Oh my damn, Kelly. I am so incredibly sorry that I somehow didn't know you lost your Mom. Please forgive me for being neglectful. We have so much to talk about but mostly I really need to give you a giant prairie-style hug.
Your words hit me on a visceral level; both my parents are gone now & two of us live in the house they SCRAPED to buy and kept SCRAPING to keep through 14 years of my Dad's disability and then leukemia & death when I was on the doorstep of adulthood almost 30 years ago. My Mom left us a bit over 2 years ago. Some things of hers are still where she left them. It's been an emotional process that exceeds my worst breakup to even begin filtering through the belongings and reminders of both parents and a decent smattering of objects they'd each kept to remember *their own* parents. And since I'm one of many, any time I come across something I think can be donated or sold or tossed I have to ask myself: will my siblings or Mom's sister or those older cousins who adored my parents or knew our grandparents far better than I ever did--will any of them want this?
And what if I finally finish these essays, the memoir, the trilogy, the giant migration study research project & its companion, the creative nonfiction "yet another why LIW matters to me and what I did about it" book that people keep telling me to write? What if I actually make viable contributions to the LIW canon or the fiction market or just document something somewhere that people will give a sh*t about? Will some second cousin thrice removed care in 2083 that I saved this 19th century whatnot that came from my Dad's mother's house and might have been her mother's and mattered so much in my childhood because I knew it had a name because Laura wrote about having one in her own home on the Dakota plains that I begged my Dad to bring it home and he did and I kept it and then I wrote about it? (That really happened.)
It's a lot.
I kept a few other treasures. I'm still working on it. I've tried to write about it. I'm not wholly ready, but I'm getting there. I, too, follow The Keepthings. Reading others' stories is soothing, and the stories make me feel as if I knew the person upon whose death the author suddenly sees, perhaps for the first time, as a whole person. I can't tell you how many moments I've had like that but I suspect it will never end.
The weirdest, loneliest, most daunting part about losing a parent is how often the very person who might have great insight to your emotions & how to manage them in your grief is...the very one you're grieving.
Anyway. I'm so sorry. May your little bottle of Clinique forever offer just a little more.
You know what? I'm ready to use the bottle up and turn to my niece's bottle. Moving across the country 6 times diminishes sentimentality, I tell ya. By move six, I had boxes I'd never opened in five years, so I didn't even look inside and just donated them.
A great memoir about processing things is The Sum of Trifles. The author's parents ran an antique store and much of what they had was super valuable. But who has a Victorian mansion anymore?
Oh my damn, Kelly. I am so incredibly sorry that I somehow didn't know you lost your Mom. Please forgive me for being neglectful. We have so much to talk about but mostly I really need to give you a giant prairie-style hug.
Your words hit me on a visceral level; both my parents are gone now & two of us live in the house they SCRAPED to buy and kept SCRAPING to keep through 14 years of my Dad's disability and then leukemia & death when I was on the doorstep of adulthood almost 30 years ago. My Mom left us a bit over 2 years ago. Some things of hers are still where she left them. It's been an emotional process that exceeds my worst breakup to even begin filtering through the belongings and reminders of both parents and a decent smattering of objects they'd each kept to remember *their own* parents. And since I'm one of many, any time I come across something I think can be donated or sold or tossed I have to ask myself: will my siblings or Mom's sister or those older cousins who adored my parents or knew our grandparents far better than I ever did--will any of them want this?
And what if I finally finish these essays, the memoir, the trilogy, the giant migration study research project & its companion, the creative nonfiction "yet another why LIW matters to me and what I did about it" book that people keep telling me to write? What if I actually make viable contributions to the LIW canon or the fiction market or just document something somewhere that people will give a sh*t about? Will some second cousin thrice removed care in 2083 that I saved this 19th century whatnot that came from my Dad's mother's house and might have been her mother's and mattered so much in my childhood because I knew it had a name because Laura wrote about having one in her own home on the Dakota plains that I begged my Dad to bring it home and he did and I kept it and then I wrote about it? (That really happened.)
It's a lot.
I kept a few other treasures. I'm still working on it. I've tried to write about it. I'm not wholly ready, but I'm getting there. I, too, follow The Keepthings. Reading others' stories is soothing, and the stories make me feel as if I knew the person upon whose death the author suddenly sees, perhaps for the first time, as a whole person. I can't tell you how many moments I've had like that but I suspect it will never end.
The weirdest, loneliest, most daunting part about losing a parent is how often the very person who might have great insight to your emotions & how to manage them in your grief is...the very one you're grieving.
Anyway. I'm so sorry. May your little bottle of Clinique forever offer just a little more.
You know what? I'm ready to use the bottle up and turn to my niece's bottle. Moving across the country 6 times diminishes sentimentality, I tell ya. By move six, I had boxes I'd never opened in five years, so I didn't even look inside and just donated them.
A great memoir about processing things is The Sum of Trifles. The author's parents ran an antique store and much of what they had was super valuable. But who has a Victorian mansion anymore?