I'm still evolving
Wednesday, 26 December 2018 07:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"I Hope He Was Warm When He Died. Perhaps He Remembered The Sun For A Minute."*
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Yesterday, I gave away three family heirlooms: a two-foot tall painted plaster statue of the Blessed Mother; an iridescent teal vase that once belonged to my gramma; and the crucifix my grampa held in his coffin. (I always want to say that he was buried with it, even though quite obviously he wasn’t buried with it, since I still have it.)
There’s no great symbolism to the number three here; that was the number of people I wanted to give things to, and one of them was weighing on my mind. So let’s start there.
At one time in the Donahue-Eiser family (my mother’s family), there were five Marys: my mother, both her grandmothers, and an aunt on each side.
I don’t know where the statue originated, though I think it was my mother’s to start because it’s not that old. It was a fixture in our house, and I always loved it. My mother being named Mary always seemed like a confluence to me, having been raised Catholic and to believe that the Blessed Mother was always watching out for me.
We are down to one Mary now, my cousin Molly. And I had decided a while ago I wanted to give her the statue. Of course, I didn’t think of it on Thanksgiving, when I was actually going to see her. And I couldn’t go for Christmas yesterday because they were eating too late. (With rare exceptions, I don’t drive in the dark.) So when my cousin Darby asked me for Christmas, I asked if I could come over earlier and leave some things.
The Blessed Mother has a new home.
So do the vase and the crucifix, though I’m not sure whose those homes are.
I left them with Darby and told her to let her father choose which one he wanted—his mother’s vase or his father’s crucifix. I’ve had the crucifix since Grampa died 56 years ago. I got the vase from my mother’s china cabinet.
This year has been about giving things away. One friend asked me if I was dying, because I kept giving people presents. (The answer is: well, yes, we all are, but I don’t think I’m going any faster than anyone else.) It gave me the fun of buying stuff and the joy of seeing how happy these things made my friends. I didn’t do Christmas; I just did it randomly throughout the year.
I feel the weight of all of this stuff on me: three houses, two of them full of things fraught with tangible memories of times and people I love. I started giving away Pat’s things shortly after she died, to friends who loved her. It made things easier. I didn’t have to carry the weight of her loss alone.
So I had an excellent Christmas: a nice talk with Darby, and the past handed off to other caretakers. And maybe by giving away the precious things will make it easier to get rid of things that are only around because of my stubborn, irrational optimism.
*Mary Katherine Blackwood
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Yesterday, I gave away three family heirlooms: a two-foot tall painted plaster statue of the Blessed Mother; an iridescent teal vase that once belonged to my gramma; and the crucifix my grampa held in his coffin. (I always want to say that he was buried with it, even though quite obviously he wasn’t buried with it, since I still have it.)
There’s no great symbolism to the number three here; that was the number of people I wanted to give things to, and one of them was weighing on my mind. So let’s start there.
At one time in the Donahue-Eiser family (my mother’s family), there were five Marys: my mother, both her grandmothers, and an aunt on each side.
I don’t know where the statue originated, though I think it was my mother’s to start because it’s not that old. It was a fixture in our house, and I always loved it. My mother being named Mary always seemed like a confluence to me, having been raised Catholic and to believe that the Blessed Mother was always watching out for me.
We are down to one Mary now, my cousin Molly. And I had decided a while ago I wanted to give her the statue. Of course, I didn’t think of it on Thanksgiving, when I was actually going to see her. And I couldn’t go for Christmas yesterday because they were eating too late. (With rare exceptions, I don’t drive in the dark.) So when my cousin Darby asked me for Christmas, I asked if I could come over earlier and leave some things.
The Blessed Mother has a new home.
So do the vase and the crucifix, though I’m not sure whose those homes are.
I left them with Darby and told her to let her father choose which one he wanted—his mother’s vase or his father’s crucifix. I’ve had the crucifix since Grampa died 56 years ago. I got the vase from my mother’s china cabinet.
This year has been about giving things away. One friend asked me if I was dying, because I kept giving people presents. (The answer is: well, yes, we all are, but I don’t think I’m going any faster than anyone else.) It gave me the fun of buying stuff and the joy of seeing how happy these things made my friends. I didn’t do Christmas; I just did it randomly throughout the year.
I feel the weight of all of this stuff on me: three houses, two of them full of things fraught with tangible memories of times and people I love. I started giving away Pat’s things shortly after she died, to friends who loved her. It made things easier. I didn’t have to carry the weight of her loss alone.
So I had an excellent Christmas: a nice talk with Darby, and the past handed off to other caretakers. And maybe by giving away the precious things will make it easier to get rid of things that are only around because of my stubborn, irrational optimism.
*Mary Katherine Blackwood