![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I just received four boxes from Michigan. The sender? Me. It's all stuff from my parents' house. Two big lamps. Some books. Some hand-crocheted stuff. A platter and a matching sugar bowl (sans lid, alas). Some clothing. Some yarn that I bought in Michigan. Several small wooden figures carved by my father, including two unfinished pieces (a howling wolf and an Amish man, both of which Dad decided to set aside, permanently as it turns out). What else? I can't really remember. I haven't opened the boxes yet. I should do that soon. It will probably take me a couple of hours to disentangle everything from the layers of bubble wrap and miscellaneous packing materials I used while assembling the boxes. I hope nothing is broken. Mostly.
Once again I have to comment on how strange and how wrong it feels, to be mourning two people who are still alive. I should mention that I take the mourning process to include such things as breaking up someone's home and distributing their belongings (and, of course, the feelings that go along with perpetrating such dissipation--and I use the word "perpetrate" intentionally here. I feel like a perpetrator because it feels like I am doing violence.). These actions break up the relationships among a person, his/her things, and his/her surroundings, home, environment, or whatever you want to call it. Those relationships, just like relationships among human beings, are woven together with memories, stories, habitual use and action; intangibles that don't travel with the objects, but don't entirely leave them either. These relationships linger in my perception of these objects, traces that my eyes and fingertips will look for as I incorporate the objects into my own set of belongings, my own life and habits, my own home (which I share with others), and ultimately my own stories. When I turn on the lamps, I will always picture my parents' living room and the end tables on which they sat for as long as I've been alive. Sometimes I'll remember dark, rainy afternoons spent lazing on the couch between the tables, both lights blazing, reading Agatha Christie novels. Sometimes I'll remember staying up very late, lying alone in the low light of a single lamp, listening to the grandfather clock (built from scratch by my father, with my "help") chime every quarter hour and, between chimes, to the house's own quiet life. Sometimes I'll remember the light falling across my mother's still, napping face--a sight always tinged with the dual fear of her death and her unpredictable temper. I will buy new lampshades (the old ones, a boring beige that doesn't suit me, have already been donated to Goodwill). When I use the platter, I will picture roast beef or poultry cooked by my mother and carved by my father, served out to seven different plates in front of seven different faces (including mine, which in memory I sometimes see rather than inhabit) at our dinner table. I will hear echoes of utensils on cheap melamine dishes (they were white with a ring of green and yellow flowers around the outside; later they were replaced with white Corelle dishes that had a green floral border), and of conversations about sports, politics, photography, and music. Sometimes I might wonder where the voices and the years have gone, and sometimes I might feel as if I am the only one in the entire world who knows or cares about the stories that go along with the things I have arrayed around me. Because I have witnessed the deaths of more relatives than I care to count right now, I know that I am both right and wrong to feel this way. People, objects, memories, and stories exist in a multidimensional space, their location and depth triangulated by the different people who have experienced them in one way and another, and imbued them with various meanings.
The thing is, I don't necessarily want all of this stuff, but I can't let go of it either. How does one break these attachments to objects? How to see them again for what they are, rather than as projections of memory, story, and relationship? How to rupture that multidimensional space and slip the leash of obligation that binds us to objects? How to travel lightly through a (hopefully) long life? The only answer I've come up with--and it's an answer that comes from experiences with the aftermath of death--is that subsequent life with objects can serve to re-mundane-ify them. After my sister died, I kept a number of her things out of a sense of loyalty to her (as if I could carry a torch, a baton she had somehow passed to me through these things); as time passed, the things became mine, and I ultimately chose to let go of most of them because I didn't need them anymore (or didn't feel like they needed me anymore, to put it more accurately). I kept a few very dear things, but let go of others--most notably her bedroom set, which I sold prior to moving from Vermont to Seattle. I couldn't afford to move it, and I wasn't going to turn down acceptance into graduate school over it, so off it went. I miss it sometimes because it was pretty, but I don't feel guilty about getting rid of it, don't feel like it was a form of disloyalty to the memory of my sister.
