When you dismantle someone’s life, you find yourself not only going through their papers and documents, but also, through your own emotions. These emotions can be triggered by something as simple as the greeting cards they may have kept for 70 years. Why would someone keep a lifetime of Christmas or Birthday cards? Perhaps they kept them because each hand written sentiment meant something. Many cards will be found in their original envelopes with photographs of friends and family members still inside. Some people wrote on the cards received, as if cataloging them in their minds and hearts.
You my find yourself distracted for several hours while you read through all the cards. You may or may not remember that you even sent the card. However, there is a haunting poignancy to seeing your own handwriting from decades past as you wrote to your Mom about your life and how much you loved her. You will quietly find yourself smiling as you gently open the yellowed pictures you made as a three year old. How touching that these primitive little boy or girl pictures were as precious to your Mom as any expensive art.
Many times you find these things in the homes of even the most difficult person. Maybe you thought you knew them. Maybe the view you had of this cantankerous grandmother or irritable grandfather was not quite accurate. Each of us has a mindset about the people in our lives. How surprising to realize that that difficult mother-in-law did cherish all the photographs you sent. Maybe she mellowed over the years. The challenge for the family members settling the estate of an elderly relative is sorting through all of the emotions that go with touching their things, and reading their written thoughts.
Adult children often discover that their parents carefully saved all the projects that their children made in school and all of the funny cards given on Mother’s day.
Many an adult son has asked himself, why his Dad was so difficult to read or understand. Why didn’t his Dad want to spend more time with him, or teach him more ‘manly’ things of the world? Some men feel sad that they never once heard their father say that he loved his son.
Often it is hard to think of rigid seeming parents as ever having been in love, yet many a granddaughter has only gotten to know her grandparents through the tenderly saved love letters, carefully tied with a blue ribbon and tucked neatly in a drawer. Who would have guessed that her grandfather could write such passionate letters from his lonely post in China during World War II? Imagine getting to know what their early marriage years were like from silly greeting cards.
What about the angry letters one spouse sent to another? Conversely, what a shattering thought to learn how deeply troubled your parent’s marriage was, right from the beginning. How will you feel? You may have many a bewildered moment as you realize that the falsely happy face they showed to the world did not reflect the empty feeling they harbored deep in their hearts.
This is exhausting work. You find that emotionally you can only do so much each day. It takes time to process the information you learn. It is also good to remember that there is residual energy left on every object your relative touched and you may sense their presence more strongly precisely because of this remaining energy.
Sometimes as a person aged, they were unable to maintain their residence as they once did. The quiet shabbiness of their dusty surroundings stands as humble testament to their steady decline. Maybe you wish you could have visited him or her more. Perhaps you wish this parent had been easier to get along with so you would have wanted to visit them instead of dreading each encounter with their cantankerous personality.
What about the feeling of despair you would feel as you encounter movies of your Mom or Dad before Alzheimer’s set in and destroyed the person you had always known? Often times the why of their lives remains unanswered. Is Alzheimer’s a retreat from the vicissitudes of day-to-day life? Perhaps you would have grieved their soul personality long before death claimed their mortal body.
If your family member committed suicide, you will come face to face, through letters, documents, books and often art, with the darknesses that haunted them literally to death. Perhaps in that moment you will find a way to forgive your loved one for leaving you to find peace in death. Once you understand that you could never have eased their emotional terrors, you may be able to forgive yourself for being unable to stop their tragic actions.
After you have finished the physical sorting, you may find that no matter how you grieve him or her, you will need many months to finish the emotional sorting out of your relationship. Mortal life is complicated and the tightly woven matrix of interpersonal relationships is often profoundly convoluted.
Emotional peace can be achieved through suspending judgment of your love one and yourself. Observe their life from a spectator’s vantage point and know that as you have dismantled this person’s life, you have simply learned a bit more about your own life and times.
No comments:
Post a Comment