Photographs & Memories

A friend who lost her mother a little over two months ago posted on Facebook asking what she should do with her parents’ high school and college yearbooks. I instantly flashed back to what it was like to have to go through my mother’s things when she passed in 2001. Her death was sudden so none of us had time to prepare and could barely process our new reality. To take the burden from my Dad who was, frankly, lost without her, I took on the task of sorting her belongings. Donating clothes to my aunt, Mom’s friends, and Goodwill was relatively easy. She had worked her entire life up to age fifty-five in an office where she had to wear business attire. She had held onto a few Alfred Dunner outfits for weddings and funerals, but had mostly taken to wearing casual v-neck tops and comfortable pull on slacks. There were no minks to deal with … my hot-natured Mama wore short sleeve tee shirts to Christmas dinner!

I inherited her modest jewelry collection which was filled with pieces that had more sentimental than monetary value. She’d made that special bequest in her will. I imagine that was because she remembered how much I loved wearing her faux pearls and 1960s enamel daisy pins when I played dress up as a child. Twenty-three years after her death, I have and cherish every piece of her jewelry except for the few I have passed down to my niece and one long strand of ceramic beads, very 1960s, that somehow disappeared after her death and that I pine for to this day. It had been a particular favorite of my ten-year-old self when I slipped into the velvet hippie granny dress my aunt had left behind when she moved out of state, playing dress up. The navy and turquoise beads just made the look, you know?

Clothes lovingly donated and cherished jewelry tucked away at my home, it was time for the hard stuff. You see, I am a collector of things tied to precious memories. I’ve searched for the right word, but only came up with Archivist. According to Wikipedia this word refers to someone who keeps records that have enduring value as reliable memories of the past. Only I don’t just keep written records. I keep cherished objects, too. My grandma was the type of Archivist who kept every piece of paper that came her way. She had a thousand clipped obituaries; every wedding invitation, birthday card, or thank you note she had ever received in her eighty-six years on Earth; and a scrapbook she had compiled during her high school years in the early 1930s. I inherited that trait to a certain extent. I could toss the cards and clippings, but I wouldn’t take a thousand dollars for that scrapbook! Each poem or cartoon or saying in it is illustrative of my Grandma Cartner’s personality. To me, it is a priceless window into her younger self.

When Grandma passed in 1999 a few of my aunts and I took on the burden/privilege of going through her lifetime of stuff. Smarter than most, Grandma Cartner had taken to gifting her children and grandchildren with her mementos as Christmas gifts in her later years. She gave me a clear pressed glass tray that had The Last Supper scene embossed into its surface. It came with a note that sits underneath it on the dresser in my bedroom to this day that says, “This plate was a wedding gift given to me when I married your grandfather on December 23, 1936. Love, Grandma Cartner.” She also gave me a bell, a salt & pepper shaker set, and a tiny ceramic owl … each item a reminder of her cherished collections that were displayed about her house. Every time I pick up one of those items, I am flooded with memories of Grandma and the many special times spent in her house with my extended family.

When Grandma was in her fifties, she took up oil painting as a hobby. Her house was filled with her creations. My special favorite was a painting she did of her own house, but there were so many more! As we cleaned out the house, we turned up canvases I had never even seen. We staged her enclosed garage with all the treasures that simply could not go into the dumpster and invited all the family to come and take them home. On the last day, at least ten of her paintings were still there in the carport. There was no way I could leave them. My aunt and I took the remainders home and in addition to paintings she had given me for my wedding in 1985 and several birthdays, I added those new paintings to the walls of my house, where they hang today as constant reminders of Grandma. My aunt, Alice, inherited the painting of Grandma’s house. When she recently passed, she left that painting to me. She couldn’t have left me anything that would’ve meant more to me!

Clearing out things at Grandma’s was difficult. I recall the flood of emotions from the combined beautiful memories and the stab of realizing there would be no new memories made with her. However, there was some comfort in the realization that we were blessed to have her for eighty-six years. Most of those years were good ones, with few illnesses and only a few side-lining accidents like a fall down an airport escalator. She did remarkably well in her fight with breast cancer, gaining remission for almost five years before it came back aggressively and took her life. Only the last few months were really rough as the cancer spread through her brain and bones.

Clearing things out at Mama’s was far more difficult. Her death had been sudden, totally unexpected. She went into the hospital on a Thursday for rotator cuff surgery. She came home on Saturday. We shared a lunch of broccoli-cheese soup I had made for her and did her stretching exercises for her shoulder. I told her I loved her and went home for the night. The next day I was supposed to bring lunch for her and Dad, but she had Dad call and say not to bother. She wasn’t feeling well and just wanted to rest. A few hours later, Dad called to say he had gone in to check on her and found her unresponsive. She died in her bed of a “silent” heart attack. She was three months shy of her sixty-second birthday. As I get nearer to that age I realize even more how young that was!! The feeling was what I imagine people experience when someone they love is abducted and never seen again … she was just gone. Poof! That day, August 12, 2001, I had a mom-shaped hole blown in my heart that hasn’t healed to this day.

Each item of Mama’s that I picked up was heavy with memories. I held on to a slip of paper with my Aunt Ann and Uncle Sandy’s mountain home address on it just because it was written in my mother’s handwriting. I collected every photo she had squirreled away in shoe boxes and those horrible sticky-paged albums. I took them home and spent nearly a year’s worth of weekends organizing them into themes like Vacations, Christmases and putting them in albums. It was a labor of love; something she had planned to do and had never gotten around to doing. I didn’t take her yearbooks since my Dad is still in our family home and went to school with my mother. I want him to enjoy those as long as he wants. When he is gone, I will cherish them and remember the times I sat on Mama’s or Daddy’s lap, or loved up beside them on the couch, flipping the pages and admiring my beautiful mom as a teen. I love that my Dad was voted “Most Dependable” in his class and my brother and I were both voted “Most Dependable” in our respective high school classes, following in his footsteps. Dad was also voted “Best Personality”. The yearbooks are like a totem, reminding me of that time together. Just writing these sentences takes me back to thumbing through those glossy pages and talking with my Mama and Daddy about their childhood experiences. I cherish those times and those memories more than I can explain.

My advice to that friend who was tempted to toss her parents’ yearbooks was this: “Keeeeep them!!! Don’t throw away anything like that in the first year …” That great advice was given to me by a pastor not too long after Mama passed. Those first few months, that first year, there are too many emotions coursing through you, too much brain fog, to make longterm decisions. It has been almost twenty-three years since Mama died. I don’t regret one thing I held onto that represents her days on Earth. I would be devastated if I did not have those tangible reminders of her that I can hold, look at, and share with my niece and nephew, who, unfortunately, came along after their Grandma Joan was gone.

Thankfully, my Dad is still here at age eighty-six. Though he is known for saying “That’s the first I’ve heard of it” about things I and others clearly remember telling him, that is more a symptom of inattention than forgetfulness and is nothing new. I’ve heard that phrase all my life. I know I am blessed to spend time with my dad three or four mornings a week as we breakfast together (along with Hardee’s usual cadre of old men solving the world’s problems over biscuits and gravy). None of us are promised tomorrow, so I know these times are precious. When Dad is gone, I’ll have his guitar, his yearbooks, those photo albums on the shelf. I’ll have the blow mold Santa that graced the mantle all through our childhood. I’ll have tons of shells and sharks teeth to remember our family vacations by. I’ll have the letters my parents wrote to each other as high school kids. I will look at those things and remember and count my blessings once again.