Artifacts

I was reflecting on artifacts earlier, objects I have that evoke memories and feelings. I have several of these in my apartment; there were more a few months ago but I had to purge because things were out of control in here. But there are some that occupy space in here, because that’s my pattern, to hold on to reminders of meaningful moments, events, phases.

In my closet, I have two dresses that belonged to my mother. She left them when she lived here in 2005-2006, during those horrifyingly chaotic months following Hurricane Katrina. She was essentially homeless, because the house I grew up in, and in which she took so much pride, was uninhabitable. More than 8 feet of water had occupied the house for more than 10 days, destroying the memories of several lifetimes. Like me, she held on to what had been memorable for her, but the invading floodwaters had no sentimentality. Photos, records, sheet music, a piano, all mingled in the swirling waters coughed up by Lake Pontchartrain when the earthworks designed to keep the lake at bay failed. 

My mother had coveted those memories with a nearly violent force. I can still see the stacks of old photographs, some form my childhood, before I was old enough to speak. When I got my Easy Bake Oven, when I was pushed in a stroller down the sidewalk of some town. My great grandfather holding me as an infant. My aunt’s wedding, which I remember vaguely because she almost fainted during the ceremony since it was summer in Louisiana and she wore a dress that seemed nearly bullet proof.  My grandmother’s photo album of me, titled “Grandma’s Brag Book”. My parent’s wedding album; I remember a particular picture of them cutting the wedding cake, ,my father looking characteristically frustrated while my mother stared at the camera with a look I recognized instantly, a look that said, “I didn’t do anything!” Pictures of me and my cousins at picnics, at the park, all together as a small herd of children with the same last name. My father and his brother, who had identical beer bellies that earned them the nicknames Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. My father’s sister who was confined to a wheelchair from polio back in the 50s. It was the most normal my family had ever been, and the artifacts of that had been washed away by an hurricane that could have spared all of that were it not for politics, greed, and stupidity. 

My mother’s sister, my favorite aunt, had begged my mother many times to let her store all those memories at her house. She lived in a section of town that was more elevated, and storing the artifacts there would have mitigated the risk of destruction. My mother would not hear of it, and became hostile whenever the subject came up. My aunt stopped asking after a while. It never occurred to me to challenge my mother about such things; until the day she died I remained somewhat intimidated by her rage when she was challenged. So now I have only the memories, buried deep in the recesses of my mind, but they are mine. As I realized only recently, memories are quite possibly the only thing in this world that I can actually lay claim to entirely. My mother attempted to preserve those memories tangibly, but in the end she lost them all. 

The dresses she left here when she lived with me for more than a year would have nice for her funeral. It has taken me years to actually open the closet in which they are stored in my apartment, but I know they are there. One is red, and the other tan or ecru. One still has the sales tags on a sleeve. She planned to wear them the next time she came to visit, but she never did. After she chose to return to renovate her house and return to the life she knew, she found that nothing would ever be the way it had been before Katrina. She made the best of it, however, and was comfortable there for more than 10 years after the renovations were complete. And then another cataclysmic force descended, but that was an inside job that called dementia.

When I left her on the day she died, it would have been a great idea to have taken one of those dresses with me for her to be buried. But I was not of sound mind at that point, and denial is a powerful force. I had not accepted that i would not ever see her again, and that I had no reason to keep those dresses. I wound up buying new clothes for her after she died, and they were a horrible fit. She had lost a lot of weight so the sizes I remembered were no longer correct. The funeral home adjusted them, but all I could think was that she didn’t look quite right. She didn’t, because she was dead. Had she been wearing one of the dresses still in my closet, she wouldn’t have looked any better. The funeral home did a fine job, but she wasn’t right. She was dead.

Artifacts don’t bring back the past. They don’t make it any easier, I don’t think. Fingering old photographs from the 60s of me and my cousins, of me in a stroller, of me with an Easy Bake Oven doesn’t bring back the past. I remember the feelings, and maybe the photos make the feelings a little easier to retrieve but they are just prompts. I remember. I remember all those feelings, even if only in contrast to times after losing those people, that family, and life before it all fell apart. Life after my grandmother died, life after my parents divorced, life after I moved out of my mother’s house. I have always been able to remember just about everything, even when I didn’t want to remember any of it. That is a blessing and a curse, and I’m not sure pictures will change that.

So, having lost all those things makes me sad, mainly because I can’t show anyone else what my life looked like back then. What I looked like before I had jowls and before the light dimmed in my eyes, before the weight of grief etched lines in my face. But I remember. I will always remember, and I need to tell people that gas was 39.9 cents a gallon and we had a Ford Fairlane 500 that drove like a Howitzer tank. I need to tell people what I plowed through to be here, and how I think I somehow chose to be here from the beginning. Sometimes I believe that’s the only reason I am still here, because I was intentional about getting here in the first place. I’m beginning to think I am not done because I haven’t done what I came here to do. Then again, perhaps I’m simply grandiose and there’s nothing I came here to do, or I’ve already done it. Maybe that’s not how life works at all, but as long as there’s a maybe to it, I suppose I should ride this out until the end. I’m not hearing any singing at the moment, from fat ladies or anyone else, so on we go.