The Perils of Collecting • Enchanté

It almost seems like it was all just a dream now.

So much has happened in the ten months since he’s been gone; all the upheaval in the world and in myself makes that feel like a different plane of existence. Maybe it was.

I can only describe it in dramatic hyperbole, which is fitting because that’s how most of our conversations were conducted. Even the telepathic ones.

Don appeared in my life out of nowhere. He was like a comet, blazing across the darkest days and nights. At first, I just admired his brilliance. Then the pain came, realizing that he was consuming himself.

We talked about the thread of fate that connected us, which we clung to and stretched and distorted, and wove into a blanket under which we hid from the world. That all started unraveling when he died, leaving me starkly exposed and vulnerable. But also, the unraveling let the light of truth in.

Don wasn’t a perfume collector when we met. I didn’t consider myself “a collector” either. I enjoyed vintage perfume and had a working knowledge and had several nice bottles which I wore regularly. Don had decided that he wanted to start wearing fragrance, and, in typical Don fashion, was looking for something extraordinary.

He christened me as his mentor, and he was too charismatic to be refused. We had immediate chemistry. Within days of meeting we plunged into years of frenzied joint discovery and acquisition — researching, chasing, buying, smelling, comparing, planning the next conquest.

I can see now all the ways that we fed off each other. Melancholy. Romanticism. Obsessive tendencies. Aching nostalgia. Feelings of being lost in the wrong place at the wrong time. We took all of this intense, hopeless energy, and poured it into perfume.

We lived 300 miles apart, so we were “sharing” everything, but we usually each bought a bottle. If it was something really old or special, we would swap decants from our respective bottles and compare them, spending hours in real-time discussion of the comparison. Or he would ask me to describe the “scene” that a perfume evoked in my mind, and we’d carefully go through and brush in tiny details to make it more and more perfect. He never bought anything without immediately decanting a generous sample to send to me.

All of these moments were profoundly intimate, in a way that I can’t adequately describe. I felt fully seen; I could talk about something that inspired me with someone else who appreciated it equally, and would never tire of the conversation. It was intoxicating.

As my few dozen bottles grew to a few hundred, they became a nuisance. I was running out of storage space. Things became harder and harder to find. There was always something else to want and acquire. We had moved on to buying “the best example” of things. Don was collecting “investment grade” bottles. I was buying some ultra-rare scents that I questioned if I even deserved to own (I do). But we were also buying things for “completion.” Every scent created by Jean Kerleo. Mitsouko from five different decades. Different sizes of the classic Guerlain flacons (pristine and sealed, of course).

We had tipped over the edge. We were collectors. I was dusting bottles of perfume that I was never going to wear. I had never wanted this, and I could see how it was problematic in a number of ways. But collecting sustained a relationship that was vitally important to me. And it had become a part of my identity that I could never quite decide if I wanted to embrace or reject. I spent a lot of time with this identity “trying it on,” a curious vacillation between pride and embarrassment; one day I would say I was a collector and the next day I would vehemently deny it. To be a collector meant, to me, that the cycle of buying and owning and keeping would be endless.

Around this time, we started to have serious discussions about what would happen to all this perfume if one of us were to die. The thought of our precious bottles of Nombre Noir, Poivre, Patou Pour Homme, and Jicky being carelessly tossed in cardboard boxes and hauled to the Goodwill gave us actual palpitations. Nobody understood us like us. We vowed that if something happened to one of us, the other would take care of their “babies.”

Don eventually became obsessed with buying Iris Gris, to the exclusion of everything else. And he succeeded. That was the point at which I said “enough,” but I delighted in his joy anyway. Waiting for his bottle to arrive was an anticipation that I can only compare to waiting to give birth to my children — such excitement but also everything feels so tenuous until the moment of safe delivery. And, although I absolutely did not expect it, as soon as he opened the bottle, he sent me a decant, which moved me profoundly.

Between finding his white whale, my bowing out of actively buying, and some mounting personal problems, Don seemed done with collecting and near the end of his life started selling some of his perfume. I was surprised by this; I was the one who was always concerned that there was too much, that possessing all of this was wasteful and was holding me back. But I felt too caught up to stop, and then too overwhelmed to do anything about it. I said, “how can I start?” He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll teach you.”

A few weeks later, I got a message from Don’s wife. He had died suddenly. It was a shock, but also not a total surprise. I had hoped it wasn’t true, but somehow felt it coming. He had left instructions for her to contact me about the sale of his perfume collection. I drove to meet her and collected the bottles, all wrapped with care, and listened to her talk about how much this meant to him. I brought home these ghosts from our past together, and he has been with me here since, teaching me how to sell perfume.

I’m down to the last bottles now, the connection is fading. I’ve bought some of his perfumes for myself that I will always treasure, but when this task is done, the dream will end and I will move on. I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the lessons, and realizing that I’m a different person now than I was then, and what I need to do to reflect that outwardly in my life.

Probably the most important thing I’m taking away from this experience is the knowledge that selling a loved one’s precious perfume collection is an extraordinarily painful and time-consuming burden. I am honored and humbled to have been chosen, and I would do it again in an instant, because it was a promise that I made. But I don’t want anyone to ever have to do this for me. So, I need to leave less behind.

Not long after Don died, I saw a quote (author unknown) that said, “Look around. All that clutter used to be money. And all that money used to be time.” That really hit me hard. While we were doing all of this perfume collecting, my two children were in high school and starting college and somehow I managed to get divorced and remarried and finish my doctoral degree while working full-time. Don was married and had a very young child and they had a second child during that time, and he ran a business. Our friendship and perfume was a source of joy, but also I wonder what we missed out on when we weren’t present with our families and lives, and with each other, because we were busy buying perfume that was destined to later be just resold.

I cherish all of the time that we spent talking about perfume, but when I think about Don I wish that we had more time now to talk about anything else. He was such a fascinating person, full of random knowledge and unusual experiences and fierce opinions. He would often start to tell a story and then say, “you know, we should save that for later, it could be a whole book.” And I would ask him to continue, but many times he would go back to perfume instead. Now the perfume is still here, and the stories are lost forever. I loved him deeply, and I think about that all the time, how I wish I would have pushed back, restored the balance, kept more of him and less of the perfume. We talked daily, about all of our thoughts and fears and secrets, but there was still so much to tell. There are stories, unfinished, that haunt me.

Don died in December of 2019, and the year had been particularly bad for him personally. He kept saying to me that “19 is a terribly unlucky number” and I never asked him why because he was very superstitious and I didn’t want to force him to talk about it. The very first thing that I was going to do on New Year’s Day was ask him WHY 19 is unlucky. I never got to ask. But he also told me over and over again, “if we can just make it to 2020, everything will be OK.” I laugh about this several times every day, because, well…. look around you. I hope that he is laughing with me.