Greetings, friends. Happy Vernal Equinox, and a Nowruz mobarak to you all. As I write this, the man called Brian is upstairs with his associates, very loudly destroying the bed that I slept in from the age of about 4 years old to almost 17.
This happenstance was, in some sense, foreordained, from the moment my mother and step-father divorced. There was no world in which my mother, on her own, was going to have the physical or mental health to want to die anywhere but in this house. There was no world in which she would heed our pleas, and deal with her effects before she became too infirm to do so. There was no world in which either my sister or I was going to want to keep a 40 year old small single bed, nor one in which an estate liquidator would have anything like a viable market for reselling it.
So here we are. The bed leaves the house, and our lives, once and for all, as kindling. Sic transit gloria mundi.
But Adah and I have spent a lot of time since November, but particularly in the past month, trying to dispose of our mother’s effects in accordance with what we imagine her final wishes might have been.
Mom’s will is about three pages long, and is not very specific, at least, not in relative proportion to the incredible volume and diverse array of objects she owned. She named Adah executor (executrix?) of her estate, and the two of us as equal heirs. She listed a couple specific bequests, and that was it. The rest was left up to us to interpret.
I thank the One who makes peace in His highest places that there even was a will. Mom signed it a mere three weeks before she died. For years, Adah and I begged our mother to make one out. Neither one of us even cared what was in it, just that it existed, and gave us some capacity to deal with whatever mess she left behind. If she hadn’t, we’d still be doing all of this anyway, but also paying for it all out of our own pockets, and with one hand tied behind our backs.
No, Mom dragged her heels for years, repeatedly canceled appointments with the probate lawyer, and protested that she was too sick or too anxious or both to discuss the subject, whenever we deigned to bring it up. Which was not too often, honestly.
The reality is that, aside from that which was forced upon her by her expanding and complicating physical and mental illnesses, our mother did very little in the last few years of her life that she did not want to do. She would protest at me saying this, because of course she would.
And the one thing that my mother decidedly did not want to do, seemingly above all else, was face her impending mortality. Who would? I get it. But there is a way in which her refusal to do so was profoundly selfish. Après moi, le déluge. Thanks a lot, Mom.
As an aside, the husband of one of the guests at our private estate sale stood in the library, in reflecting on the volume of his and his wife’s own possessions, casually joked to the exact wrong person at the exact wrong time that, “Well, someday that’ll be my kids’ problem.”
I turned icy cold for a moment. I said to him in a very quiet voice, “Sir, I know that you are kidding, but please believe me when I say that I am not. For the love of God, I beg of you, do not do this to your children. Please. I beg you.”
He laughed uncomfortably and sidled away from me. I didn’t blame him.
So, in some sense, I think my sister and I would have been within our rights not to bother with any of this. To simply call up an estate auction and say, “Come, take it all away, every scrap.” And thus spare ourselves hours and days and weeks of trouble. If Mom had wanted something different to happen, she ought to have left better instructions ahead of time.
But Adah and I are also too conscientious, too much our mother’s children, to simply let items of value, especially educational value, simply go to waste. Hence the private estate sale for her reenactor community, hence the museum donations. Very little, however, even the fate of her library, is quite so cut-and-dried.
Last week, Besha sent me a quote from a novel, Dead Collections, by Isaac Fellman, that struck very close to my heart:
“Oh, that’s fine. I never want to see this stuff again.” She went rigid for a moment and looked down. “I’m sorry if I sound callous. It’s just that I feel her presence and it makes me so tired… Why do you think it is?”
“Loss of context,” I said. “That’s what I think. When I take in a new collection, every tchotchke and every line of text feels like it’s been soaked in meaning but left to dry out. So what’s left is just a color, and a mark, and maybe a smell, but what the liquid was is impossible to tell. You can’t know why they kept these things, and you drive yourself nuts trying to understand what was in their mind. It reminds us that we can’t know our loved ones’ minds.”
(As another aside, my mother would’ve loved that quote, if for no other reason than its use of the word tchotchke, which is another one of those Yiddish words that has counterparts in English, but no perfect translation. My mother didn’t actually speak Yiddish, but her own language was peppered with it.)
