This is a story that piggy-backs on three generations.
When I was a child, coming into some sense of family consciousness and history in the late 1960's and early 1970's, my mother used to tell me stories of her childhood. One she told repeatedly was about the time she came home from school to find her own mother crying over the kitchen sink. My grandmother was not a woman given to overt displays of emotion, even as a young woman, so my mother, then a six year old child, asked what had happened to make her mother cry. The day was April 12, 1945, my grandmother's 35th birthday.
"The President died," was the response.
At the time, the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn't mean very much to my mother. But the fact that it had affected her own mother so deeply, and so uncharacteristically stayed with her for the rest of her life.
The world has probably never produced a less politically aware human being than my late grandmother. A non-union textile worker, employed in the mills of western North Carolina and upper South Carolina from the age of 10, the widowed mother of 7 children, and a woman who would brook no nonsense from anyone, my grandmother had neither the time nor the patience for political rhetoric. For her, FDR transcended politics; he was, quite simply, the man who saved America.
My own mother was very different. She had both time and patience for many things my grandmother couldn't begin to understand: things like books and philosophy and cultural experiences vastly different from her own childhood in a NC mill town. An avid reader, particularly of biographies, my mother's interests were eclectic. One subject she would never let rest, however, was the life story of both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. The bookshelves in the home I grew up in were filled with biographies of these two. While her interest is easily explained by her own cultural experiences and political leanings, I do not believe that she read these books for herself alone. She read those books as her mother's daughter.
My mother was a daughter for 59 years. Her own life ended very soon after her role as a daughter ended. In some ways she had it easy in that she never really had to face what it means to no longer have that identity "daughter".
For the past four years I have struggled with coming to terms with the end of my own identity as a daughter. I am now faced with what I believe to be my last task in the daughter role, cleaning out the family home so the property can be sold and estates closed.
One of the biggest challenges of that task is facing my mother's books. As multi-faceted a collection that the books represent, I project when I look at them and see not simply books, but books that spoke to her as a mother, as a daughter, as a wife, as a friend, as a sister, as a lover, as a student, as a feminist, as a southerner, etc. And I can tell, sometimes, which of them spoke to what identity, or how she might have read them when they did speak to her that way.
The hardest books to let go of are those Roosevelt books. For a few fleeting moments last week I thought, only half jokingly, about sending them to the Wisconsin Governor's Mansion, but then I realized the depth of my own family history that encases them would simply be invisible to the likes of the Governor there. It may well be that it is invisible to everyone but me.
Therein lies the dilemma: those books are more than books. They are a tangible manifestation of a mother-daughter relationship. And now its my job, the last I'm likely to have as a daughter and a granddaughter, to decide what to do with them.