The things we keep.

The call came on a Saturday morning.

It was Officer Love from the Mesa Police Department. I was still in my pajamas, finishing a gallon of mint chocolate chip in my bed. I thought it was a joke.

It was not.

There is nothing funny about flying across the country to identify your mother’s body. Or making final arrangements.

I remember my grandfather’s silence and my grandmother wailing, “Oh what are we gonna do?” And I remember I had to go to Target because I’d pack a suitcase full of pants but no shirts. And like a miracle, one of my mom’s oldest friends randomly showed up at her house on Sunday afternoon because she’d already planned to spend that week with my mom and what would I have done if she had cancelled her flight because my mom wasn’t answering the phone?

A week later, my mother returned to the town she was born in and we laid her in the ground all by herself.

And then, for reasons I think I get, but cannot for the life of me understand, we had less than a week to clear out my mother’s house. Days. To empty the home where my mother had lived.

I had no idea how to do this.

 

I lived in a studio apartment in NYC that was already full of my stuff. My mom had a 3 bedroom house with a garage that I discovered also contained a fair bit of my stuff.

The most surprising things I found?

A small metal suitcase with all of our Barbie and Ken and Stretch Armstrong dolls. Just like we would have packed it up the last time we played with them. When we didn’t know it would be the last time.

Boxes and boxes of trophies from middle school and high school. I had no idea she’d kept these. Or why she’d moved them from house to house to house and then all the way across the country with her. But, there they were. All wrapped up tenderly.

A bunch of my old journals. From I don’t know when. I don’t know because I didn’t have time to look at them. Into the garbage can they went. Because we had to clear the house. All of it had to go.

I’d never seen my mom in a bathing suit, but she had 3 that looked brand new. The curling iron. The Gevalia coffee. The teapot I brought her from Poland in 1990. The placemats woven by a Native American woman she met the summer I fell off the monkey bars and ripped open my armpit. The goldware we used for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The printer that was also a fax machine and would end up coming in very handy over the next year as I finalized her estate.

 

My mom didn’t have a lot of stuff. But she had things. Things she used every day. Things she needed. Things she loved.

And while none of them were especially important on their own, all of them pointed to something that was.

 

It’s proof of who we are and who we have been and who we aspired to be when we bought the running shoes. Proof of what we did first thing after waking up every day and before going to bed every night. Proof of who we loved and what we found funny and believed was too important to let go of. It’s the best of us and the worst of us and the parts of us that only people who truly know us get to see.

And that makes it much harder to toss into a donation box than people like to admit.

 

That doesn’t mean we have to keep it all.

Not in a “Silence, please while I have a memorial service for this glass measuring cup we used to make hot fudge sauce in the microwave” kind of way.

(Because that seems like it’s going overboard and you’re never going to actually be able to get through all of the stuff you need to get through.)

But there are some things that you should probably take 3 seconds to pause and acknowledge that what you’re holding in your hands isn’t just a bathrobe.

It also isn’t your mother.

 

Whether you keep the robe or drop it into a donation bag doesn’t matter.

Unless it’s got gold bars sewn into the hem, the only thing that makes this robe valuable is that your mother wore it every night over her nightgown while she drank a tall glass of Lipton instant and read one of her sci fi paperbacks on the sofa.

That’s the thing you want to keep.

Because that’s the only thing that matters.

You don’t need the robe to hold on to the memory of the life that wore it. But it is important to give yourself a second or two to have the memory.

 

I don’t think I would have made different decisions about my mom’s stuff.

I could not have kept anything more than I did because I had nowhere to put it. I was already crowded and when her things arrived at my tiny studio, I was literally climbing over furniture to get from my bed to the bathroom.

Everything we got rid of, needed to go.

It’s the way it went that still to this day makes me angry-sad.

The speed of it.

The lack of attention.

The feeling that there wasn’t time to notice the life before we dealt with the stuff.

 

Because sometimes what you’re holding in your hands is a bathrobe. And sometimes it’s evidence.

Evidence that someone was here.

Evidence that they mattered.

Evidence that a life was lived.

 

That doesn’t mean you have to keep it. It doesn’t mean you should.

But before you decide what stays and what goes, I think it’s worth taking a second to acknowledge what you’re actually sorting through.

 

The things we keep are never just about the things.

Sometimes they’re about memory.

Sometimes they’re about hope.

Sometimes they’re about grief.

And sometimes they’re about trying to remember how your mother made hot fudge sauce in the microwave.

 

Your friend who really wishes she’d found her moms hot fudge recipe,

Vivian