Spoils for Our Elders

An acquaintance and fellow blogger down in Santa Fe, New Mexico, posted a story the other day about age, mortality and the shedding of belongings. It seems that an 80-year-old friend of the blogger had had a mild heart attack, and that this brush with mortality had loosened his hold on his belongings. A box of treasured opera CD’s arrived by mail to the blogger, a gift that seemed to offer some kind of continuity to the giver. The puzzling part was that the blogger himself is 85-years-old and had several years ago suffered some very serious cardiac problems. Now, the 85-year-old has even more of things he needs to get rid of, while the 80-year-old has somewhat fewer.

I think once one hits one’s 70’s, the awareness of how many things one has and the question of what is eventually going to happen to the more treasured of those things (not IF but WHEN one dies) presses more quite sharply. Because I’ve moved around so much, all my life, I have (happily, I think) ended up with nothing from my ancestral life other than a couple of photo albums, and my mother’s christening dress. When I lived in New England, I was amazed at all the houses that were chock full of ancestral belongings. What a weight of the past was there. And, I suppose, the refusal to have that ‘weight of the past’ is much of what the western U.S. has always stood for.

Earlier this year, I sent a box of doll furniture that I made in the 1970’s to a granddaughter, but other than that, I haven’t actually done anything to start this needed (or perhaps unneeded?) dispersal of treasured things. Treasured by me, of course, but not necessarily treasured by anyone who is on the recipient end. Mostly, at the moment, I’m focusing on the ‘finishing unfinished things’ part of the spectrum. Knitting includes unfinished pairs of sox, hats, shawls, sweaters; quilting includes blocks that haven’t yet been made into quilt tops, quilt tops that haven’t yet been made into finished quilts, and no end of pieces in various stages that would someday be an art quilt/wall quilt if I refined my ideas about them sufficiently to progress to that stage. Lots of embroidery work also sitting around in a nearly finished stage.

Only yesterday, though, I actually finished the quilting on a ‘cathedral windows’ quilt that I started 25 years ago. I began that quilt so long ago that I no longer even know how that traditional pattern is made. It’s a kind of origami folding technique: I look at the finished work and, except for the fact that I recognize the main fabric was from a dress that I once wore, I wouldn’t know that I was the one who had made it. So how treasured is that? Well, at least it is a brand-new quilt that is simultaneously and instantly a vintage quilt.

Perhaps the dispersing can be put off until the finishing is done. And then, well, maybe I could start shipping the treasured and finished objects around to friends who are older than I am. If everybody disperses upward, at least we will have avoided burdening the future with our past. But those centenarians are going to have to get much bigger houses in which to store everything.