It’s December 26th, the day after Christmas. I made it through The Day. I made it through the first one without my mother here on earth. Not my mother, my father, or my grandmothers are still here, a fact that I only realised the other day. Christmas felt like my first one really alone as an adult. But I wasn’t alone, I have my family; my husband and my children. They are my family, the one I made on my own, by my own choices, my labor and my sometimes fortitude. Oh how lucky I am, I tell myself often. I tell myself often as to not forget that, as they say, what I have now I once hoped for, prayed for, and could only dream of. So as to not forget that life’s accomplishments are not simply professional, artistic, or financial but personal, too. Creating a family is not a given, nor is stability, safety, security. It should not just be another box to be ticked while striving in all other areas of life. It is, it can be, an accomplishment all on its own. For me at least, it was the goal, the only goal that ever really mattered to me and I am just now coming to terms with this. Perhaps by now you might understand why. If you have read a bit of the stories I’ve put down here and blindly shared with you. Whoever you are, reading these, you might understand why the only thing that I ever cared about was creating a life of my own with a family of my own, as to leave behind the one of my origin. My mother and father are now both gone. I no longer have the weight of their lives around my neck, pulling me down, making me heavy. I no longer have the confusion and panic cursing through my mind, and veins. Or do I? It’s a sad, sick irony that I still act on these body memories. I still have the stored histories and they too often play out as insecurities and assumptions and defences in my life today. They are still in me, these previous lives. Just like, even after two long summers of work, there is still junk in the shed at my mom’s house, just like there has always been in every house, in every shed. There are still boxes to go through, boxes and boxes of stuff. There are boxes of Christmas decorations that were never used, that my mother lovingly compiled and saved. Boxes that we couldn’t bring ourselves to go through. We’ll save those for another trip, I said to my sister, and tucked them away in the back.

We did a little tour of the junk together before she had to leave to go to work in late summer as I stayed on to do what I could with the things in the shed. We were determined to get rid of the papers, at least, as there were at least 30 years of boxes of papers. Unopened bills, magazine tear-ings, old New Yorkers, letters, notes, lists, dissertations. I think she may have even written a book. She never talked about anything, though, anything that she had done in her life. She just saved it, saved it for later. There were quotes she loved, and comic strips, sometime there would be a bundle in a little plastic bag, zipped up. They were like little collages, tucked away. I have saved a few because there was such a feeling of the essence of her in them. These little packets held some significance that was evident only to her., so much so that she preserved them in zipped up plastic pouches. The whole process was like an excavation of some strange tomb of objects and timestamps of her lifetime, of both her inner world and the outer world at large. It was all there, waiting to be pieced back together by some loving conservator, hoping that someone would finally come along to notice what she’d noticed and bring it to light.

All that was left, after her passing, was everything she’d ever thought worth saving – which was a lot – and me and my sister. We were the keepers, by default. No one else saw the boxes for what they were, besides junk, besides a problem to be dealt with, to be thrown away, finally, because she was no longer there to protest. We saw them for what they were – evidence. Evidence that she had lived, that she had been there, even when no one else saw her. Even when she was alone, engulfed in her clutter. Her whole life was there, in souvenirs, a word which means ‘memories’ in French. It was all there, in property deeds, receipts, patterns for crafts of all sorts. There were quotes that she’d copied from books, lists of radio programs she’d liked, events that she’d hoped to attend. It was all there. Left for us to piece together, if we choose to do so.

One of the funny things mom said in the days before she died, perhaps a little high on morphine, was Papers are great! To which I laughed whole heartedly, and told her she was right, and that I loved her. Towards the end of her life, when Camille and I came to visit and to help her get through the cancer treatments, we found out just how little our brother had done to help her. So we dove right in, to sort through the mess for her, once and for all, we’d hoped. Before that trip, I had a phone call with Mom to assess the situation. I told her not to be ashamed, or embarrassed, that I just wanted to see it ahead of time as to not be shocked when I arrived after the two day journey it would take to get to her from France. She showed me the house on a video call so that I could see. She answered questions about what my brother had done, and not done for her. There wasn’t much on the positive side. He had mostly left her, alone, in a house full of boxes and mess. She was at the point, finally, that she knew she couldn’t handle it alone, not anymore. Not with the cancers. – she had not one but two that sh’d have to fight. She couldn’t handle any of it, she could finally admit, and thank God we were coming, me and my sister. So we did, we came to help her, and she finally was fully ready to accept it. We went through boxes and boxes of papers and treasures and junk and keepsakes – sometimes all of these things in one box.

