Every year Marc and I review our trust binder, records, and wills to ensure everything is in order in the inevitable event of, well, you know. It’s always in back of my mind as I acquire something new, or ponder giving something away, how important the thing is, or could be, after I’m gone.
Our kids don’t really want our stuff. Not to be crass, but in life or death, it’s the financial related concerns that come to the fore. Death can not only be expensive, but unnecessarily contentious; this is less a reflection on relationship than upon the difficult conditions young families face trying to survive and give one another all the newer things our culture says is vital to a life well-lived. You and I may question the “have to haves” as defined by a market-driven society, but that doesn’t nullify the fact that most today are scrambling to provide.
So once funeral costs and such are laid to rest (sorry) as far as the kids are concerned, and we are pretty certain that there will be little interest in our stuff, what can we leave?
About 2 months ago I set forth to explore collage-making, thinking it’d be a fun way to make “art” and satisfy a few curiosities my journals and writings don’t quite cover.
How-to book in hand, I gathered ephemera that was evocative of my life. How hard could this be?
Turns out, plenty. I’d confused the process of this art with the neatly ordered planned layouts associated with scrapbooking, where memories are lovingly displayed in story-book fashion. My life was no story book. It really was an amorphous blob with no obvious place to start. I’d sit with the photos and symbols of my life spread around me, overwhelmed, even awed at how a single lifetime holds more than it can express at any given point in time.
My head in my hands, it occurred to me: what is time anyway? I’m still the person this pile of collage material represents. Don’t abandon the kid now, get her out of there if you can!
I abandoned all plans and committed only to the first image. I didn’t start at birth, which seemed more logical. I was drawn more to my four-year-old self, when I was just so confused. At that age I had a brother and twin sisters, a mother who sought solace in lonely drinking and a father who kept her always waiting – expectant in all ways possible. Busy and too tired to fight.
I have subtitled this first piece “I don’t know how to smile about life right now.” That title comes from my kindergarten photo a bit later, when my mother berates me for the stupid half-grin I mustered for the photographer who told me I looked too serious. “Don’t you even know how to smile?” Mom asked. I’m sure that photo will come up in a future work of art. So there, Mother.
To all my friends doing scrapbooking and collage work: my hat’s off to you. I never imagined how difficult it could be to have an idea while simultaneously allowing the process to unfold to create a thing like this. Memories arise. Images and symbols emerge from past life to current, expressing something unutterably true. But what to choose?
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Bonus for those doing collage work, or who want to try it: Here’s some meaning behind the elements of the work.
-Via Negativa- This theological term resonates for me in a few ways. Most simply it describes a way of knowing Divinity through understanding what it is not. I was a sensitive kid who felt life was big and confusing. In the beginning, I had so little. Still, life unfolded such that I could not lose faith, albeit one not neatly described.
-The bits of natural things- Just before the twins were born, at about four years old, I sat on our front step watching my mothers plant flowers.That’s what she told me she was doing, but I didn’t understand how that related to pretty flowers. She told me flowers were inside the seeds. I could not understand this either, but later, flowers did arrive. I do believe it was then that my child’s brain got the message that things can exist without being seen by us. See “via negative” above.
- A Penny – Grandma had my father take me to her house to stay as often as he was willing to make the drive, because, as she told me later, I’d been forced to grow up too fast. There she engaged me, making the mundane special. She had a crystal container with a lid that was filled with pennies. I was allowed to spread them out, count them, compare and stack them. As we laid out pennies, I’d ask questions. I remember one of them being, “Grandma, am I still a little girl?” She answered, “Yes, Linda, a six-year-old is still a little girl. “ The penny container is long gone, but I still have its lid.
-A Key – Grandma also had a lot of keys. I was allowed to play with the keys while she watched me learn to match them with doors to see which opened what door. Next time I visited, she’d see what I could remember, and as I grew, I was able to lock and unlock doors myself. A useful skill in the realm of the living and the dead.
-A Picture of a White Bird at Rest on a Dried Leaf- Grandma loved birds. She used to tell me that every morning, a bird told her how I was and what I was doing. I gladly believed her. She was magic, and this magic came from an unfortunate raised mole on her forehead. At the age of seven she gifted me with a stack of educational cards with birds on one side, their stories on the back. I memorized forty-two of them. I recently purchased that same vintage set from an Etsy seller, and my husband evaluated my bird knowledge. I remembered about six of them. I remembered which one was now extinct (The Great Auk) and which was supposed to be, but never became extinct – The California Condor. Finally, when Grandma arranged her own funeral, she insisted on that poem that contains the words, “I am the swift uplifting rush of birds in flight…” Bird life matters, though I am no expert.
-The Horse – my grandfather had been a proud country boy whose family raised horses in Scotland long ago. He had an impressive collection of horse statues that I well remember. Part of Grandma’s home. No doubt a harbinger of my post-retirement interests because we bear history in our bones, according to Jiddu Krishnamurti.
-The Dried Heart-Shaped Leaf – this modern acquisition is from last fall. I was part of a huge entourage of Firefighters paying respects to a young firefighter who was dying. Numerous gigs lined the street where he lived, and to our surprise, he was waiting for us standing upright on his lawn. After I hugged him, I turned away and looked down. There was this beautiful leaf in the shape of a heart; it was greener when I found it but it’s still, I don’t know, so much. It seemed to belong somewhere in the first formal art-story of my own beginning.
I can’t help but think of verses found in the apocryphal gospel of Thomas, where the disciples ask Rabbi Jesus to tell them how their end will be. Jesus wonders why they ask about their ending when they know nothing of their own beginning?
Wherever you stand on the Messianic belief scale that’s a fantastic response.