Family Matter

The Sadness of Stuff

When my friends see artifacts from my childhood — the chrome Corbusier chairs my dad re-created, the black-and-white photos of cocktail parties where cigarette smoke hazes the bead curtain and my mother’s laugh shows all of her teeth — they tell me, you must write about this. The milieu they think they see in our Mid-Century Modern furnishings means, to them, that my childhood must have been interesting. I suppose it was. But not in that Ann-Margret dancing to bongo drums way that I associate with the word “Bohemian.” And even if it had been like that, so what? As each successive parent has died, I have tried to make sense of the stuff they leave behind them—it’s what any life deserves. And each time I return to these tasks, I think to myself: maybe my friends are right after all. My childhood was “different,” my parents—all three of them—were artists, and nonconformists, and two of them had drinking problems, though again not of the sort one sees on TV.

Then there’s my next-door neighbor. I have not seen him in months, but I know that he was born in the same year my mother was. I’ve noticed lately that his kitchen window is filling up with plastic food containers. None of my parents could throw those things away either—I think it has something to do with having survived the Depression. Anyway, I notice my neighbor’s accumulation as I walk by and I think to myself “he must be in the home stretch, now.” I picture his son and daughter sweeping those containers into a Hefty bag and feeling the awful sadness I now know so well. Because it doesn’t matter whether the now-dead person was a scholar or a schlemiel, whether the things they’ve left behind are objects of great value or stupid plastic tubs: they were intrinsic to a life, and now they’re not.

As a retired single woman, I spend more and more of my own time alone, among my own things, wondering how to start their dismantling before they (metaphorically) topple on someone else when I die—not an imminent danger but you never know. At 69, it would not be unheard of for my heart to erupt. If I had kids of my own, I guess I would figure removing my stuff was just their job, but having been through the sorting out, moving, and destroying of my mother’s little empire a few years back, and now facing my stepmother’s estate (not just the apartment she shared with my father, but their country house and her work studio), I can’t help but wonder what the point is of having all these things (my things, their things, anyone’s things), much less of forcing anyone else through the agonizing difficulty of trying to discern their meaning or value, after-the-fact.

My brother, however, looks at going through the contents of Dad and Katherine’s apartment as an adventure; that was definitely the word he used. He mentioned “inviting” his older son to fly across country to help us, as though it was a fun party instead of the world’s biggest and most thankless chore. Would I have thought this was a fun thing to do at my nephew’s age? I doubt it. But, didn’t I once want to be an archeologist? Don’t I love nothing more than visiting ancient ruins? (We have already uncovered a number of “finds”: the mysterious adjustable screwdriver with the blue wood handle that we both recall being transfixed by as toddlers; examples of Dad’s handwriting before architecture school gave it the blocky all-caps form we recognize as his; photos of Katherine wearing a bikini (though in the 45 years I knew her, she never set foot on a beach)!

And yet, each time I head home on the subway thinking I have scored something I’ll be glad to keep (Dansk serveware, fancy black T-shirts I would be too cheap to buy myself), I begin to dread the next layer: there are miles of paper files, shelves of unvaluable art books, closets stuffed with once-fashionable clothing (“Wide-ties from the 70s” reads one box labelled by Dad), a whole drawer crammed with exhausted, mateless size five leather gloves, even a very large box of burnt-out lightbulbs)… Anyway, things! Not to mention the three lockers full of stuff in the basement. And the ten-thousand unsorted photo negatives. (I won’t go on. I must go on.) I feel erased by this stuff, just as I suppose I feel endorsed by my own bookshelves and art objects, my collections of beach rocks, my seven non-matching but carefully selected throw pillows. (My mother had a throw pillow disorder—I counted twenty trash bags full when we emptied her house.)

Why do I feel erased by the muchness of my parents’ stuff? Because so little of it is about me, or about their roles as parents. Another way to see it: they led big lives. Maybe I have, too? But I think not. I have worked, travelled, published, had many friends (and many cats), and my apartment is exactly the way I want it. It took me twenty years to get it so. But there are still several file-drawers’ worth of my own unpublished, unedited, and in many cases ridiculously old writing contained here. Those drawers are analogous to the looming paperwork at my father and Katherine’s place, and the wads of moldy, disorganized, bent and torn papers and photos at my Mom’s. The unseen and unsorted. That which couldn’t be faced.

I have opened every closet, drawer, and box in each place my parents have occupied, hoping to extract my mother’s love or my father’s notice. Those things are not there. This search probably started back in the first apartment our family lived in, when I was eight or nine. (Mom moved us out while my brother and I were away at summer camp.) Many of the objects I remember examining closely then were not my own books or toys, but the contents of my parents’ drawers and closets: Mom’s lavender ski parka from her year in Aspen, her wetsuit, the mystery of her diaphragm. Dad’s drafting tools in their blue velvet-lined leather case, his pyramidal scale rulers, the stuffed sacklike thing that cleaned the drafting board and the horsehair brush for clearing its crumbs. I studied them long before I knew we would all soon be parting company.

I watched my father move out of that apartment in the spring of 1967 when I was nine; saw him pack his one suitcase and begged to know why (”your mother doesn’t love me anymore”), where he was going (“hotel I guess”), and when he would be back (“don’t know”).

