When you go to an ER because you've caused a severe auto accident, and you're all banged up, sometimes you arrive strapped to a gurney with your clothes cut off.
This happened to me nine years ago. The EMTs cut off my new Christmas clothes at the scene to examine me for compound fractures or any other injuries. It was freezing that night. (Once I was pulled from the back of the ambulance, it seemed as though I was left restrained on the gurney in the frigid weather of the hospital portico while the EMTs debriefed the nurses outside the ER.)
Anyway, when they release you from such an ordeal, they give you a bag of your belongings. It contains the possessions off your person, even if they’ve been shredded up by EMTs doing their job.
I saw someone handed his belongings bag the other night on TV, like a mom giving her third-grader his sack lunch as he heads out the door for the school bus -- or a prisoner emerging from his senetence and receiving the scant items of a displaced life, a former self.
I find it a very existential exercise, to receive such a thing. It presents quite metaphysical scenario: summarily sent you on your way with a tidy bag of what represents you.
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