A Few Moments More

The card was a simple birthday card from my grandmother to my mother.  I'm not sure of the year it was purchased, though it had to be before 1961, since that's when my grandma passed.

It talked about how wonderful a daughter my mother was; the language was very touching and poetic. The card itself was thin cardboard, with flowers, lilacs I think, and the font was a very ornate cursive style.

This gift is over fifty years old; the person who gifted it and the person who received have long since passed away.

And I cannot bring myself to throw it away.

There's no practical reason whatsoever to keep it.  I will likely never look at it again.  It's possible that someone in my family might care to see it, but the only one left who even knew both of them is my aunt, and my guess is she isn't going to want to keep it past that first viewing.  My niece and nephew might have a passing interest in it, but again, they would almost certainly throw it out soon after, and they both live hundreds of miles away.

All logic points to throwing it out.  Oh,  maybe one last look and a quick cry in goodbye, but then pitch it.  It's taking up space; where do you draw the line? Do you keep every single correspondence and/or card that's ever been exchanged in the family, just because of some neurotic clinging to the past?  What's more, my guess is that even the people who participated in this card's history would assure me that discarding it would be fine with them, perhaps even preferable.

And still...I cannot.

And that's not the only thing.  I cannot find it within myself to throw out a great many things that have accumulated through the years, passed unceremoniously into my possession by a succession of deaths.  Minutes and assorted papers from my father's terms on the local village board, his work papers including performance evaluations and other correspondence a batch of unsent greeting cards my mom purchased for "what if" situations.

I know the arguments against saving them, of course.  Beyond the practical stuff I listed above, there's no real spiritual reason to keep it either.  I know, for instance, that my love for my family (and theirs for me) is in no way attached to these physical objects.  That love is unconditional, and the memories we share can never be discarded nor forgotten.  They won't be "mad" at me from the heavens if I happen to throw out that thing that, in life, had meaning or importance.  Their ties to those things ended when they passed; only their love for the people they left behind remains as an anchor.

And still, I keep it all.

How do I explain the wrenching tug I feel whenever I think about tossing this stuff? How do I put into words something conventionally illogical and yet so completely natural to me?

While I realize that my family's legacy has almost nothing to do with objects, I also admit that I want some reminder of them left when I pass.  I'll go into the ether, and God willing, we'll be reunited and the love we shared will hopefully live on through the actions I've made on earth and how they affected people I met and interacted with.  But I want there to be some physical evidence of their being here.  I want them to be more than some collection of neurons firing in wistful memory; I want the world to know that a man named Richard C. Miller and a woman named Beverly J. Miller walked and breathed and had dreams and did work and impacted lives and people for the better.  I want the world to know that they mattered and that they were here.

Destroying or discarding all of their worldly possessions, particularly the ones that highlight who they were and what they did, almost seems to surrender them to infinity.

No, my father is not an evaluation he received from his boss, or a suggestion he made to the village board.  My mother is not a group of unsent cards she bought ahead of time, knowing that her friends would at some point probably need one of them.  But these physical things are evidence of them, of their work, and their personalities.  They resonate with meaning and memory for me; they cry out that these people existed, that everything they touched did not simply scatter to the wind when they breathed their last breaths.


I know that ultimately, "all flesh is grass", and all material goods will fade as well.  I can't hold back the void forever.  These things I keep will decay and vanish with the passing of time.  But while they are in my care and are entrusted to me, they help keep their memory alive.  Would I forget them if their goods were gone?  Never.  But sometimes a nostalgic revisiting of these items refreshes my mind, allows for time to stop and freeze all the immediate concerns I might have so that I can appreciate once again the people who created and/or defined them.

There's a wonderful line from the old television show "Soap", where the heroine and matriarch of the show, Jessica Tate, is awaiting the results of a test that she is almost sure will be bad.  Her doctor approaches her gravely and begins to speak, and she says to him, "Wait.  Let me have just a few more moments of immortality."

I know it won't last, but I want them to have a few moments more, too.