We couldn’t, or didn’t want to, just throw boxes away, as it seemed that in every box there was one thing worth keeping. At the point that we realised this, perhaps just days into the work, we decided to divide and conquer. We would divide the boxes into categories such as Christmas, papers, photos, kitchen, toys, tableware, keepsakes, crafts, yarn, books, and just-can’t-deal-with-this-right-now. Photos, books, and useful tablewares stayed inside. Papers were gone through until I thought I had all the financial information that we needed to understand her accounts. Toys stayed in the back room in hopes that the grandkids could one day soon come over to play. Crafts and yarns went into the tiny room/large, unfinished closet that we made up to be the craft room that she always wanted. Christmas – there was so much of it – was all set to the back right side of the storage shed, to be dealt with later. There was even a spot stacked high with boxes of only just cookie cutters.

At the end of that summer, we’d put everything that belonged in the house away, having made spots for things, finally. The rest was also away, in the shed, to be dealt with later. Later and later, it seemed. There was a huge section of just papers, boxes and boxes of papers that had proved too much for me and my sister. They would have taken too much time, but also mental and emotional energy. It is not easy to open these boxes and to see, to understand, just how bad off she was at the time they were made. These boxes were like time capsules from her life. We could see the times when she was really bad off, when she saved things that didn’t really make much sense. She’d filled countless of those clear page portfolios with pages from magazines on every which subject, with ads, with nonsense. Was it from when she was fighting a lot with my brother? Falling out of love with my father? Some of them had to be from after he died and none of us talked to her, angry at the part we all felt that she’d played in his death, by negligence. It was all there, from every era. All the evidence, of all the times, of her life.

It was after my father had died that she repacked her things once more. Some of them were still in boxes from when she moved out of the house that they’d owned in Corona, California. She packed her things this time to move out to Lakeland, Florida, to be by her mom and her sister, where she had by the grace of God found a teaching job. It was during this packing that she sent me my boxes to close out that chapter of our family life. She sent these boxes to my high-rise apartment in Chevy Chase, MD, just across the city line of DC. I sat them in a nook in my living room and hid them behind a Japanese paper screen. I slowly unpacked them, full of my personal effects but also Christmas ornaments and small antiques left behind by my Grandmother, for my father. I wondered how she’d chosen the things that she sent me. There was an army trunk that belonged to my Grandfather, with every voyage marked on it, including its last one, from Illinois to California, in my aunt’s pretty handwriting. I then repacked all of it again when I left the US behind, taking only what I could fit in three suitcases. These boxes that still sit in a storage in Maryland. These boxes of memories, boxes of life, boxes of death. There is even one box marked ‘Dad’. One of the movers joked – Hey, is your dad in here? – to which my sister and I answered, in unison, after exchanging a knowing look and a slightly sadistic smirk said, yes, to which he fell silent, first confused and then understanding. There are still his ashes left to scatter, left in the dark and quiet storage cube in Maryland. This spring my aunt, my mother’s sister, when speaking of the details of the service she was planning for my mother, said that she felt it wasn’t right that mom’s ashes had been waiting so long to be interred. It had been about three months. If she only knew about Dad, I thought. But she didn’t, only Camille and I knew. Well us and Dad, I would assume. I don’t think he’d really care though, to be honest, or I would have done something about it already. Maybe that is the final act that can end this chapter – to plan a family service to spread his ashes somewhere. I can’t even imagine it – mostly because I’d have to invite my brother. But maybe I wouldn’t have to, as I did as he’d asked me, I ‘d had made a little marble urn of Dad’s ashes, a little part of him, as my brother’d requested. It’s all, he’s all, in the same box, in storage.

This summer was the second round of going through the boxes and throwing things away, again just me and my sister. Mom’s sister, her daughter, her brother and his wife had all offered to help, an offer we only sometimes politely, but always declined. We knew it had to be just us, as by this point we were just trying to minimise any further trauma to both of us. We are the only ones who understand it all, we agreed and so we did what we could. She went through at least twenty boxes of papers before I got there, pulling out things of interest, of some kind of value, with some story, pieces of the puzzle that was Mom’s life. When I arrived in July with my children, she already gone through them and they sat under a tarp in the back garden, protected from the humidity and rain as to not weigh them down, as the cost at the dump is determined by the weight of the materials to be thrown out . At one point in my weeks of working on it all alone, I took off the tarp and started to look through these already examined boxes. With exhaustion, I stopped my self, slowed my frantic pace and looked at them as one insurmountable task. I resigned myself. I knew at that point that I had to trust my sister’s work, judgement, and wisdom. I put the tarp back over the pile of boxes of papers. I knew I had to let go of all of it, of all the chances to find something, the maybe missed clues that were in that overwhelming mound. I had to accept that I might never know certain parts of my mother’s story that were perhaps still hidden in that mountain of boxes filled with countless papers and whatever else. I was sad but I knew it was the only way. There was just too much left to do. So I covered it back up, and went on back into the shed, and went through every last one of the unopened boxes.