It will be harder, perhaps impossible, for me to separate from some of the things in these boxes, because a lot of them were made by hand--by the hands of my loved ones. I know such separation happens. I have seen handmade items in thrift stores and antique stores, and I have purchased some of them. But the memories and the stories are stronger in these objects, which is to say that my attachment to them is stronger. I guess that's OK...it has to be OK...but I tend to get anxious when I have too many things. I already felt like I had too many things, before I went to Michigan. Now I have more things--4 boxes' worth.
OK. Best get on with it. Where's my knife...?
Once again I have to comment on how strange and how wrong it feels, to be mourning two people who are still alive. I should mention that I take the mourning process to include such things as breaking up someone's home and distributing their belongings (and, of course, the feelings that go along with perpetrating such dissipation--and I use the word "perpetrate" intentionally here. I feel like a perpetrator because it feels like I am doing violence.). These actions break up the relationships among a person, his/her things, and his/her surroundings, home, environment, or whatever you want to call it. Those relationships, just like relationships among human beings, are woven together with memories, stories, habitual use and action; intangibles that don't travel with the objects, but don't entirely leave them either. These relationships linger in my perception of these objects, traces that my eyes and fingertips will look for as I incorporate the objects into my own set of belongings, my own life and habits, my own home (which I share with others), and ultimately my own stories. When I turn on the lamps, I will always picture my parents' living room and the end tables on which they sat for as long as I've been alive. Sometimes I'll remember dark, rainy afternoons spent lazing on the couch between the tables, both lights blazing, reading Agatha Christie novels. Sometimes I'll remember staying up very late, lying alone in the low light of a single lamp, listening to the grandfather clock (built from scratch by my father, with my "help") chime every quarter hour and, between chimes, to the house's own quiet life. Sometimes I'll remember the light falling across my mother's still, napping face--a sight always tinged with the dual fear of her death and her unpredictable temper. I will buy new lampshades (the old ones, a boring beige that doesn't suit me, have already been donated to Goodwill). When I use the platter, I will picture roast beef or poultry cooked by my mother and carved by my father, served out to seven different plates in front of seven different faces (including mine, which in memory I sometimes see rather than inhabit) at our dinner table. I will hear echoes of utensils on cheap melamine dishes (they were white with a ring of green and yellow flowers around the outside; later they were replaced with white Corelle dishes that had a green floral border), and of conversations about sports, politics, photography, and music. Sometimes I might wonder where the voices and the years have gone, and sometimes I might feel as if I am the only one in the entire world who knows or cares about the stories that go along with the things I have arrayed around me. Because I have witnessed the deaths of more relatives than I care to count right now, I know that I am both right and wrong to feel this way. People, objects, memories, and stories exist in a multidimensional space, their location and depth triangulated by the different people who have experienced them in one way and another, and imbued them with various meanings.
The thing is, I don't necessarily want all of this stuff, but I can't let go of it either. How does one break these attachments to objects? How to see them again for what they are, rather than as projections of memory, story, and relationship? How to rupture that multidimensional space and slip the leash of obligation that binds us to objects? How to travel lightly through a (hopefully) long life? The only answer I've come up with--and it's an answer that comes from experiences with the aftermath of death--is that subsequent life with objects can serve to re-mundane-ify them. After my sister died, I kept a number of her things out of a sense of loyalty to her (as if I could carry a torch, a baton she had somehow passed to me through these things); as time passed, the things became mine, and I ultimately chose to let go of most of them because I didn't need them anymore (or didn't feel like they needed me anymore, to put it more accurately). I kept a few very dear things, but let go of others--most notably her bedroom set, which I sold prior to moving from Vermont to Seattle. I couldn't afford to move it, and I wasn't going to turn down acceptance into graduate school over it, so off it went. I miss it sometimes because it was pretty, but I don't feel guilty about getting rid of it, don't feel like it was a form of disloyalty to the memory of my sister.
It will be harder, perhaps impossible, for me to separate from some of the things in these boxes, because a lot of them were made by hand--by the hands of my loved ones. I know such separation happens. I have seen handmade items in thrift stores and antique stores, and I have purchased some of them. But the memories and the stories are stronger in these objects, which is to say that my attachment to them is stronger. I guess that's OK...it has to be OK...but I tend to get anxious when I have too many things. I already felt like I had too many things, before I went to Michigan. Now I have more things--4 boxes' worth.
OK. Best get on with it. Where's my knife...?
Tags:
