It's been said that when an older person dies it's like burning a library. Sadly, I learned the truth in these words as I was going through my mother’s belongings a few weeks after her death. The wealth I found was not in stocks, bonds, or bankbooks. No. The real wealth was in her cedar chest, a locker of polished blond wood on gorgeous glass casters that rested at the foot of her bed.
This chest was now scratched and dented from years of use and countless moves, but it had always held special meaning for me because it had been my favorite hideout when playing hide-and-seek as a child. This day as an adult I finally realized the real treasure the chest had safely held for so many years: bundle after bundle of cards, letters, and photos. Beneath all this in a box of its own I found Granny’s Bible, its loose, yellowed pages and broken spine held together with a delicate loop of red ribbon.
I found that other concerns of my life mattered not until I had taken the time to look through it all, an undertaking that took days but one that provided delight and occasional surprise with each page I turned. And even though it’s been over two decades since Mom’s passing, there are still times when I pull a footstool up to her cedar chest and look through it all again. My pleasure in doing so never wanes, but, unfortunately, each time I revisit this cache of memories I depart with the same confused feeling as having just read a book with missing pages.
You see only a small portion of the items in Mom’s cedar chest held full meaning for me. These items, of course, were things that related to the years after my birth. And while I knew the other items most certainly held special meaning for Mom, she had failed to include any writing with them that would have made these items meaningful to someone else. Yes, I wanted more. I wanted to know all about the ones mentioned in the cards and letters and of those who were smiling back at me from the photos. Who were these people and what part or place had they held in Mom’s life?
Mom had saved a few of Granny’s things but they, too, offered only a glimpse of her life and times. The richest piece of Granny’s writing was a short journal she had kept as a young woman. One part chronicled her family’s move from Kentucky to Florida in 1889, a three-month trip in a wagon pulled by a pair of mules named Horace and Abigail. Again, I was left wanting more.
This experience with my mother’s lack of writing was not the one that led me to be a writer, but it was the one that caused me to look through my personal horde of cards, letters, and photos with the purpose of not repeating Mom’s mistake. I invite each of you reading this to do the same. Here’s why.
Our coming into this world is accompanied by only one certainty--the certainty of our leaving it one day. The good news is we do not have to allow our library to burn at our passing, not if we’ve taken the time to leave a bit of ourselves in our writing.
Bob Burdick is the author of The Margaret Ellen, Tread Not on Me, and Stories Along The Way, a short-story collection that won the Royal Palm Book Award.
