Memories, Mementos and Inheritance
In this season of loss and remembrance, so many people are sharing stories of when they last gathered with loved ones, traveled or felt a freedom in connection. More poignantly, there is story after story of a family member mourned without a chance to gather at a memorial service or to whisper a final goodbye. We struggle to publicly honor the memory of those who have passed away and to communicate to the world that every single death is a fully significant one.
While the scale of the pandemic disaster is unprecedented in our era, personal bereavement is a well known constant in almost every lifetime. I have found that each new death of a family member brings up the grief of earlier deaths. They accumulate and become a sort of collective group on the other side of this reality. I even dream about them in a kind of family reunion—my brothers and dad and perhaps an aunt or uncle, hanging around a dinner table and exchanging opinions on all sort of matters.
Two more were added to this membership in the past couple of months—my dear aunts, both nuns and the last of my mother’s siblings. They each had live-streamed funerals that we all watched in our respective homes. Eulogies and prayer cards came in the mail as keepsakes from those rituals; times, dates and narratives of long lives lived in loving service to God and the world. Perhaps the next generation will remember them in this way.
A different sort of memento came in the mail a few days ago, one that surprised me and brought a deep feeling of kinship. My eldest aunt had few possessions, and most of them were distributed to my mother and my aunt’s goddaughter. A small package had been prepared for me. It contained a metal comb, a pewter butterfly pin in a satin pouch, a copy of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and a plastic bookmark featuring Snoopy surrounded by butterflies and declaring joyfully, “Butterflies like me!” The enclosed card said that my aunt always liked this particular—and quite unadorned—comb. Maybe it had been from a missionary journey? The satin pouch may have been from Korea. We both liked the author Annie Dillard. And Snoopy? What a great way to view our place in a world full of beautiful delights. Metamorphosis is perhaps the message of the pin, or maybe just a promise for a continuing relationship through another realm.
These little things were described by the sender as a few mementos. But to me they speak of a deeper treasure, of an inheritance. A memento is something like a souvenir—an inanimate object that reminds one of another place, time or person. It comes from the Latin verb “to remember.” And that’s fitting in this case. Memento Mori, meaning “remember that you must die,” is a somber inscription on many a Puritan tombstone.
But these objects, though inanimate, spoke of the practices of living that my aunt inhabited. Combing one’s hair, fastening a pin, reading a book, laughing at a joke—these are earthy flesh-filled expressions of being present in the everyday of life. It doesn’t represent every facet of her existence—her love for poetry, her insight in situations requiring social renewal, her heart for students she’d taught across the world. Nothing termed religious made its way to me; nor did anything that reminded me of how much suffering she’d endured in life. But these keepsakes are enough.
The ordinariness of them allows me to smile back at my aunt’s enjoyment of Snoopy’s exuberance, to think of her when I read, to know that even though our lives were so different in so many ways, we share a particular place with each other. It is just as real as the particularity of the simple objects that were hers.
And that is what death threatens to take from us—a particularity of being in the world with another. Our memories are all about the past. What we yearn for is a continuation into the future, and not just in some eternal vision, but now, here, in distinct ways that make sense to who we are in relation to that loved one.
An inheritance speaks more to this sort of idea. We inherit all sorts of things—brown eyes, big bones, bad tempers. An inheritance, whether material, physical or spiritual can be for our good or for our ill, but it becomes a part of us as we take it for ourselves. Our identity and the identity of the giver are companions in the gift.
So it is with the objects from my aunt. And so it is with what I received from my father. I didn’t get any objects of value—not even mementos. But every time I play tennis, I feel him. He is telling me to move my feet, or bend my knees or just smiling widely as he watches me hit a winner. I love these meetings on the court. I pass these sessions on to my children, telling them about their grandfather as we rally a ball back and forth across a net. I imagine them playing with the next generation, sharing the family game.
Loud dinner table conversations that devolve into Babel-like exchanges, the initial topics long forgotten, conjure up my brothers. Eventually a champion debate coach and a lawyer, they cut their teeth on their younger siblings as they challenged our opinions and questioned our reasoning. Perhaps many would find this manifestation of their memory stressful, but for me it invites a laugh and an acknowledgement that we come from a fiercely verbal tribe who somehow still manage to admire, enjoy and miss each other.
I often wonder at my spiritual inheritance. It matters so much to me. On the one side, I have the Reformed Presbyterian minister grandfather I never knew, and his kind loving Southern widow, my Granny. I have a packet of his sermons and just inherited both of their Bibles. On the other side, I have the nuns, my Catholic mother and childhood religion, and all my favorite mystics and contemplatives. The jokes, the rituals, the culture of that one holy and apostolic church runs deep.
I don’t identify fully with either group, though I blend in easily enough with both. I once commented to the younger of my two aunts that I probably was a disappointment to both the Protestants and the Catholics, since I couldn’t quite claim either wholeheartedly. She turned, met my eyes, held my face, and said, “You’re no disappointment to God. You are just right.” That, dear aunt, is a fine inheritance that I hope to pass down to all I love.