An Inexact Science

It’s an inexact science, this sorting through my mother’s stuff, trying to decide, or to feel, what to keep and what to let go. Here’s a box full of almost nothing but greeting cards. Some have photos inside, and some of the photos feature my mother. Those I’ll keep, of course. What about the cards that held them? Cards are manufactured things, but they all have personal greetings, some long and heartfelt, others seemingly perfunctory. And some are more than 50 years old. I’ve been around archivists enough to know that paper ephemera say something meaningful about the material culture of our time to scholars and historians, so the old ones, I’ll keep—but if kept long enough, they will all one day be old.

What to do with all those signed cards? How many Christmas cards over how many years are sufficient for me to memorialize that my mother lived through many Christmases, and shared the joy of each with her friends and family? Is the measure of any one card’s value how much the sender meant to my mother, or to me? If there are many cards from a given party, does any one of their cards have lesser value than a card signed by someone who only sent her a card once in her life, or more? What about the card she sent to her friend of over 80 years that was returned to her, because the friend’s son had her transferred to another care facility and failed to notify his mother’s gal pals of her whereabouts? That returned card is in there too, and tells a story that was decades in the making and ended sadly, with neither friend knowing what eventually became of the other. How can I simply trash it?

I sift and I sort, saving some and deciding some will go into the recycling, with a silent affirmation that they will no doubt be turned into more greeting cards that someone in the future will send, receive and cherish. I encourage myself to get rid of as many as possible, because, after all, they are only greeting cards. Some I can’t yet jettison. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps in time the energy I feel as I hold and read them will lessen, and they too will have their substance sent back into the moving stream of sentiments that is the recycled greeting card industry, or be turned into wonderful, life-changing books, or common everyday printer paper. I can’t say why I choose to keep some and let go of others. Every one that I let go of lightens the burden of stuff, but shrinks the evidence of my mother’s participation in the rituals of day to day life. It’s an inexact science, this sorting through my mother’s stuff.