Unsplash
What Is Left
A bobby pin. A torn program of Rigoletto from The Metropolitan Opera from 1976. A prayer shawl from my brother’s bar mitzvah. Jewelry in a tangled mess. Necklaces intertwined with other necklaces, gold chains in tangles. Loose pearls, fake or real, I can’t tell, fill an entire shoebox. A receipt from Fairway’s Market for six boxes of matzos. A silk scarf with red poppies. One leather glove. A bottle of olive oil coated with dust.
These are just some of the items that I discover cleaning my mother’s apartment. My father died more than twenty years ago so there was no need for a procedure I find almost surgical. This January, my mother left the world, after eight agonizing months of hospice. Her will to live was so strong, no matter what the pain.
I grew up in the apartment, so it’s particularly difficult for me to find objects, papers, and clothes deeply hidden in the recesses of closets. An old Halloween costume of Cinderella I wore when I was nine. My report card from 8th grade with my teacher reprimanding me that I pay more attention to the boys in my class than the algebra equations on the board. A story I wrote when in first grade about a princess imprisoned in a castle. Essays from my English literature classes, Bartleby the Scrivener, Clarissa and The Great Gatsby.
After I left for college, my parents decided to make my bedroom my father’s office. I arrived home after freshman year to find my once pink-and-white bedroom with its canopy bed was gone. My parents hadn’t felt the need to tell me. “We thought once you were in college, you wouldn’t care. You didn’t want to move back home, did you?” my mother asked, looking away from me. I never knew what happened to my records or posters, or even some articles of clothing. I knew I had a leather jacket from an ex-boyfriend my mother despised that was now missing. Outraged, I asked them how they could do this to me? It seems this was the family tradition. When my father went to college, his parents converted his room into a library. My mother’s parents moved to Florida as soon as she was married and “got rid of everything!” Sentimentality was not part of their lives.
My brother found my mother’s diary from when she was a teenager. He read a few pages and gave it to me, claiming it made him uncomfortable. In tiny purple letters, my mother crammed the pages professing her deep love for an older girl named Lillian. My mother attended an all-girls school, so I know these crushes were common, but her passion borders on the obsessive. Whenever Lillian ignored my mother, my mother left school sobbing and locked herself in her bedroom. If Lillian was nice to her, my mother wrote that she is the happiest girl in the world. Each page details Lillian’s every moment, her clothes, her hairstyle, what she ate for lunch, who she sat next to in the cafeteria, every girl she spoke to who was not my mother. “I love Lilian so much, I can’t breathe” is as frequent as “I hate Lillian so much that I can’t breathe.” So much passion! Page after page detailing everything about Lillian from her starring role in the school play of Romeo and Juliet (my mother hated the girl who played Romeo, of course) to the day Lillian, to my mother’s shock, cut her waist-long hair in a bob. The diary is exhausting to read, and it makes me feel too intrusive. Surely my mother didn’t expect anyone to read this journal. But why did she keep it for so many decades? The emotion is so vibrant that the journal seems to almost tremble in my hands. My mother threw out my letters from sleepaway camp but she saved her journal, hidden in the middle shelf of the closet, a black leather-bound notebook with her name inscribed in gold letters.
More bits. A sterling silver spoon so small that it could belong only to a baby. A Broadway ticket to “Hello Dolly” starring Carol Channing. A postcard from Jamaica from The Tower Isle Hotel in Montego Bay with a signed message, “Met a shark here yesterday. Love, Ricardo.”
Who is Ricardo? I will never know. I can’t fit all the pieces of my mother’s life together like a jigsaw puzzle.
Massive garbage bags and boxes are brought in. My brother is in a hurry to clear out everything. An entire set of Encyclopedias are thrown in the bin. I remember how much I loved looking at these books, reading about distant places like Tunisia or the life of Emily Dickinson. The tossing of these volumes, which I know are now obsolete, hurts me more to see abandoned than almost any other item.
My mother’s apartment is empty now, and the real estate broker has staged it in a way that makes me feel I am in someone else’s apartment. Modern lighting fixtures, black and white photographs of cool-looking young people, chairs with curious triangular seats, and probably what would be the worst insult for my mother, a faux-fur blanket on the bed. “How tacky,” she would say, but the real estate agent thinks it’s modern. The office has been turned to a bedroom again, but with two twin beds, hopefully to encourage parents with the idea that there is more than enough room for their children. All my mother’s furniture has been donated to Habitat to Humanity, her clothes to women’s shelters and thrift shops.
I have an uneasy sense of disassociation as I wander from staged room to staged room. The only item of furniture the real estate agent saved was the massive mahogany dining room table, which used to host twenty-five of my relatives at Thanksgiving. The real estate agent has also left our menorah on a shelf in the kitchen. Although my mother was not religious, I take it out and place it on a table. No antisemites in my home.
So, I depart my parents’ apartment, waiting for the next couple to move in and start a family. When they leave, decades later, when I am not here anymore, what will they save? What will they discard?
Finally, what my mother left was herself. She chose cremation. She rests in an urn I bought for her from the Sydney Opera House, a place she longed to go and finally visited 20 years ago. Right now, the urn sits next to the window near my piano. My mother was an opera singer, and she would be happy to be so close to music. The urn is blue, silver and gold. When the sun from the window shines on it, the urn is turned into something magical, like a genie’s lamp. In this light, my mother, whole once more, rises again. I see her by my beloved piano, singing her favorite Mozart aria, her lovely voice that will never leave.
