stab in the heart. Seeing his hunting boots left to dry next to the wood stove was especially heartbreaking for some reason. I don’t know if throwing everything in the closet was the best idea, but it worked at the time, and the time had finally come to reckon with it.

Although I know that a lot of his clothing still has a lot of use in it and could probably be donated to someone who could really use it, as I started taking his shirts off their hangars and folding them with the intention of donating them, I realized quickly that I wasn’t there yet. Many of them were still creased perfectly from the last time I had ironed them and hung them up, expecting him to wear them to work the next week.

He’d had a relaxed casual dress code for work, usually consisting of a corporate logo polo shirt or, his favorite, a plaid button-down shirt. These became so well worn that they’d taken on a fuzzy feel and so they became what his coworkers had jokingly called his “pajama shirts.”

So many T-shirts, and almost all of them were from the kids’ activities and sports teams that he’d supported for so many years. His coaching polo shirts. “Free” T-shirts from volunteering that he’d done. And, of course, all the shirts from Scout camps over the years.

I know that I can have them made into quilts or various other memorabilia items, but there are just so many of them.

Then, there was the corny Hawaiian shirt that we bought as part of a matching set of outfits when we were on a cruise together long before the kids arrived. While it has been decades since the dress fit me, Steve hauled the shirt out any time a festive shirt was needed.

As the years passed, he frequently had to wear it over another T-shirt, as the buttons pulled a little bit around his waist. I never imagined, when we were posing on the deck, in the sunshine, that years later, I’d be on that boat again, doing everything I could to avoid the first Christmas without him.

I uncovered his old bag of boxing equipment, including his Penn State boxing jacket and hoodie. When we’d first started going out, I had claimed that hoodie quickly, doing my girlfriend duty of stealing his best hoodies. I’d worn it for years, and it became one of my favorite things to wear when I was pregnant with the boys.

At the very back of the closet, in a corner that I’d already stashed things that I always wanted to save, ever before he was gone, I found the jacket he was wearing on the night of our first date. It is a dark grey fleecy Patagonia jacket. I remember it for so many reasons. The color really brought out the deep blue of his eyes, and even though we’d been friends for years, that night was the first time I’d noticed how blue they were.

Later in the evening, when we stood in his driveway, laughing about the fact that neither of us was sure that we were actually on a date and we had our first kiss, I remember putting my hands against that fleece and thinking how cozy it felt to be next to him.

Years later, when the fleece was matted down, and the seams were starting to come apart, and the elastic was dry rotted, I caught him trying to throw it out. He thought I was crazy when I dug it out of the garbage.

He, of course, did not remember wearing it on our first date. He didn’t remember much about it at all, other than that apparently I was wearing pants that made my butt look good. They were tan corduroys, and I wore them with a white sweater, and a striped scarf that I would later wear again in our engagement picture, because that’s just the way I am.

Steve frequently made fun of my tendencies to attach importance to things like jackets, shirts, or scarves, but I’m a symbolic person and I love hiding “meaningful to me” objects in pictures or incorporating them into life to link important things together. Now, I am glad that I have held on to these items because they and memories are all that I have left.

At any rate, everything has been gone through, sorted into storage bins, labeled, and moved slightly down the hallway, into a larger storage closet, and a few slightly more permanently to the attic. A few articles of hunting clothing made their way into G’s closet and a few items were packed up to send in a care package to A, just enough things to help keep their connection intact. (E had claimed a few items earlier this year when she was working on her bedroom makeover just in case you thought I left her out.)

This was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do since the immediate aftermath of losing him, but it was a step finally seemed necessary. So, this is just a reminder that there is no right way to do any of this, just what makes sense at the time.

Life with Liz appears on Saturdays in the Times News.