Faded Photographs...and Other Traces

"Memories light the corners of my mind...
Misty, watercolored memories of the way we were."

I don't believe in an afterlife in heaven or hell. I think you only last in the hearts and minds of the people who remember you, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the stuff we loved and touched and cherished contains a part of us that lives on beyond the memory of mortals.

I have kept tons of stuff from my parents and theirs and even of great-grandparents I never knew. Only some of them actually constitute treasured memories, and yet...it's hard to let that stuff go. Why?

I'm wrangling with these questions because of all the stuff. (Yes, I love and believe George Carlin's ramblings about stuff!) I love the stuff because it triggers memories and because it belonged to family and loved ones. But I don't need them to remember the person, and much of it has become a sort of psychic burden. Why is it so hard to let things go?

My friend Chris recently and admirably let stuff go with a vengeance. And she was an only child whose parents both died within six weeks of each other. She knows her extended family well, and still she has let stuff go. I'm in awe.

I'm actually dismayed at what I don't know and will never know about my family history. I didn't ask in time. I didn't care in time. So why does it matter now?

James Hillman, in his book The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, says:

"[Our] uniqueness is reflected in the stuff left on the dresser, the reading glasses on the nightstand, the trivial accumulations in the desk drawer that no one knows what to do with but are handed down as 'valuables.' Useless irrelevancies, yet now imbued with the specialness of art objects. Does the irreplaceable soul of the deceased pass into these ordinary bits of matter?...

"Is our image located only in the memory of those who remember us? Or does character remain in the objects collected, the tools used, the places inhabited. Perhaps history lives in the world's memory beyond human rememberings."

He wonders if we project onto the objects or if the objects reach out to us. Has the departure of these things' living companions transferred to the objects some of the person's former life?

He goes on..."Can a person become an epiphany? Can we entertain the idea that all along, our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation. Can we imagine that at the essence of human being in an insistence upon being witnessed -- by others, by gods, by the cosmos itself -- and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display? The image will out, and the last years [of life] put the final finish to the image.

"We are left as traces...lasting no longer than a little melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts."

Perhaps this idea is reflected in the value of provenance when people sell old stuff.

In which case, no damage is done by letting all that stuff go.