I
“Pray, for what do we move ever but to get rid of our furniture, our exuviae, at last to go from this world to another newly furnished, and leave this to be burned?
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
When my father died three years ago, my mother immediately began to fret over their belongings, who would take what, where their possessions should go, how they would be distributed, and where they would end up after her death. There was as much resentment and repressed anger as generosity in her obsessively repeated litany of concerns. The “value” of things was often anxiously economic—”we paid a lot for that”—but sometimes more difficult to pinpoint. It seemed that everything they owned had sentimental as well as monetary value that she felt was insufficiently appreciated by others, particularly her two children, and everything was “too good” to give to charity. She couldn’t bear the idea that something she paid money for fifty years ago would be enjoyed by what she considered the undeserving poor.
“We paid a lot for that vase, you know. It’s from Spain. I hope you’ll remember that after I die, and not just get rid of it.”
“Sure, Mom. The blue vase is worth money.”
“I’m giving the jewelry to you, and the silver to your brother and Debbie. It’s not written in the will, but I want you to know that.”
Patiently again, “Sure, Mom.” Never mind that Debbie and Steve didn’t want the silver, and that the jewelry was the kind of costume jewelry that a New Jersey suburban housewife wore in the 1950s, along with her prized mink stole, which of course no one wanted either.
“We got those little leprechauns in Ireland. Maybe you should take them with you now.” After seven trips to Ireland, the contents of an entire Dublin gift shop were distributed throughout the apartment.
“Your father loved that picture.”
The days wore on, between trips to the florist, St. Benedict’s, and the mortuary, my mother all the while detailing instructions concerning the afterlife of their things, all that was left of her sixty years with my father. When the widow from across the hall stopped by to extend her condolences, my mother mused, “I haven’t forgotten that crockpot I said I’d give you.”
Her neighbor was taken aback. “What a thing to say.” My mother didn’t seem to notice.
II
“In its widest possible sense, however, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.”
William James, Principles of Psychology
The dialogue over the housing of possessions, what they were “worth” and the memories they embodied, actually began some two decades before, when my parents sold their home in New Jersey after my father’s retirement. I was living in a small rental house in California at the time; my brother had recently bought his first house in Wisconsin, also small. We rarely saw my parents. Because they were moving to a beach condo in Florida, they decided to get rid of their couches and wing chairs and houseful of walnut furniture. They were determined that they would go to my brother and me. To this end my father produced an elaborate Sotheby auction-style brochure, listing each piece of furniture, its dimensions, weight, date of acquisition, original price, and estimated current value. He included a recent catalog from the furniture maker in Virginia as well.
They made phone call after phone call to us, despite begrudging the cost of long distance.
“Have you looked at the catalog? We just couldn’t believe the price on that chest of drawers now. I think your brother will be taking the small desk, but I don’t know about the side tables. Have you decided about the dining room table? We have four extra chairs, you know.”
I could picture them at home: Dad in shorts, dark knee socks, and one of his drab retirement polo shirts, pencils in his shirt pocket engineer-style, Mom in one of her suburban, brightly-colored polyester outfits. The two of them conferring earnestly and at length over what should go to whom, what would be most fair—never imagining that we had our own lives, our own furniture, our own taste, and limited space. Reluctantly, my brother and I took most of their things, primarily to assuage their near-hysteria over our disinterest.
III
“If you are a seer, whenever you meet a man you will see all that he owns, ay, and much that he pretends to disown, behind him, even to his kitchen furniture and all the trumpery which he saves and will not burn, and he will appear to be harnessed to it and making what headway he can. I think that the man is at a dead set who has got through a knot hole or gateway where his sledge load of furniture cannot follow him. I cannot but feel compassion when I hear some trig, compact-looking man, seemingly free, all girded and ready, speak of his ‘furniture,’ as whether it is insured or not. ‘But what shall I do with my furniture?’”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Ten years later, after my brother moved to a larger house, and my parents themselves had moved from Florida to North Carolina, Steve and Debbie decided they didn’t want the furniture any more. My parents were livid with fury. It was the most intense emotional crisis of their retirement years, marked by a rage profoundly out of proportion to a redecorating scheme. My brother and sister-in-law—and of course they bitterly blamed her—had betrayed a sacred trust, proven themselves unworthy of a Doyle legacy, and forced Mom and Dad to ship the furniture at their own expense from my brother’s house in Wisconsin to mine in California. “Would you believe she said it didn’t go with their oak floors in their new house? Who ever heard of such a thing? It’s just not right.”