My father was a soft-spoken and mostly gentle individual, but he was merciless about the look of things, people included. When I got dressed up in my T-shirt dress and chain-link belt for a trip to our favorite Chinese restaurant, he told me to “quit gilding the lily” and I felt like the whore of Babylon. Perhaps he later felt guilty because, that same year, he consented to spray-paint my bedroom cabinet Kandy-Apple orange, which must have been murder for him. At the time, he owned not a single article of clothing that was not black, white, or gray. Walls could be no other color than white and never glossier than eggshell, even in the kitchen. The day Katherine got him into a tweed jacket that had faint flecks of color in it, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

My mother’s taste was more flamboyant than Dad’s, but she was no less opinionated. To her dying day she wore violet lipstick—a color that looked great on her and no other white-skinned person. Her characteristic halo of short red (and later white) hair, her attire of carefully appropriated ethnic clothing and silver bracelets were mostly frozen after 1948, and yet her look so suited her that people remarked on it constantly. Her house no less so: situated at the foot of a luminous marsh, practically all glass, designed to her specifications by a mutual friend of hers and my father’s. In it, she had one of those famous Eames lounge chairs, giant floor pillows made of oriental carpet scraps, Flokati rugs, and several large beautiful paintings given to her by men who had certainly been in love with her—most were. There were also towers of crumbling paperbacks, the aforementioned throw pillow malignancy, dog-fur matted blankets, shit-upon bedsheets… Little of it was salvageable (after the fire, and the dementia, and the parade of crazy live-in caregivers) but she lived well up to that point—the dementia point—and perhaps beyond.

The sale of Mom’s house did not go well—from the week we spent emptying it to the day we accepted the third and lowest offer, six months later. In the interim, the dumpster we’d filled with her stuff sat in the rain and rusted because of a misunderstanding about its removal. I took a picture, because that’s the kind of sicko that I am: Dead Mom Soup, I called it. Anyway, from that experience I learned that my brother and I had contrary viewpoints about the value of real estate but also equally fierce needs to have the last word on all such matters. Both tropes are clearly the outcome of having been raised by a woman who loved to pick a fight but never fought fair: with Mom, the point was always shifting, the stakes altering. You could never win, nor even outlast her, but in the dark of night, muttering bitterly, you could at least be right, goddammit.

For many years, I’ve had a recurring nightmare. It started long before any of this dead-parent stuff, maybe in my 20s. The gist of it is that it’s time to go and I’m not finished packing. Sometimes I’m about to miss a plane, sometimes a tidal wave is rushing toward me, but the dream isn’t about what will happen if I don’t finish, it’s about the certain knowledge that I am leaving something irreplaceable behind. Sometimes, just as I have got the suitcase closed, I find a whole new drawer or attic about which I had forgotten but which it’s now too late to deal with. Sometimes what I’m leaving behind is valuable on its face: the family archives or jewels (things that didn’t exist in real life). Far more often, though, my dream is about an unexamined mass of stuff that must contain treasures, or crucial documents at least. Night after night, year after year, I have woken up before I can go back and save them, these things.

Last night, after writing much of the above, I dreamt a version of this dream in which I found things I had left behind last time: torn, unbecoming flannel shirts; some broken toys and loose marbles. I managed to get them into the suitcases at hand. There was even a point in the dream when I closed all the bags and double-checked the top shelves of the closets and declared, “Okay, I’m done.” But then the camp director (remember how Mom moved us from our old home to our new Dadless one while my brother and I were at camp?) bumped into one of the suitcases on the floor, which spontaneously opened and began to spill its contents. Nevertheless, I told myself it would be okay, that I had packed really well, that nothing crucial would be left behind. And then I woke up. Am I really done?

One final anecdote. My father had esophageal cancer at the end of his life. Shortly after its diagnosis, he had his voicebox removed and was given an electrolarynx—one of those devices you hold against your throat to amplify silent words formed in the mouth—but Dad never really took to it. As his shrink remarked to me at the hospital, the day before the surgery, “he never said much anyway.” Nevertheless, he did record a cassette tape the night before the surgery. On it, he recited two poems by Yeats (bleak ones) and described some scenes and memories from his childhood as the eldest of five siblings in Springfield, Illinois. At first, I couldn’t really bring myself to listen to it and then after his death (February 2000), it was just too sad. So I moved the cassette from one tape-player to another, and from box to box in my apartment until, after my mother’s death in 2019, I was finally ready to give it my full attention and it was nowhere to be found. I had a sick recollection of putting a portable cassette recorder out on the “free stuff” table in the basement of my building during a cleaning spree many months earlier. I went downstairs and dug through the electronics-recycling bin. I may have even put up a sign. Of all the things to forget! What an idiot I am! And in spite of all those nightmares!

Midway through last year, before Katherine’s stroke, my brother had emailed to say he had a surprise for me. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Well, I could—there were a few things that got lost in Mom’s last move from the “memory care” place to hospice that I had still hoped might turn up—notably a brass spittoon that her great aunt Mary had brought back from her time as a missionary in India. But what my brother actually sent was a movie file. He often sends short movies of his kids, so I figured it was one of those and hit “play.” But what I saw instead of my niece or nephews was old silent movie footage of my mother, taken by my father, and accompanied by an audio track of Dad’s voice from a later time. After a few seconds, I realized it was the cassette recording he had made in the hospital! I had sent it to my brother for safekeeping instead of throwing it out by mistake. I am not an idiot, after all.

I guess here is where I come back to my initial question about why we collect what we collect; what “things” are for. Or do I come back to the question of whose job it is to remove them when a life ends? I have always struggled with endings in my work. Even in fiction, where a conclusion feels like part of my bargain with the reader, I want to veer away. We all know life isn’t like that. I could take my pick of the objects, people, and memories I’ve spread out, above, and concoct an ending that sounds good, I’m sure. I’ve already thrown away a few of those.

I am good at throwing things away, better than I am at making them stick. I am also good at tracking down meaning where there may be none, and terribly reluctant to admit defeat when there isn’t. I have not been defeated here—not by my parents, not by my brother, and not by myself. But whether anyone will be able to thread my story together from what I leave behind on that day when my heart explodes, I don’t know. It’s my job to get there first, I guess.