The very last one must have been one sent by my aunt to my father, after she cleared out their mother’s house, alone. In this box were some postcards, a few photos, but below all of that there were letters, letters from and old high school girlfriend mostly, and a couple other of Dad’s friends. They were written in a language, and a manner, and with an innocence that was so long forgotten. It must have been his first real girlfriend, and her name was Susie, too. I wondered if when he met Mom, he thought of this first Susie, too. Maybe it made him think it was a sign, significant that she shared this name with his first love. From these letters, I could tell that they had known each other while living on a base, perhaps when they had lived in California. He had moved away, probably to Lebanon, Illinois, where my grandmother would much later run the print shop at the charming college there. I’d spend happy days there with her, in summer, walking freely on the campus, covered with a canopy of trees, or in the theater that was attached by a corridor to the print shop. I never strayed far, but felt a sense of simple freedom there, nonetheless. I heard stories of the big beautiful house that they’d lived in there while the kids were in high school there. Where my dad had played baseball and was offered a full scholarship for it. He excelled in school, too. He had so much promise then, I think. It was odd but comforting to read those letters, to imagine him, then. It was funny that that was the very last box that was opened, such a special one. It felt right, meant to be, reassuring and comforting. It was not time to throw those things away, either. No, they could stay a bit longer, be read by my sister and perhaps by me again, too. So I put the contents all back in the box, back on a pile. I looked around and thought wow, we’ve finally opened every last box. Finally, for this round at least, we were done.

A few days later, the workers came to take away all of the boxes we’d decided could go. It seemed almost too easy, as they loaded the truck. They took all of the rubbish and the random bits and pieces first. Then they uncovered the pile, taking off the tarp, and using a dolly, took the boxes away four at a time. I saw that great collection of papers finally disappear. I thought again that no matter what I might have found in those boxes, I would never fully know her, or understand her. Perhaps this was to reassure my self or perhaps it was just to really say goodbye to any remaining sense of possibility. I knew that what I had kept would have to be enough. To have had kept more would have risked my own sanity, would have kept me running in circles, obsessively digging through details just as she had obsessively saved them, and I just wasn’t willing to do that to my self, not anymore. I had kept enough, even too much, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to reconcile my memories with these remaining artefacts. There was not going to be any magic moment when it all made sense. It would never all make sense. Maybe that is why she kept everything herself – in hopes that she could make it all make sense at some time. Perhaps she had hoped to one day stop time and step outside of herself and have a look back at all of the papers and things that she had saved to say oh, that’s why, that’s the reason, that’s the real important thing. But she never did, because it all piled up until none of it made any sense anymore, until it was all so completely insurmountable that she couldn’t do anything at all with it. So she just left it there, all of the remnants of an un-lived life, the plans, the activities, the interests. All of the quilts she never quilted and the scarves she never knitted. All of the books she never read with the answers that might have helped her to finally heal herself. All of them. All of them left for us to unpack for her, and to keep unpacking, until all we would have left are the artefacts of a life that she wished she had lived, in a house that we tried to make a home for her, finally, so that she could die knowing that her happiness and comfort did matter. She could die knowing that she deserved good things, and to be loved by us, her girls, safe and loved in a home of her own.

I don’t really know how to end this story, on this Boxing Day, the 26th of December. When I sat down to write, I didn’t think that this would be what I would write about. I did not intend to write about boxes, but of course that is what has come out. My whole life with my family of origin, I was surrounded by boxes, by mess, by an unsettled life and home. I think that finally, now, I am able to see that it is ok that I the thing that I wanted most in my adult life was to be free of these boxes and of everything that they represent. I have only recently come to realise that the thing I most cared about in my adult life was creating a real life for myself, in a real home, with a real family, with a husband that cared about having these things, too. For before this, with my original family, this never seemed to be important and it was something that I wanted so badly, and never got, from them. I wanted it not only for its materiality but for what it represents – safety, security, predictability, attention, care, respect, pride, worth, and love. I spent my entire adult life wanting to create this for myself and finally, I have. The fact that I was able to then do this for my mother, through our reconciliation, by caring for her and supporting her in the end of her life, and by helping her to have the home she always wanted, this, all of this, was perhaps the greatest gift and the greatest lesson of all.