When we were cleaning out my parents’ house, my sister ran across a paperback novel, the sort of thing that normally we would have tossed on the give-away pile. Except this one had a Post-it note on it, in my mother’s handwriting: “This is the book Mammy was reading when she died.”
Mammy was my grandmother, who died in 1981. My mother passed away in 2003. As we cleared out the house, we found that she had left notes all over the place—stuffed into teacups, stuck on the covers of books, tucked inside folded clothing. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t dying when most of them were written. They were just reminders to herself, and information for us should something happen. How else would we know that the ugly woven-glass basket, which we would have thrown away in a second, was from the 18th century and identical to one that sold for over $2000 at auction? Would we have realized that the black lace mantillas in the cedar chest had belonged to Great-Aunt Daisy, who went in and out of three convents, slapped Mussolini, and sat for a portrait that now hangs in the National Gallery of London?
I wouldn’t call our family materialistic, exactly—we don’t care much about cars or jewelry or expensive stereos—but we do invest ordinary objects with great significance. Like a complete set of china, including massive platters and tureens, that my mother shipped over from Ireland to our home in South Bend, Indiana, after my grandmother died. I never saw her use it, although she hung a couple of the platters on the wall and put a tureen on top of the china cabinet. “Dad must really have loved Mom, to pay for shipping all that china over here that she never even used,” my sister observed. Then we fell silent when we realized that we were shipping the entire set to Boston for pretty much the same reason: Because they belonged to my grandmother.
This is a blog about stuff. Some of the posts will be longer versions of my mother’s notes: Here is the story of this object. Others are about interesting things that I picked up in my travels that I think should be shared with a broader audience. It’s a way of getting the information down and sharing it.
I don’t want to end up like an acquaintance of mine, who taped his father’s dying breaths and then was faced with a dilemma: He couldn’t throw out the tape, but he didn’t want to listen to it, either. If my life must be filled with these oddments and talismans, well, at least I can make something of them. And if somehow they are destroyed, the record will linger.
In the end, like the notes my mother left on nearly worthless books, the stories are more important than the things themselves.