Left Behind

It is interesting (sad, confusing, I’m not sure what feelings it brings out in me) to me that our things outlive us. When we die, we are gone but leave behind a host of things from our lives. Physical things, ideas, and progeny are the basic things we leave behind. The groups overlap a bit, but fundamentally that’s it.

Physical Things

In Louisiana it was easy enough to pretend that my grandmother was still alive. Maybe I hadn’t spoken to her because I was too busy to call. Maybe my Christmas card had gotten lost because of the confusion brought on by one too many changes of address; the Post Office just couldn’t keep up. I still had the Christmas card that she had sent to me in early November (always so punctual!) a couple of months before she died. I read it frequently, pretending that I had just received it in the mail. It was full of grandmotherly advice and of course love scribed in her perfect schoolteacher cursive. There had been a few times before I left Idaho that that I hadn’t seen or spoken to my grandmother; I had neglected my granddaughterly duties for a weeks at a time, not visiting, calling, and for no particular reason at all. But I always knew how my grandmother was; someone had visited her almost everyday. Susan and my dad did so without fail. I was the one who was neglectful.

Now that I am home, I am smacked in the chest with the fact that she is gone. I no longer have the greater part of the United States to protect me from the fact. It is strange to drive by her house, noticing other people’s plants in her flowerbeds and different curtains hanging in the living room. There is also a new garage door, a much needed improvement, but the Grandma’s Garden plaque beneath the magnolia tree is missing, and they chopped the hell out of the snowball bush; I wonder if it even bloomed last spring? I spent so much time in that house; she lived there for over a decade. Birthday parties, cousins coming to visit, Christmases. I was no longer welcome there. What a peculiar feeling.

Belongings take on a life of their own. They are never really ours own, we simply get to use them for awhile. My grandma’s hard plastic flamingo pink Samsonite luggage is now mine. So is the diamond from her wedding band; she wore it on her left hand for fifty-three years, and now I wear it around my neck everyday. There are various other things of hers scattered around the house. I found her jewelry box in the garage when I was looking for sandpaper (the jewels are elsewhere). Her linens are mostly stored in the linen cabinet upstairs, as all of the women in our family have a problem with hording linens. Her fantastic coffee table made from acrylic with beautiful rocks, sliced in half and polished to a spectacular state is stored on its side in the rent-some-storage unit. It is crazy that my dad pays for a storage unit; they live on twenty acres. But, with my grandmother dying, my sister’s husband cheating on her, and my taking off for Louisiana, there simply wasn’t enough room for all of our stuff.

Photographs are an interesting thing in their own right. They are meant to be, literally, snapshots of a moment in time. They evoke memories; flattened, constrained glimpses of an instant. But sometimes they do more than that. There is a photograph of my grandmother where she is a young woman of about thirty. Her hair is perfect. She has on a black hat tilted as I am sure was the style. And her dress is stunning; it looks to be a cream colored satin with lovely black lace details highlighting her slim waist and ample chest. She has a matching handbag in beautiful black patent leather. You cannot see her shoes in the picture, but I imagine them to be either black, but hopefully red, patent leather platform pumps with a strap around the ankle. I have no idea where she was going in this picture. A date? Maybe just shopping; women did tend to dress better then.
As beautiful as she is in this photograph, that is not the reason I stare at it so frequently. I look at it often because I look just like her. While my grandmother was alive, I didn’t think I had the slightest resemblance to her; she was 4’11” on a good day, and I am nearly 6’, she was quiet heavy, and I am only slightly plump. I really didn’t see the resemblance then.

I first saw the photograph at her funeral. The funeral home had created a slide show from various pictures that my sister had dug out. This was one of them. A friend of my parents commented on the photograph, noting how much it looked like me. Same I don’t really want you to take my picture right now, but I know I look good smile that I sometimes get. Same stance. Same way of holding a handbag. Strange.

Of course photographs are things, things that we leave behind. I think about the graven image, stealing your soul belief that some cultures have. Photographs certainly don’t have a soul, but I can definitely see where different cultures have come up with the idea. How strange is it to see yourself exactly as you are, but on a piece of glossy paper? And think about how photography was in its infancy—the picture taker was under a dark cloth, and often a large flash, complete with sparks flying accompanied the picture taking. This certainly smacks of the devil, or at the very least, magic. It is easy to see where the belief came into play.

Now we can also leave behind moving pictures and voice recordings. How strange is it to see someone you once loved moving as if you were watching them walking across a park? And, you can listen to them talking as well. But it is not them. It never was them, it is only an image of them. Separating the image from the self is a trick. I understand the mechanics of it all, but sometimes I am still amazed that we can do such a thing. Where is the image making going to take us next? It is so strange to see a walking, talking image of someone you once loved; yet the image is not real.