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Emotional Archives
May. 29th, 2018 06:06 pmFor the past three months I have been tackling what I refer to as "The Monster in the Basement," that is the boxes and trunks full of family memorabilia that wound up there when my mother moved to assisted living in 2014 and then died in 2016.
It's been quite a process, both logistically and emotionally. I have sorted through thousands of photos and letters and deeds and wills and postcards and portraits. I have discarded a significant portion of them, honing the collection down to only things that tell the story of our family.
Along the way, I've been mildly surprised by the things that evoke strong emotional responses. Some of my grandmother's letters are very funny, a side of her I never knew, as she had already begun having strokes before I was born. The pictures of my father as a small, happy child have often brought tears to my eyes that I finally decided were for the loss of potential: that child could have done anything and what he became was my father--not a bad life, full of a fairly usual mix of talents and flaws, successes and failures, but limited to just that one, known life among the myriad possibilities shining in the eyes of that little boy.
Today I found a deposit slip in a pile of my mother's papers along with letters from her mother, a Valentine's Day card from my dad and the card with his wedding gift to her signed "All my love, always," a vow he fulfilled over the next sixty-two years.
I was about to toss the slip in the recycling bag when the friend who was helping me asked "But why would she have kept it?" And I looked at it and realized that $500 was a lot of money for my parents in 1956. That was during the hard years, when my father served five different churches in ten years. They had a five year old daughter, and it was starting to look like she would be their only child. Money was tight. I don't know where this came from. Did my mother's parents scrape together enough to send her a check? Did she accept the money from my father's parents that he never wanted to take? Did she sell something dear enough to double their savings? I don't know the story that this piece of paper brought to mind for my mother. I only know that it was important enough that she held onto this simple receipt for decades, looking at it each time they moved and she went through this stack and thought again yes, I will keep this.
And I started to weep for the tiny residue of our rich lives, the papers of a lifetime that fit into a small box once all the mementos of lost stories are discarded by those who never heard that one. Jason came down and found me feeling silly and soppy and so grateful for all the stories that I do know, all the pieces I can put together, all the memories and connections to who my parents were. My father was the sentimental one of our parents. But Mom saved this. Maybe I will, too.
It's been quite a process, both logistically and emotionally. I have sorted through thousands of photos and letters and deeds and wills and postcards and portraits. I have discarded a significant portion of them, honing the collection down to only things that tell the story of our family.
Along the way, I've been mildly surprised by the things that evoke strong emotional responses. Some of my grandmother's letters are very funny, a side of her I never knew, as she had already begun having strokes before I was born. The pictures of my father as a small, happy child have often brought tears to my eyes that I finally decided were for the loss of potential: that child could have done anything and what he became was my father--not a bad life, full of a fairly usual mix of talents and flaws, successes and failures, but limited to just that one, known life among the myriad possibilities shining in the eyes of that little boy.
Today I found a deposit slip in a pile of my mother's papers along with letters from her mother, a Valentine's Day card from my dad and the card with his wedding gift to her signed "All my love, always," a vow he fulfilled over the next sixty-two years.
I was about to toss the slip in the recycling bag when the friend who was helping me asked "But why would she have kept it?" And I looked at it and realized that $500 was a lot of money for my parents in 1956. That was during the hard years, when my father served five different churches in ten years. They had a five year old daughter, and it was starting to look like she would be their only child. Money was tight. I don't know where this came from. Did my mother's parents scrape together enough to send her a check? Did she accept the money from my father's parents that he never wanted to take? Did she sell something dear enough to double their savings? I don't know the story that this piece of paper brought to mind for my mother. I only know that it was important enough that she held onto this simple receipt for decades, looking at it each time they moved and she went through this stack and thought again yes, I will keep this.
And I started to weep for the tiny residue of our rich lives, the papers of a lifetime that fit into a small box once all the mementos of lost stories are discarded by those who never heard that one. Jason came down and found me feeling silly and soppy and so grateful for all the stories that I do know, all the pieces I can put together, all the memories and connections to who my parents were. My father was the sentimental one of our parents. But Mom saved this. Maybe I will, too.
