What am I to do with all the family photographs and memorabilia?
Once I am gone, who will share their stories, visit their graves, and honor the sacrifices that allowed me to sit in this space today to write this?
My mom, Doreen, loved to bake, almost as much as she loved to feed people with her extravagant dinner parties where she could show off her latest Jello salad creation.
However, nothing compared to Mom's Christmas cookies, her signature, sought-after treat!.
But nothing compared to her love of taking pictures!
The photo above was taken by my step-daughter Janice on Christmas Day, the last Christmas before her passing.
My wife, step-daughter, her husband, two great-grandsons, and I gathered for our newly invented Christmas cookie-decorating party with Doreen at the nursing home where she resided.
While Alzheimer's has now cruelly placed almost every other memory she once held out of conscious reach, which included who I am to her, it couldn't reach or touch mom's love of cooking.
Less than a year later, following an unfortunate serious fall, and due to the unexpected complications of broken hip surgery, a surgery necessitated if only to alleviate her pain and suffering.
Mom made it successfully through the surgery without incident, but soon after her health deteriorated rapidly and she passed six days later due to complications of surgery.
"Photographs and memories, Christmas cards you sent to me. All that I have are these to remember you by."
-Jim Croce
Now that the majority of her affairs have been taken care of since her death, I am looking at the last responsibility of being her executor where one daunting task remains:
What do I do with all her photographs and memorabilia?
My wife has her family history, with many sisters, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren to carry on the family knowledge.
Me, not so much.
My mom has been busy.
I can tell she took several courses in creating a vacation pictorial.
My god!
She has amassed many photos of her vacations, family gatherings, dance competitions, etc…
Adding to the workload, on top of her extensive album collections, are the photos of her parents and grandparents and the knowledge, memories, pictures, and stories my mom collected over the years, adding to the chaos.
Going through the forest to reach the mountain top befalls on my shoulders.
There are no grandkids that I could pass this herculean task onto.
Her daughter died when she was 21, and I, her son, made some fatal decisions during my younger years that cost me my chance at being a parent by marrying an alcoholic and abusive wife.
There are no brothers, ex-husbands, fathers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins to carry on the family traditions.
There is a rumor that a cousin who reportedly has two kids is hanging around somewhere. Family politics forbid me from discussing this further.
Family hatred between the Thaler brothers must be handed down generationally and honoured until death.
I met his kids once, many years ago, when his sister remarried and I had my first glimpse of my uncle since my sister died.
The meeting was cordial, then that was that.
The sons of our fathers must carry the shame, but I digress.
My mom remarried soon after my sister died, to a man with two pre-teen children and apparently couldn't wait a week for the body to settle.
Mom instantly gained a new family and was responsible for raising a step-daughter and stepson whom she helped raise from their early teens through adulthood.
Her family grew with the step-daughter's spitting out two kids that momentarily considered my mom their grandmother.
I wasn't part of that time frame in her life because I was causing problems in her new marriage and told to seek shelter elsewhere.
For the next twenty years, my relationship with my mom consisted of yearly birthday visits, dinners, and the usual celebrated holiday meals, so I knew where all those photos were heading.
When her second husband died, the step-daughter chose to cut all ties with my mom for whatever reason, which meant no more contact with her kids who were now 11 and 8 years old.
My mom would never admit it, but that hurt her significantly more than she let on.
My mom did try another marriage, this time to a widower with two grown kids and grandkids. Still, his son refused to even put one foot in the matrimonial home during the next 8 years, and they all disappeared as soon as my mom completed her stint as "nurse with a purse" and he died shortly after entering the hospital.
Another winner winner chicken dinner family.
What can I say, my mom loved men, and her Alzheimer's never slowed her down either! Once, the night nurse, giving her night medications, walked into my mom enjoying his company in the boodwa.
The nurse screamed, and my mom screamed…Bev and I checked our bingo cards. Nope, we never had that one.
Before the disease entirely took over, mom also wore the title of Great-Grandma to two of my step-daughters' children for a short spell, a role she cherished in her final years before the Alzheimer's took over and robbed her of many things.
All this history now teeters on an abrupt conclusion when I pass on, and I'm at a loss for what to do moving forward with all my mom's possessions, photos, documents, trinkets, artworks, china, furniture, etc., that threaten to overwhelm our cozy one-bedroom apartment.
But, back to the task at hand…
More concerning for me is who will take care of these things once I die?
There are no children, grandchildren, brothers or sisters, nieces or nephews, or even grandparents to pull out of my hat or argue over it with or to help determine the fate or knowledge of things.
I've reluctantly become aware I'm the soul judge and executioner of what stays or what goes.
I must first work out the one thing hanging over my head like an elephant.
Why?
My mother was the guardian of her family history and my dad's, a task she took seriously, judging by the current volume of material to consider.
The family history dating back generations lay hidden in her file cabinets,
where a slew of carefully preserved personal correspondence dating back to the 1800s.
Mom was also careful to keep detailed records of old wills and cemetery plot titles, pictures of my great-great-great grandparents from the turn of the century, and letters containing their handwriting.
Jesus H Christ… All these ancestors are now weighing heavily on my chest.
Where do I start?
How do I decide?
I was half assed looking through my mom's pictures when one particular photo caught my eye as a shiver rolled down my spine.
I stopped and closed my eyes.
I couldn't shake the feeling I was now one of the people captured in the display case that the students in the movie Dead Poets Society were pondering on. Still, this time I'm the observer looking out at the class, watching them watch me while I hear Mr. Keating whispering "Carpe Diem."
I silently remember the poem he recited next :
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will be dying.
— Robert Herrick
I open my eyes again, wondering what happens to all this history when the pictures remain but the stories surrounding them fade?
Each picture is reportedly worth a thousand words, but what value can those words add without the commentary surrounding it?
I know who they were, what they believed in, and what they stood for.
I stare at these memories immortalized in pictures, and can easily recall the memories the pictures evoke.
What will become of these remembrances once the commentary that brings them to life and the historical importance is lost forever?
Distracted with writing, I never noticed YouTube cueing up the following video. Although I can’t see the video because my writing screen takes up the laptop, I can hear the monologue.
“O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here — that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse.
What will your verse be?
— Robin Williams from The Dead Poets Society
Those words brought me to tears.
I think I’ll leave things here.
.