“Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But
even the earth will go someday.”
––Lydia Davis, “Head, Heart”
Simone called in tears because an eye-glass case once
belonging to her father, the one she inherited upon his death, fell from a coat
pocket and was lost on a New York City street.
“It’s not the case you’re mourning,” I told her. “You
want your father back. You can buy another case.”
She sighed and said they used to fight over the one
she’d lost because she longed for it before he was ready to give it away, a
thin black sleeve of leather he used to roll between his big fingers.
It was masculine and soft, like his skin, Simone said, and worn in the exact
manner she prefers––a cracked patina she associates with valuable objects,
things that cost dearly years ago, and cannot be easily replaced. So different
than things made in the digital era where value is created through surfaces
that are voids––blank and shiny and clean.
“Yes,” I said. “I understand. Our fathers will not
return.”
I grew up in a family less wealthy than hers, but by
today’s standards, even hers was not very wealthy. They were not of the one
percent who demand entire sections of cities be reconfigured in their honor,
purchasing penthouse suites in towers rising past clouds with special glass for
looking out of but not for looking in. Simone’s family was not that, but they
did have fine things––Turkish carpets and candelabras shipped from Austria
ahead of the Nazis, who took everything they left behind, including family members
unable to make a timely escape.
What I have is my West-Virginian grandmother’s silver
teething spoon. Her initials are engraved on its handle and its hollow is worn
thin and bent like wrinkled cloth, signs, presumably, my grandmother did,
indeed, gum it as a toddler. Now I use it to stir sugar into tea I serve
guests.
From my other grandmother––the cranky one––I have a
cracked blue soap dish with two white birds perched at the edge. There’s a
blackened seam of glue holding it together, and sometimes it re-splits. Every
so often, I must put a fresh line of Elmer’s across the old break to make it
whole again. This very soap dish, already damaged, sat in my grandmother’s
front bathroom years before her death.
Until then, I hadn’t even known I noticed it. However,
once grandmother was gone, we were allowed to choose things we wanted to remember
her by, and I chose the dish because of its familiarity, so familiar it had
hardly been seen––also a small pink hippo. The hippo, formed from a strange
plastic no longer in use, sits on a ledge over my kitchen sink, just as it once
did over hers.
Not long ago, Mother was throwing away the ugliest
thing, a grey canvas lap-top bag that belonged years ago to my father. It’s
worn, and not in the beautiful way Simone desires. I nevertheless suddenly
coveted it. After all, it once belonged to my father, whose death three years
ago is one I’m still getting used to.
I plucked it from the pile of things Mother was tossing.
Though it is small, heavy, and impractical, I tried carrying my laptop in it.
But the bag is not my father. It is ugly and grey, something I never even saw
him use. Still, I can imagine him purchasing it with pride. Like me, he had
ambitions––grand intellectual projects––bigger and grander than his small world
of family and this ugly impractical grey bag could sustain.
I imagine him buying it and placing his laptop in it
much like I did mine. What hope it would have carried! But where was he going
to go with his laptop? My sister had childhood cancer and had suffered
significant brain damage after the surgery. She needed full-time care. As a
result for thirty years, my father and mother rarely left the house.
There are diamond rings that belonged to my
great-grandmothers, and one or two now belong to me. I never wear them. They
are for more slender fingers, and I’m wary of diamonds. They seem fancy and are
less than interesting because they are the very things we are meant to value
when someone dies.
What I like are the everyday objects the dead once
used––things familiar or banal that can be loaded up with a variety of memories
(real or imagined). We can imbue them with so much story they seem to reveal
the dead to us in a present-tense manner out of all proportion to an object’s
actual use in our present-tense lives and, perhaps, even out of all proportion
to the role they played in the actual lives of those now dead.
For memorializing a loved one, I recommend choosing not
the diamond, the gold watch, nor the pricey porcelain vase but instead the
well-worn comb, bathrobe, or jelly jar holding an abandoned collection of loose
buttons or old coins. But be prepared, should one of these objects go missing,
the ache of its absence will surprise you; you will know the value of comb,
bathrobe, and jelly-jar in a fresh and painful way. In losing even these small
things, you will find the dead can die all over again.
