Our Lives
A few years ago I pulled a storage bin out of the top shelf in my clothes closet. It held mementos of my past, dating from junior high and ending with my marriage announcement. Many cards—birthday, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, wedding congratulations. Cards from girlfriends, guy friends, family.
Many cards from my mother, some that broke my heart. How could I have forgotten the beautiful and brave words she wrote, which should have changed the dynamic of our fraught relationship? One card in particular made me bawl. A beautiful name card for “Lynn” the name I adopted when Madelaine seemed not to fit a young girl. (Lynn means “a cascade” and is Anglo-Saxon in origin.) I accepted the name at age ten, when we lived in Hawaii. I had twin friends named Denean and Denise who pulled Lynn from Madlynny and it stuck. Mom refused to accept it and insisted on the German version of Madlen. Now I find the card, sent to me in my early career days, after college graduation. I had forgotten of her acceptance.
In my mother’s Germanic cursive she wrote how proud she was of the woman I had become. And how I am still “improofing,” her spelling always a point of ridicule my nasty younger self used to roar with laughter about. Now I am humbled instead. Ashamed. My mother was self-taught in English. It’s easy to see how the German pronunciations would affect her spelling: the German V is pronounced like the English F. I should have been proud of her efforts. And felt the love she was sending.
Letters—yes we used to write letters, long ones even! I have bundles. Some from a secret admirer I never did meet (even after flowers and poetry were delivered to my cubicle at the Orlando Business Journal where I worked in ad sales); many from relatives in Germany; many from a roommate while I spent two months in Germany with my mother and sister tracking down our German past. I had not been there since I left at age seven, Mom for many years, Jackie never. This time forged relationships with my German peeps that are now the most priceless part of my life, my German heritage.
Pictures! Precious photos of friends and relatives that beg a hasty comparison and acceptance of the years that hurtled us all into “elder age.” Some are gone forever and the hasty snapshots are all that’s left. I stare at them and try to pull up a visual in my memory of the circumstances surrounding the snapshot.
I never thought of myself as overly nostalgic but now I think I am. Every afternoon I wander upstairs and sit my butt on the carpet to ferret out more memories. It’s telling that the bin sat in our office for the last three years without me digging into it until a few weeks ago. I was beset by fear that my memories would be altered, that good might become bad. Instead, the opposite happened. So much love emanates from these scraps of my past. Even the bad poetry I wrote is reassuring because I can sense my collegiate self, struggling to find meaning in the crucial aspects of life. Writing has always been the best way for me to come to terms with most anything.
In a new book titled The Release, Creativity and Freedom After the Writing is Done, the author writes this as her first sentence: Why do I write? Writing helps me listen, expands my self of what’s possible, transforms me from the inside out. Bingo. I have stacks of journals which contain long tirades offset with revelations that could only come about from introspection and tons of emotion. And drama. The perfect outlet. These will remain part of my past. And end up in a trash can soon after my demise, I’m sure. But I can’t bring myself to purge them now; it feels as if I will be giving up on the whole self to prepare for who I am moving forward. Who am I without my memories?
There are plenty of self-help books dealing with end of life purging, especially private things. But I think I want to die surrounded by these memories, the reminders of who I was and the lives I have had. Yes, I say lives because I see distinct eras. Portions of my life changed dramatically when an event sent me on a divergent path. And don’t we all feel the need to reconcile all of our selves to know who we are now?
As I walk through my house, I am surrounded by photos and mementos of my married life. I refuse to throw or put away reminders of this current era. Now I will add the past and wallow a bit in happiness and nostalgia. I wish the same for all of you.
