Blogging the Family.
Part One
My brother the priest called me. He is moving or rather I guess he's being moved. He's been the pastor at his church for ten or eleven years and there is some kind of rule that says priests can only stay in one place for about that much time before he gets moved to another church or in this case, two churches. He'll be the pastor of two churches in the Northwestern corner of Connecticut. He, with the help of our oldest sister, is sorting out and throwing out the accumulated debris, er, treasures from his attic at the parish. Mostly throwing because my sister is a very good sorter. (A large dumpster has been placed just outside the kitchen door.)
The phone call was one of a chain of phone calls and emails. We talked on the phone about a week before about the move and how hard it would be on everyone-- him, the parishioners, the cat, his loyal staff. He emailed later inviting us up to the farewell party which won't happen until after he's already moved and, almost as an aside, he asked if there was anything from our deceased parent's stuff that I'd want. I emailed back that if there were any pictures... .
Everyone's parents die. Our dad died suddenly over years ago. There was a wake where I got to talk to his to two of his brothers whom I hadn't seen for decades. There was a funeral where I read out a short eulogy.* Then there were weeks and months of caring for our mom who had been ailing for years. The sister who sorts well found a - aren't all terms abhorrent?- rest home, retirement center, convalescent home for Mom near my brother's church and we cleared out, closed out and sold the condo our parents had moved into from their three bedroom house up on the hill.
I'm sure there are some people who cope with loss really well and others who do not cope so well and there are those who think they are coping well but who really are in some kind of state of delusion. I was in that last group. It took everything I had to take a few things - a clock, some candlesticks -from my father's house. My father's house, my mother's house, my parents' things, anyone who has had parents knows what I am talking about, all those things that since the age of three I had been told not to touch, ever. Never ever. And now I was being told "Go ahead. Take. Touch. Go on."
(shudder)
I took my father's hammers, they are on the wall by my desk, I'd never use one. I took the tin tapper he used at Hamilton for thirty odd years. I took my mother’s little music box which plays Always.
A few years ago we found out that the favorite song of one of my wife's family was Always. They were surprised and happy that I knew the song so well and could sing it. I should able to, I said to myself, I played it over and over when I was five or six until my mother made me stop saying that I was going to wear the little box out. Now the music box is mine. I never play it. I'm afraid I'll wear it out.
What else? Oh, somewhere I found the little dishes from my sisters' dollhouse. I keep meaning to show them to my wife to see if she could use them as charms on a bracelet, but I haven' yet.
What I didn't take were any letters or pictures or documents which is really odd because I fancy myself as the family genealogist. That's right. The one most likely to use letters and pictures and documents didn't take any. I had some pictures that Mom had given me of her mom and dad, but not many and certainly not everything I could have used from the big box in the basement closet. Ah well. Such are the effects of a state of delusion.
It's odd what we mourn. Once, dad and I took a bunch of trash out of his workshop to the dump. We actually did that several times before he died and yet there was still an incredible amount of just junk in that corner of the basement. This one time we were clearing the pieces of lumber and pipe and there was a large piece, about two foot square, of solid flat-planed oak. Pop said he had always had meant to make something with that wood, he just never did. It was a beautiful, flat piece about an inch thick - just right for an oversized plaque of a coat of arms or the depiction of some holy Saint. Neither of us could bring ourselves to put it in the dump's chipper. We left it standing up near some barrels where we hoped some woodworker would spot it and take it home. Pop mourned that oak plank as a sign of things passing and I thought about that oak plank and the pictures I didn't take.
So my brother called me. He said I should come up right away and get the pictures.
You mean, I asked, there's some left? Boxes of them, he replied, we were going through the stuff and I thought we had found them all but a few moments ago we hit the Mother lode and there are some letters that you should have and some other stuff.
I took a Zip Car up from the city early the next morning. My sister and brother were waiting at the rectory and we loaded the car. There were seven boxes and two plastic files. Not all pictures, they said grinning. My brother had kept everything. A glance in one of the boxes showed that I was now the possessor of several, many, 8mm films, one of which is entitled St. Lawrence Seaway Locks. My father had helpfully added the words "in motion". Well. Yes.
We had a nice breakfast at a diner where we talked and remembered things - my sister how she and our other sister would go to work in the tobacco fields. How on Fridays they would put their hair up in curlers and go to work that way so that they could get to the Friday night dance on time.
There’s an inventory to be done.