I took as many items as I could, though I didn’t really want them, and a lot ended up in our garage. I balked at the large dining set, since I was perfectly happy with our own smaller table, a more intimate size, just right for the three of us. Their table was nice enough. Like the other furniture it was a light walnut, almost Shaker style, with plain ladder chairs with rattan seats. But the drop leaves had to be open all of the time, and the table sat eight people. There were two people in Steve and Debbie’s household, three in ours. The table had felt too large and formal for the four of us when I was growing up, emphasizing the distance between us.
True, we often ate together. Often we didn’t. I remember my parents’ martini-fuelled fights before dinner about who would cook. The spiraling violence of their voices. Mom’s familiar refrain, always in a sprightly tone of fake cheer: “It’s do-it-yourself-night, kids.” And on the nights when one of them cooked, the tension of our dinners together.
“Would you ask your mother to pass the butter,” my father would say to my brother, pointedly not looking at her.
“Is there any more steak?” Steven passed the butter dish.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” my mother said. “Do you know what steak costs these days?”
There weren’t a lot of happy memories associated with this furniture. We weren’t a happy family in my adolescence, and we weren’t a close one in adulthood. Yet my parents were intent on giving me the dining room table. They brought it up again and again. Maybe they simply wanted good value for their money, but their emotional investment in the issue suggested something larger. Maybe a concerted effort to rewrite history—to imagine warm family dinners that never happened, and a family togetherness that hadn’t survived our past.
IV
“The world-embracing, metaphysical cupola that once enfolded mankind has disappeared, and man is left to rattle around in an infinite universe. Thus he seeks all the more to fill in his immediate, his physical environment with things.”
Leo Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy And Phenomenological Research: A Quarterly Journal (1942)
The catalog of their furniture when Dad retired was only the first of more elaborate catalogs to follow. They assembled alphabetical lists of all of their paperback mysteries, put together indexed lists of all their tapes and videotapes, took pictures of all their possessions, and finally produced a grand museum-style catalog of all that they owned: curios, souvenirs, knick knacks, framed photos, paintings—each now has a small label on the bottom with a number neatly printed in my father’s hand, corresponding to a number on a list filed in triplicate in my father’s army of file cabinets. The list includes the “provenance” of the object, where and when it was acquired— most often on a vacation—and in some cases its original monetary value.
It was hard to gauge my father’s tone when he observed to us in his later years, “This place is a museum.” He may have been impatient with the sheer volume of their possessions, and the number of things they had in storage. Maybe he was tired of the litany of anecdotes attached to each object and picture. Maybe he finally glimpsed the insanity of his curatorship, and the impossibility of extending his numbered catalog into infinity.
V
“If a museum is first of all a place of things, its two extremes are a graveyard and a department store, things entombed or up for sale, and its life naturally ghost life, meant for those who are more comfortable with ghosts, frightened by waking life but not by the past.”
Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces
It sometimes seems that the high points of my mother’s life were her two giant garage sales. She was often lethargic and bedridden, complaining of fatigue and poor health. For years, including most of my adolescence, the curtains were drawn, the house was dark and quiet, while she napped. “I just can’t seem to shake this cold,” she’d say, day after day, or “I don’t know why I’m so darn tired.” But her garage sales galvanized her into prolonged periods of excited activity and preparation.
