Modern Loss by Rebecca Soffer

Author:Rebecca Soffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

THE ACCIDENTAL ARCHIVIST

by Spencer Merolla

Things do not exist without being full of people.

—BRUNO LATOUR, THE BERLIN KEY

When I was a teenager, my parents died a few years apart, and as I went through the rituals of laying them to rest, well-meaning people assured me that I would “always have the memories.” But almost immediately those memories started to fade. First their voices, then their smells, the punch line to one of my dad’s stupid jokes; and after that weird period where I thought I saw them everywhere, I found that the images in my mind of their faces had lost their crispness.

In grief we forget, and it’s terrible. I would forage in my mind for details, only to realize that there were fewer and fewer to be found.

There were the memories, which I couldn’t seem to hold on to, and there was my parents’ stuff, which I could actually hold: a half-empty jar of moisturizer my mother used to soothe her radiation burns, new polo shirts that my dad bought but didn’t live long enough to wear, a Post-it note with a phone message on it—the last thing my father ever wrote.

Death turns everything into an heirloom.

Getting to know my parents better was no longer a possibility, but like an archaeologist, I could investigate their belongings for answers to questions I hadn’t thought to ask when they were around. Letters sent to my grandmother chronicle my dad’s adjustment to leaving home; a business card tells me about his first job out of school; a snapshot of a handful of scraggly perennials shows me the pride my mother took in the humble beginnings of the garden I knew so well. And like the curator of a tiny and very specific museum, I could comb the archives for whatever selection of items seemed most relevant to my station in life at the time. I took up running in college, and I trained wearing my mom’s jacket. I polished my shoes for my first office job with my dad’s shoe brush. I pried the backs off the picture frames and replaced photos from my childhood with pictures from my travels. I cut up my mother’s wedding dress for an art installation. Surely my parents would not have wanted me to feel bogged down by their possessions, but neither would they have wanted me to forfeit the comforts to be had in keeping them around.

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