My View Memoirs

Beth is an avid writer in her spare time, focusing on her childhood and now full time life on Cape Cod. These memoir articles have been published in "The Cape Cod Voice" a local, award-winning community newspaper. Below is her most recent contribution, published just before Memorial Day, 2005.

Left Behind Stuff

Memorial Day reminds me once again that I must deal with the “stuff” left behind when my beloved family elders died. This “stuff” that is so hard to handle or know what to do with represents the remnants of lives well lived by my parents and grandparents, as well as my godparents and their extended family, and all of it ending up in my care in Wellfleet over the last four years.

Memorial Day means upcoming garage sales and white elephant tables, both places where I can recycle “stuff” I cannot use or have nowhere left to store. My “stuff” trips you in the basement, leaps out of closets unannounced, and burdens drawers once assigned other purposes. It clogs up cabinets, the floors of storage spaces, most of the garage and, in my case, a temporary (in my dreams) tent erected in the side yard because my 900 square foot cottage and garage are just too small.

I’ve watched heirs call for dumpsters to be placed outside their parents’ retirement homes, and horrified, I’ve watched them dump much that was useful, true Swap Shop finds. Certainly, my Yankee sensibilities were abused seeing still useful furniture and household belongings arbitrarily assigned to the trash.

But it’s more than that.

Sorting through the belongings of those who have died is important grief work. To avoid that work, with unrepentant assignment to trash, is a denial that grieving is required.

I’ve chosen to take very seriously this forensic sorting – at least that’s what I call the “who gets what” game of finding new homes for the belongings of others. I think now, that this self-assigned task has been much like an archeological dig. Each layer has been wrapped carefully, sometimes with notes of identification, but mostly not. Each layer reveals another layer as you move from old age and the most recent belongings, all the way to the carefully, lovingly-wrapped and protected turn-of-the-20th century childhoods.

Opening these time capsules is a mixture of delight in discovery and sadness that the owner is not still sitting here with me, laughing and relating tales of Mum’s battered doll, head torn from the body, dress tattered, or Dad’s wooden-wheel boyhood wagon, truly worn from its WWI summers in the sand in South Truro. My Grandfather’s Spanish American and WWI medals are here too.

My brother Joe and I cleared out my Dad’s Wellfleet house in spring of 2002. He died December 30, 2001, just after his 90th birthday. My mother had pre-deceased him by seven years. We spent eight long weekends going through his and my mother’s long and robustly-lived marriage and lives.

There are plusses and minuses in being raised by the same parents, acquiring the same taste in antiques. We had been assigned certain treasures (my mother had made a list and divvied up the antiques years ago) but then there was an entire accumulated lifetime to go through as well. Methodically, we worked through every room, putting items on a table, flipping a coin with the winner getting first choice, then alternating. In our scheme, if you absolutely had to have first choice, you gave up the next three choices.

The basement yielded many items never unwrapped since my parents move from North Attleboro to retirement in Wellfleet in 1976. The most surprising of these was a trunk filled with eleven quilts and two hand-spun blankets, complete with pattern names, that my mother had assembled at some point and never thought to mention to her children. I won the tiny red and white baby quilt by giving up the next three wonderful choices. The quilter had run out of red and substituted with blue on the outside of two opposite corners. What a treasure!

I boxed a lot of items to meet the house sale deadline, and even now, in 2005, I continue to go through the layers of the lives of my loved ones, so hastily moved from my parents house to mine, or in the case of my godparents, from their home to their garage, so I could move into their space overlooking the meadow in Wellfleet where I now live.

Finding people who want to give new homes to this detritus of our families’ lives has become a passion for me. I’ll never need the bulk of this stuff. Much has been contributed to rummage sales at St. Mary of the Harbor, Provincetown, as well as flea market tables at the Wellfleet Drive-In. This summer, I will contribute to another church sale and another flea market table is in the offing.

This often dirty, and always emotional work has merits for the living. It takes time, remembering, and often the dawning recognition brings tears. I cried when I opened the bottom drawer of Dad’s dresser and found a letter holder made of wire and yarn at Brownie camp when I was six-years-old, and I cried again when I rediscovered the angel drawings I made for Mum at Sunday School as a four-year-old. I was also surprised that my parents had kept every letter their married daughter had ever sent them, filled with the bumps and bruises of every-day family life and status reports on the kids – memories that are so old as to be new again in the reading.

Once examined, I have discovered that the same belongings I am struggling with now provided my forbears with sorting difficulties as well. Why did my Godmother keep her maiden cousin’s college graduating commencement bulletin (with ivy inside) and yearbook? I called Bridgewater State (formerly Bridgewater Normal) to inquire whether they would like a 1919 yearbook or did they already have all they needed. The President’s Office told me that the building with memorabilia from the first decade of the 20th century had burned and with great excitement said they would be absolutely thrilled to receive this rare document from the early years of the school. Another new home found

Grief work is “thing” work as well as heart work. Touching, dusting, admiring, remembering, and finally, repacking for a final destination has been key to my moving forward and taking ownership of my life absent my Mum, my Dad, and close family who have died. I choose to honor them and heal myself by carefully -- very, very carefully -- attending to the tiniest of inconsequential debris. In these smallest of details, I imprint my heart with the fullness of their lives.

Copyright 2005 by The Cape Cod Voice, all rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.