She can describe in full and vivid detail every transaction, and often does. She’ll tell you how much people paid, what people said about their possessions, how much better their garage sales were than anybody else’s. “Everyone said so.” They prepared the moving sale marking their departure from New Jersey to Florida for months—washing, ironing, polishing, pricing, labeling. The sale itself went on for days, and was a time of high excitement for my mother. She is still aggrieved over customers who questioned a price or decided against buying a set of books or a lawn chair or her gold and white guest towels, which were surely over twenty years old at the time, though little used. She still basks in the glow of compliments, which she can repeat verbatim. And Mom insisted on a final, colossal garage sale before they moved from their condo in North Carolina to a nearby retirement complex that added so much to the stress level of their lives, when moving was already such an overwhelming task. All during the months when Dad’s cancer had started to eat away at him, unbeknownst to them both.
“Of course we can’t give the genealogy books to the Salvation Army. Do you know how much they cost? They’re going to be a bargain for someone at half price already, believe me. And we barely used those blue sheets. Two sets. They were for the blue bedroom in Florida. This sale is going to be a step above what you find down here in Asheville. People are going to see that we take care of our things. They’ll pay more for that.”
VI
“Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects … As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these things were not burned; instead of a bonfire, or purifying destruction of them, there was an auction, or increasing of them. The neighbors eagerly collected to view them, bought them all, and carefully transported them to their garrets and dust holes, to lie there till their estates are settled, when they will start again.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
At the elaborate estate sale of a friend who’d died, my mother circulated among tables of neatly priced wares in room after room, repeatedly pointing out every trip souvenir and piece of jewelry that she’d given the friend as a gift. Finally her friend’s daughter gave up in irritation, “I guess you’re not here to buy,” bundled all of them into a box, and returned them to my mother, who left well satisfied. That most of the jewelry and souvenirs were duplicates of things she had bought for herself didn’t matter. They hadn’t gone to strangers. She’d managed to both give them and keep them, thereby getting full value for her original purchases, and no one else had profited.
Death has frequently been marked by conflicts over possessions in our family. When my mother’s estranged father died, everything went to the woman he’d married after my grandmother’s death. And when she died, everything went to her relations. Mom raced up to New Hampshire on the eve of his widow’s funeral to barge into her house and retrieve three hand-painted pieces of china of her mother’s, the kind of dishes you see in the windows of every antique store, and she has hoarded them ever since. There were three plates, but she never once considered giving two of the plates to her two sisters. They called me at college, my Aunt Mary in tears, when they discovered that my mother had already been to New England to collect them. My aunts were embarrassed in front of the widow’s relatives.
The dishes have been in boxes for years, with numbered stickers on the bottom of each, part of the grand catalog of objects.
VII
“The souvenir is destined to be forgotten; its tragedy lies in the death of memory, the tragedy of all autobiography and the simultaneous erasure of the autograph.”
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Both of my aunts are dead now. The hand-painted dishes are still packed away. My mother reminds me frequently that I’m to take them after her death. Where will I put them? What memories will they embody? Surely they will only serve to remind me of the whole sorry episode—my mother’s greed, my aunts’ chagrin, their perpetual battles, my grandfather’s disinterest in his own daughters and grandchildren.
And of course there are all of the other objects overflowing every cabinet and closet and room in Mom’s apartment, many still in boxes piled in corners: hundreds of pictures in small frames (some of the frames “valuable,” Mom insists, but who can keep them straight), tweed pillows and wool throws from Ireland, their pewter coffee set (purely for show), their pewter chandelier (in storage for twenty years), my mother’s mink stole (in mothballs for even longer), trinkets and souvenirs from every trip they’ve ever taken, outdoor furniture from Florida that they’ve reupholstered at great expense to use in their living room (“we weren’t just going to get rid of it”), plastic leprechauns and angels and paper weights from Hallmark, shelves of vases (including the ones that come free with floral arrangements), leather handbags brittle with age, straw hats they wore on their trip to Bermuda fifty years ago (along with a bottle of pink and white sand from the beach), numerous paintings of barns in New England, hundreds of records and homemade tapes and videos, hundreds and hundreds of books (including shelves of coffee table books on Ireland—the kind you see on the bargain remainders table at Barnes and Noble).
Nothing is to be discarded, now or later. Nothing is to be given away. Only base ingratitude would keep us from treasuring these possessions after my mother’s death.
Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe this obsessive desire to bestow the objects of the past on family members represents a natural instinct to preserve the value of a life by “housing” memories in the future.
Yet how does one measure the value of a life? I can’t help but feel that instead of a living and loving relationship with their children and grandson, a real and actual present, my parents labeled and filed and cataloged photographs, paintings, books, and objects, creating a museum instead of a life. Preserving a past that was forgotten by everyone but themselves, in a present that didn’t exist, they could only define the future in terms of artifacts and their posterity. Perhaps they offered things, and worried so obsessively about where their furniture would end up, as a tardy expression of affection. Or as a substitute for affection. To me it feels more like an expression of self-love and posthumous control—a way to allay their anxiety about losing their past, and to ensure that it would be remembered by others.
VIII
“Because of its connection to biography and its place in constituting the notion of the individual life, the memento becomes emblematic of the worth of that life and of the self’s capacity to generate worthiness.”
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
It is the day after Dad’s funeral. Mom is still pressing heaps of possessions on me to take back to California, each apparently more urgent than the last.
“What about these place mats? We bought them when we were in Spain. They were quite expensive.”
I shake my head and she holds up a porcelain ashtray with shamrocks from Ireland and a set of four egg cups.
“We don’t smoke, Mom. We don’t eat soft-boiled eggs.”
“Well, I know, but you must have visitors. We had such a good time the day we bought these.” She’s insistent, pushing the cups and ashtray on me.
“They’re nice, but I don’t think we’d use them.”
The white formica table in the dining room is piled high with things I don’t have room for. More things are spilling out of my open suitcase. I don’t understand why we’re doing this now.
She wants me to take a set of poster-size reproductions of old Irish maps. “Your father went to a lot of trouble to get these.”
I shake my head.
“You said you wanted them. They cost a lot of money. We would never have bought them if we thought you wouldn’t be taking them.”
“I don’t remember saying I wanted them.”
She ignores my protests, and starts displaying the maps, one by one, unrolling them and spreading them out on the carpeted floor.
“Mom, I don’t know what I’d do with them. We don’t have anywhere to hang them.”
She shakes her head, eyes narrowed, lips pursed, and then says, with angry, biting emphasis:
“It would just break your father’s heart if he knew.”
I’m speechless, stunned. It is so palpably not what a caring mother would say to a daughter grieving her father’s death.
I leave the maps behind, but she’ll offer them to me again the next time I visit, and the next.
IX
“The passion for accumulation is upon us. We make ‘collections,’ we fill our rooms, our walls, our tables, our desks, with things, things, things. … an undigested mass of things, like the terminal moraine where a glacier dumps at length everything it has picked up during its progress through the lands.”
Anon., “The Contributor’s Club: The Tyranny of Things,” Atlantic Monthly (May 1906)
“You forgot the paperweight.” It’s my mother on the phone. Her voice is aggrieved. She launches right in without identifying herself or saying hello.
“What paperweight, Mom? I took everything you asked me to take.” I’m already tense, shoulders and neck growing rigid.
“The Beaver Dam paperweight. The one in the drawer that I showed you.”
“You didn’t show me, Mom,” I say, keeping my tone mild. “But I already have more paperweights than I need.”
“Well, your father and I were very fond of the condo in Beaver Dam.” Beaver Dam was the name of their old townhouse complex. The paperweight is probably a promotional item, a giveaway at Christmas or something.
“Mom, we only visited you in that condo a few times. It’s your memory, not mine. I don’t want the paperweight.” I feel weighted down enough.
“Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it then.” She heaves a dramatic sigh. Not for the first time I realize that no matter how many objects I lug home with me, she will never be satisfied. Her life will never be sufficiently memorialized and appreciated. Her children will always be ungrateful.
“I don’t know either, Mother.”
That night I dream I am buried in a pyramid of discarded objects, in a vast junkyard of smoking detritus that seems to stretch for miles. Periodically garbage trucks drive up to unload new avalanches of junk. Melted, charred, eternal as the pyramids, the refuse just won’t burn.
This piece was originally published in South Dakota Review and was listed as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. It has been reprinted here with permission of the author.
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