Keep This Forever

Talisman or Horcrux? Pa's fiddle or just another fiddle? Only you can decide what to do with family objects.

Once, a former professor of mine was browsing a used bookstore only to find a copy of his own book for sale. He opened the flap to find the inscription he’d written to his friend: “Keep this forever.”

He took the phrase and made it the title of his next book, written in the wake of his father’s death.

If you no longer require your copy of my book, I respectfully request that you grant it a Viking funeral.

I was in Alabama the past ten days, clearing my parents’ house for sale, all the things they were keeping forever. Mom died eight years ago, and Dad (Hi, Dad! Sorry you have a memoirist as a daughter!) recently downsized to an apartment so he could be near my brother in Birmingham.

My parents weren’t hoarders. They cared for their things. Every Tupperware bottom has the Tupperware lid. When I move, I have contractor bags of garbage. Not my parents’ house. Which makes the sorting difficult.

Where do decades of curated belongings from a four-bedroom, two-bath, three-garage, three-attic-storages go?

Dad took everything he wanted, but he has limited space now. I’m 57, and my brother is 50. Both our houses are fully furnished. We are trying to pare down, not add on.

I took this secretary desk, which is actually a secret time-travel machine to my childhood, when I loved office supplies.

My brother, his wife, and I went through the house, room by room, attic by attic, closet by closet. Do you want this? Someone should take this. This is nice — but it isn’t my style. What about this?

My nieces took some things. But I could see in their eyes how, as young people, they want to choose their own things, forge their own lives.

Everywhere I turned, jump scares lurked.

What starts as an innocent Tupperware sale purchase in the 70s becomes the lettuce crisper Mom used for 50 years, the crisper of my childhood, always in the fridge, always crisping iceberg lettuce, because iceberg lettuce was the only lettuce we had back then.

Talisman or Horcrux? The decision fatigue was real.

We found this OG cloth tent from our 70s camping trips in one of the attics. While the sepia-tone codes Narcos, we were actually at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Mom labeled everything, but why she kept certain things, we didn’t always know. Sometimes Dad knew. Sometimes I knew. Sometimes my brother knew. Many times, we all shrugged. Of course, we removed all obviously personal items. My brother has 50+ photo albums at his house right now. Another battle for another day.

Mom’s Christmas card records from one year. Mom, of German heritage, missed her calling as an archivist. Every picture and every object was catalogued, dated, and labeled with a subtext: Keep This Forever.

Ma’s China shepherdess. Pa’s fiddle. The shiny penny from Mr. Edwards… The Little House fandom knows these objects well. These talismens — the shepherdess especially — represent the family. So long as the shepherdess doesn’t break, the family won’t break. We hold our breath every time Ma unpacks it.

But what if the daughter never wrote a series of beloved best-selling novels that span over a century of fandom? And what if the mother had cabinets upon cabinets of shepardesses, each one with the original box and a Certificate of Authenticity? What if the estate salespeople, two women who are dead ringers for your P.E. teachers in junior high, come by to evaluate the house, look at the Hummel plates your mother coveted — I MEAN, COVETED, unboxing each year with love — and say, “Welp, we’ll be honest. These might be good for skeet shootin’.”

Mom had this nook custom-built for her Hummel plate display case.

Therese and Diane (saints) had been planning a vacation, but after seeing all of Mom’s carefully cared-for objects, Diane said to Therese, “You know we’ve got to do this one, right?”

As for myself, I came home looking at my stuff with fresh eyes. I imagined my family going through my things wondering — what was she thinking? as my mother’s ghost counters, keep this forever.

My “what was she thinking” shrine. I’m Catholic, after all. We love us some idolatry.

I’ve come to understand that our stuff is like our travels — they mean a lot to you, but you get one or two anecdotes before people’s eyes glaze over. Your only hope is to become a writer who can turn life stories into universal stories. Even so, you will find used copies of your book, maybe even at your parents’ house.

Is the process of going through these objects heartbreaking? Of course it is. You can say it’s just stuff, but that’s not true. We’re reviewing our mortality.

Horcrux or Talisman? Only you can decide.

Recommended Reading:

The Keepthings: A Substack edited by Deborah Way. “What memento would you keep after the death of someone you love? These are the stories of lost loved ones, inspired by the things they left behind.” I wrote about Mom’s lipstick.

The Sum of Trifles by Julia Ridley Scott: “A memoir in essays reckoning with grief and inheritance through the objects parents left behind.”

Optional Bonus Content: Why I Keep These Broken Mardi Gras Beads from 2009

One crisp, sunny February day in New Orleans, stricken by a terrible cold, depression, and a hangover, I summoned the strength to leave my apartment on St. Andrew to crawl across St. Charles Street for a necessary Popeye’s fried chicken, holy buttery biscuit, and a sweet, icy Coke. This would be my death row last supper.

If you know New Orleans, then you know that 2009 was the year after Hurricane Katrina. You would also know that I lived on a massive parade route, and that in February, Mardi Gras would have been in full swing. I still look out my window sometimes, missing the parades.

Floats, marching bands, and happy dance teams flowed by, as they had been day and night for weeks now. I didn’t care. I was 40, unemployed, single, and sinking into debt. No one cared if I needed Popeye’s that day. Lonely during a parade is the worst. But I was hungry.

Time to play Creole Frogger. I found an opening between a float and a marching band. Bloop. Bloop. I had just crossed when, thunk! These (heavy) beads ringed me, as if the beads were a horseshoe and my neck was the stake.

Now, beads are not all the same. These were special beads. For special beads, you would normally jump and wave and yell, “Hey, mister!”, not resemble Igor crawling out to dig graves for Frankenstein.

Today, these beads remind me that a random stranger can see you are hurting and care. I imagine what I looked like from the float, all Charlie Brown hunched, before the beads hit and a crooked grin fought for purchase.

The beads have since broken. Yesterday, I tossed them out. Who needs broken beads from 2009? But this morning, I fished them back out. Talisman, I decided.