Ben Kalom’s lovely piece “Sometimes it just needs to be written down” www.dailykos.com/… coalesced some thoughts for me. Thank you, Ben.
It seems to me that we look at our parents’ houses, and see not the stuff, but the living shape of their lives. And when they are gone, that shape remains, but ceases to live.
For those closest to the stuff, with responsibilities for its care, that ceasing feels like its own death. First dust, then maybe mice, then a plumbing leak, then mold, then culling … until it’s quite apparent that the remembered gleaming state they owned it in, left with them, and we are mourning all over again.
Those further away come and visit and see and feel the distress. Because they come because this stuff is not stuff, but memory; they are reaching through it to feel the warmth of those who are gone.
They might want this piece, or that piece, but having come they see it dusty, or chipped, or… and what they see is that the living glow has faded from it; probably had faded from it even before those who gave it, had left.
The price of keeping the memory fresh just a little longer is time; time of the caregiver, who likely was also the caregiver of those who have left us, while they were still here in the last years of their lives.
It is very human to want this keeping the memory alive. It is a kindness to understand it can be helpful. It is important to understand what it is.
The memory lives in you, in me, in us. When the tangible reminder means something, we can honor it by doing Ben Kalom’s service with the table — making it whole again, and giving it with love. What I’ve done. What my siblings have done. What you yourself may have done, or had done for you.
But you know as I know that the memories it will create, can be passed on as stories, but the memory will be of you telling the story, not of the lived experience the story relates.
YOU are the past that, if you have made their lives good in any way at all, your children and your grandchildren or your nieces or nephews or just your young friends- will want to hold onto.
When they ask you to tell them stories of the old days, they are not talking about the old day stories you got from your parents, that you wish so much were still alive in their retelling. No, they are talking about stories of when you, yourself, were little.
It startled me quite a lot to suddenly realize that. My life is the old days, to my children and grandchildren.
Yes. Do not deprive your children, and your grandchildren, of your own stories, that feel so inconsequential.
We keep things to honor the past we lived. We pass them on to someone for whom their meaning is that they were meaningful to us — not to our parents, or our grandparents, but to us as parents or grandparents or just elders. To someone who sees in them some part of our own light, living in their homes with them, for a while, becoming stories.
It is ok that it fades. And knowing it will — perhaps we should take some of the time we spend reviving our own memories, to create new ones with those who follow, for them to relate as stories, not of things, but of people, fifty years from now, to their own grandchildren.
