Coffee and My Morning Rant - Day 11 Unemployment "Paper" When we die, most of us will have our personal belongings combed through by loved ones and strangers. Artifacts – testaments to our neuroses, our compulsions, our habits, secrets and lies – will be revealed. For the past month I toiled on building, painting, repairing, cleaning, sorting, organizing – tending to the numerous things that must be done when one’s grandmother dies and the home in which she shared with her daughter has fallen under some disarray and neglect due to the daughter spending every waking hour tending to her elderly, sole surviving, bed-bound parent. So predominantly on my own, while my own life 3,000 miles away was spiraling out of control, I spent a month diving in, wading through, and sometimes over-contemplating the relics of several generations of at least a dozen family members. And I unearthed a strange genetic neurosis, which evidently exists specifically, and perhaps solely, amongst the women of my family: an abhorrent inability to throw paper artifacts away. In the course of cleansing, I surmise I disposed of a good two tons of paper: magazines, junk mail, bills, receipts, lists, letters, cards, invitations, death announcements, birth announcements – not a single piece of paper discarded went untouched by my hand, unobserved by my eye. The attack on paper began on the first day, when I decided to begin the cleansing with my grandmother’s full wall, four-door closet. For years, I have heard my mother declare over the phone to me, “Damn it! I was just writing out checks for bills, turned around to make lunch and now they’re gone!” My grandmother would inevitably get on the phone thereafter or the following day complaining, “Your mother! She’s blaming me for hiding the mail when she just can’t remember what the hell she did with it,” Teeka, my grandmother, would say with impressive conviction. My grandmother died. I came home and sorted through what she left behind. In her closet, I found the clothing with which she’d chosen to define herself throughout her life, years of classy but not conservative, expressive but not outrageous fabrics. And hidden in more than two dozen shoe boxes, plastic bags, paper bags, cloth shopping bags and jewelry boxes, on the floor and hanging between coats, I found not only her secret, but the secret of generations of women in our family: the inability to throw away paper – products determining the worth and verifying the actuality of our existences. Teeka had in fact been hiding the bills. As I pulled out each parcel of paper, I found it was not just current bills and junk mail and half-filled out checks of payment; between a 2011 bill from the Morristown water company, and a 2012 C home loan bill marked “Paid” was a Mario’s Dry Cleaners bill from 1954. Between an overdue library book notice from 1999 in Sonora, CA and a card from my aunt to her mother on her birthday of an undisclosed year was the only known photograph of my great great great grandfather. It was ascertained right away that not one parcel of paper could be blindly thrown away. In these papers came an unraveling, an enlightening, an education, a bonding between my aunt, my mother and me. A personal letter to my great grandparents from a Senator running for President requesting a personal face to face meeting with them while in California on his campaign trail – signed Bobby Kennedy; a letter to my great grandfather from Franklin D. Roosevelt inquiring how he was doing since his stay at the hospital and many letters from Truman; an invitation to the Ladies Luncheon from Eleanor Roosevelt to my great grandmother; love letters, fan mail, campaign travel itineraries, coat checks receipts, telegrams … a treasure trove. The paper trail didn’t end in my grandmother’s room. It was in piles on every surface, in every drawer, every room – sometimes wedged between pages of unassuming books, tucked between placemats in the dining room cabinet. There was no rhyme or reason to the order in which the paper was stashed, collected and hoarded, so much of it trash – junk mail, receipts, newspaper clippings to random events or political propaganda, grocery lists, writing lessons from a first grader – that had been kept so long, or just at the beginning of its journey of being kept too long, that it has now become historic debris, artifacts. On my last day of standing knee deep by myself in a room full of paper, I realized I was standing amongst dead people. I’d spent the better part of the day reading the informal history of so many people who have been dead for a very long time – many whom I’d never met, only knew of through my first cousin-once-removed’s obsessive family tree building, and my mother’s uncanny ability to remember the personal stories and histories of all these people. For the past month, I’d been happening upon occasional letters from my father to his mother-in-law – my grandmother Teeka, inclusive of cards, photographs, and postcards – even up until 2001 (notably, more than 20 years after my mother had divorced him)… I kept each piece to bring back home with me to Alaska. They were artifacts of my father that I’d been denied – evidence of who he was so that I could piece it all back together, fill in the empty spots in my head and my heart where he’d been unceremoniously stolen from me (as his wife had forbidden correspondence with me). While weeding through the debris, I found myself needing to call him to let him know my grandmother had died – for surely he’d want to know. But as fast as I’d had the thought, the reality struck me across the head knocking tears out of their sockets. Not only is he too dead, but he died two years before her. And for hours, my tears bled ancient ink and reinvigorated envelope glue as I leaned over the piles and boxes and layers of paper. What initially seemed an inane neurosis, I learned was in fact, a confluence of sorts; my family’s matriarchal secret of hoarding paper is not without reason. Rather than (as the men in our family are more prone to do) bury in a landfill our indiscretions, our youth passed, memories of our loved ones who’ve died or disappeared, we tuck them discreetly among insignificant scraps of paper, camouflaging them, softening their blow, so that we may stand amongst the phantoms and ghosts without having to carry too long the weight of inexorable grief.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 19:50:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015