This literary passage immediately brought to mind my father’s mother and the mystery of the carp streamer, but the same sentiment applies everywhere else I look in this house. Every single object we find was brought here, and kept here, by our mother, or maybe my stepfather, with some intention in mind.
Often, the intention was obvious and trivial, like the umbrellas in the corner, and the stack of VHS tapes in the cabinet under the TV, and the numberless tins of safety pins and sewing needles, and the platoons of frog figurines on every window sill and in every corner, with their endless reinforcements carefully packed away in boxes in the barn. What can I say. Mom liked frogs.
Sometimes, the unspoken intention was plainly and quite actively avoidant, like the piles and piles and piles of unopened mail.
Sometimes, the intention was very straightforward and purposeful, like the diploma for the degree of Master of Arts in anthropology, awarded to my mother by Temple University, still hanging on the wall above her workbench.
But, most of the time, the intention lurking behind each object, however great or small, is now obscure. My sister and I are left grasping at our mother’s meaning, suspended between wanting to honor the memory of a great woman, who was also our mother, and wanting to get on with our lives, and move on from the loss of our frankly not-great mother, whom we loved anyway.
Case in point: All the baby furniture I discovered gathering dust in the loft of the barn, most of which remains there. The high chair and the rocking chair and the crib and the rocking horse. So many of my earliest memories are bound to these items.
Why did my parents go to the trouble to move all of this furniture all the way to New Hampshire from suburban Philadelphia, almost 30 years ago? Certainly, one set of answers is that my mother was a collector, or that my parents were never ones to waste things, but that’s not it.
I could ask my step-father, but I’m fairly certain I know the answer, and it’s fucking tragic, because it was, above and beyond all else, my mother’s single highest aspiration in the second half of her life, one she didn’t get to see, one she would never have gotten to see.
See, I don’t need this baby furniture, and I won’t have a need for it. Neither will Adah. Some of my cousins have grown children of their own, and, as for the rest, well, kids these days don’t want this olde-timey stuff.
Had I never discovered these things in the barn, it seems likely that I would never have even been given to wonder what became of them. But here they are, and here I am. So there’s only one thing left to do, and it’s to Marie Kondo the shit out of my past, before it suffocates me completely.
“This idea is incorporated in the KonMari Method as expressing gratitude to your belongings for taking care of you,” she said. “If you are letting go of an item, giving thanks is also a way of properly saying goodbye, so that you can mark the end of your relationship with the item and release it without guilt.”
Here goes.
This was my high chair! I think Adah used it as well. It appears in a lot of photos from when I was a toddler, with things like first birthday cakes and stuff.
This was my crib, which I slept in for a few years as a toddler, after I got too big for the cradle Dad made me, but before I started sleeping in the bed which Brian & co. were busy destroying earlier, while I was sipping my morning coffee. The crib features in one of my earliest memories, along with this rocking chair:
The specific memory dates to when I still slept in the crib, so I must have been about 3 years old. I woke up one morning, and it was full daylight, but my mother wasn’t up, so it must have been a weekend. I stood up in the crib, wondering with growing impatience where my mother was. A different child would’ve called out for a parent, but even then I had already learned to be wary about voicing my needs.
After roughly an eternity to a 3 year old, meaning probably 20 or so minutes, I decided to make my escape. I was just barely tall enough then to hook a leg over the side of the crib, but there was nothing close by to lower myself on to, except that rocking chair. So I swung over the side of the crib, and got my foot on the seat of the chair, which promptly did what it was paid to do, which was rock.
I felt my weight give out from under me. Somehow, I made it to the floor without losing my balance and falling, but the memory of that sudden jolt of adrenaline has never left me.
Interestingly, I do not have any recollection of actually being rocked in that rocking chair.
So, thank you, high chair, for taking care of me! Thank you, crib! Thank you, rocking chair, for helping me escape and not letting me tumble to my doom!
Once, you were my things — now, you are just things. Farewell.
If you’re reading this, I send my love. Thank you for taking care of me, friend.