When the mother of one of my uncles died, about twenty years ago, he told me that he’d discovered that she’d put little tags on most of the furniture to tell each piece’s story: where it had come from, who it had belonged to, when it had been acquired.
“I mean, who cares?” he said to me. “It’s just stuff.”
Well, his mother cared, for one. I would have cared, too. “Stuff” carries stories with it, and I always love to hear them.
I remember this conversation especially well because my own Gramma’s funeral had been just a few days earlier, and I had been through her apartment with my father and my cousins, and I’d had a list of the things I wanted to take home with me. None of it was very big, and most of it wasn’t even very important: a letter opener, her peanut butter spreader. One of the small ceramic fish that decorated the bathroom walls in every place she’d lived since I’d known her. Things that said “Gramma” to me, and whispered her stories in my ear when nobody else was watching.
My uncle didn’t keep the tags when he passed the furniture along. And I don’t think he had any trouble doing it, either. I would have been a wreck.
I have trouble letting go of small things. Small objects, small hurts, small things that don’t serve me as well as they used to, or maybe never served me at all. I have such a deep fear of loss that I clutch whatever I can, whatever is small enough for me to control.
It’s interesting to me to go back through this blog and see that I have written about this before, nearly three years ago. It’s like I keep circling around the same topics, maybe getting a little closer to the heart of them each time. It feels like I’m getting closer. I hope I’m getting closer.
So today, I’m trying to let go of a few small things — though not the ceramic fish! The fish stays. One such item is a little stuffed pink monkey carrying a stuffed red heart and a tag that says SQUEEZE MY BELLY! I squeezed the belly. Nothing happened. I think the little music maker inside is broken. I’ve kept this little monkey for about 17 years now, since a team leader gave it to me one Valentine’s Day. It’s lived on my desk and collected dust. But the truth… The truth is I don’t really care about it all that much. I care that a person cared enough about me to give it to me, and that’s where my affection for the monkey ends.
We parted ways today, but not before I recorded its story. I took a picture and uploaded it to a private Instagram account that I keep for just this purpose. The stories that are attached to things matter, because the people who make them and buy them and give them do. But sometimes, I have to agree with my uncle — it is just stuff.
I’ve realized in the last few days that telling the stories of my life are helping me to let those go, as well. I’ve probably said this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again. So I’ve decided that I’m going to keep telling those stories here, and keep telling myself the stories of the objects that I’ve loved (or hated), too. It’s in telling our stories that we learn who we are.
I’d love to have you along for the telling. And I’d love to hear your stories, too.
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As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, “To everything there is a season,”.. some seasons are long, and others go by quickly… but each season is to be treasured for what it is, and forgotten for what it is not….