I go over to check on my mother’s house every so often now that no one’s living there and it’s up for sale. There is still some furniture there, and the power and water are still on. Sometimes I sit down on the living room sofa and look for ghosts.
So far I have not seen any. My mother is not stirring in the bedroom or in the kitchen. My father is not puttering around in the basement. I do not feel their presence, and I don’t expect to turn around and see either of them coming around the corner into the living room.
My father died 14 years ago. I felt his presence strongly for a long time after that. I was building our house then, and when I did something I was particularly proud of, I found myself thinking that I had to show it to him. That feeling faded over the years. I was used to having my father around for 50 years, and my internal model of the world still contained him after he died. But in the last 14 years, my internal world has changed to accommodate his death.
My mother’s case is different. She died only about a year ago, but her last years were not like the previous ones. She had serious balance problems, and thus falling problems. She had urinary tract infections and blood clots. Her world shrank to basically her bedroom, her bathroom and her living room. When we went to visit, we never knew whether we were going to find her lying on the bathroom floor, standing at the kitchen counter reading the paper, or snoozing in her recliner while NCIS reruns played on the television. She wasn’t the self-reliant, smart woman she had been, and her declining health lasted long enough that the old image faded. And then she spent nearly a year with my brother and sister in law in Virginia, and after that the last few months of her life at an assisted living facility. I didn’t get a chance to form a really strong new image of my mother in my world.
So by the time my mother died, my internal model of the world didn’t really have her or my father in their old roles. And so their presence doesn’t echo in their house.
What I do find is that various things evoke memories. My father kept his tools in a corner in the basement. Most of them are still there, and when I see them, I think of my father. My mother’s jewelry and art glass are gone, but there are still things in the kitchen and in the bookcase in the living room that make me think of her
I have a few of those things that make me think of them at our house. One of my favorite sets of memories is of going with them on a few long RV trips. They started traveling with an Airstream trailer in the early ‘70s before they retired. They started out towing their trailer with their 1966 Buick Wildcat coupe. They continued RVing until the late ‘90s, and for a time in the mid-90s I was able to go with them for a couple of months at a time.
They traded for various RVs, including other brands of trailer and a couple of motorhomes, but they always kept a pair of folding chairs that they bought early in their RVing lives. They were solid, high-quality chairs. They used them outside for sitting under the awning, and inside if they needed extra seating at the dinner table.
Now those chairs are in our garage. I see them every time I pull in, lying folded up against the wall. We have a travel trailer, but we don’t need or use the chairs, and, to tell the truth, they aren’t all that comfortable anyway. But there they sit.
The associations with my parents and with good experiences with them are so strong that it’s hard to think about disposing of them. But we don’t really need them, and we don’t need physical objects to remember my parents. I guess it’s time to let them go.
It really is an interesting thing to let go of stuff that belonged to people we have loved. I think there is a discernment about what is really important to keep, and what can in good conscience be given away. In some ways you could almost imagine your parents laughing and saying, “You kept that? Aww, you didn’t have to.” We have some things that belonged to my step-father, who was married to my mom for 15 years before his death at 94. I always want to check with his grand-children to see if any of them would like his old maple dresser. Do you have any nieces or nephews that might want those folding chairs? Some part of me always wants to keep things in the family.
Robin Andrea — I think the folding chairs fall into the you-shouldn’t-have-kept-those category. I don’t think my parents had any particular attachment to them. Today, their only real value is in the associations I have between them and good times. Your suggestion about checking with my nephews is a good one. I’ll do that.
My mother’s turquoise jewelry is different. She loved her turquoise, and never missed a chance to show it to an appreciative audience. She had some really impressive pieces, but now there is no one in the family who wants them. I have no sisters, and neither Leah nor my sister in law wear that kind of jewelry. I wish it were otherwise, but we’ll probably end up selling it.
Mark, if you have any photos of your mom’s turquoise jewelry, I’d love to see it. I don’t have a lot of turquoise jewelry, but I do have a few pieces. Email me some pics!
Robin Andrea — I don’t have any right now. My brother has the jewelry at his home in Chattanooga, but he is planning to take some pictures. If he doesn’t, I will. My father also liked turquoise jewelry. He had some heavy watchbands, belt buckles, and rings, which I might (or might not) have at home. I also have a few turquoise belt buckles. My father’s and my stuff are nothing like my mother’s, and certainly not like her squash blossom necklace. I’ll be happy to email some photos when I get them.
My wife has a hard time letting things go. (I threw out a broken radio some months ago and she only discovered it missing this week. She was annoyed that I didn’t let her have a chance to say good-bye to it.) I can purge and cull more easily, but I think there will always be things that I cling to, and when my kids are cleaning up after I’m gone, they’re going to wonder what those silly things could possibly have meant to me.
Pablo — I guess it’s a little harder for me to throw things away than for my wife. I had a pair of lumberjack boots that were probably 40 years old and hadn’t been worn for close to that long. It was a struggle, but I managed to toss them out recently. We don’t have children, so my nephews will probably be the ones to clear out our house when we’re gone. I’m torn between making it as easy as possible for them or as hard as possible. Last laugh and all that, you know.
Good article on how we remember. One of the things I like to keep is books. Most everything else I own is just tools.
One time I told my wife to sell my 2 chess books on Amazon. But later, I wished I hadn’t sold them. My wife pulled them out of a box and gave them back to me.
Hi Scott. Welcome to the blog.
I, too, like books. My good friend Tom once bought out the remaining stock of a used bookstore when it closed, and then when Tom moved and needed to dispose of all his books, I took them. I gave a lot to a couple of school libraries, and kept quite a few. I eventually realized I never read them and didn’t really have room for them, so I gave almost all the rest plus a lot of my own books to our local library for their book sales. There is just something about books that makes it seem almost immoral to get rid of them, but I had to.
Of course I kept a few.