During the move, I had a long phone conversation with my grandmother. A frail woman for as long as I’d known her, she’d grown even weaker since I’d left for Chicago. Her voice now dragged and slurred, as if she’d always just awoken. I stood in Hutchinson Courtyard, the sort of sheltered campus grove that keeps you from considering the scene of crisis towards which the distant siren wail is heading, listening to my grandmother recount the dispersal of her things. My grandparents had a single room in the nursing home, forcing my dad and uncle to pass what remained of their life’s possessions through an unforgivingly narrow sieve. As she had throughout her life—through the Dust Bowl and World War II and the stillbirth of her first child—she set her jaw against hardship. But my grandmother was a tough lady, not an unfeeling one, and her sadness emanated from my phone’s earpiece, each strained pause suggesting truths about time, aspiration, and mortality that I could only begin to understand. But what I did recall at that moment was how much meaning, for better or for worse, we deposit in our things. “I can’t live without it” is an expression of attachment to an object, but it had become painfully literal for my grandmother. The gradual dissipation of her possessions must have looked like the very walls of her allotted time meeting in their vanishing point, which suddenly drew very near. (...)
True enough. A little more than a year after moving to the nursing home, my grandmother died. I was sitting in Hutchinson Courtyard—the same place where I’d listened to her pained account of the move a year earlier—reading Moby-Dick. My dad called to tell me the news, and the first thing I did after hanging up was circle the number of the page I’d been reading. My dad had been playing golf after visiting her at the nursing home when he learned of her death, and he kept his scorecard from that afternoon. After the funeral, he gave me one of Grandma’s Hummels, a doe-faced boy reading a newspaper, a nod to my interest in journalism. I placed it on my desk, where my hand seems to knock against it every time I reach for a pen or rearrange papers. But it was Grandma’s, so I keep it. My children will be bound to the Hummel by no such contract of memory. It is like an isotope with a short half-life, sitting on my desk while it leaks meaning.
We so often claim to be owners when we are in fact stewards. Indeed, with a sufficiently macroscopic lens, one that encompasses mortality, ownership gives way to stewardship entirely. And stewardship, with its connotations of preserving for later generations, may not be the right word, for there is no guarantee that the objects that mean a lot to us will be anything other than clutter to our descendants. The exigencies of time and the vagaries of individual experience ensure that most of what we own will speak only to us. A copy of Moby-Dick with a circle around the page number 38, a scorecard from an afternoon of golf, a postcard bearing a photo of a smiling father and his son: all of these things will someday become clutter, their stories silenced.
by James Santel, Paris Review | Read more:
