Tossing Treasures

I’ve been through a first round of sorting most of my old photographs now, and I’ve thrown out a lot of them. The remainder are mostly grouped by year. I am thankful for my daughter’s efforts in the late 1990s to sort the photos we had then, and I am thankful that at some point after then, I wrote the year on many packets of prints. Still, I have a stack of snapshots which I can only vaguely place in time.

I’ve also moved on to other downsizing projects to clean out our basement. Sorting financial documents is relatively easy—I decide which categories documents to keep, and toss everything else. (December broker statements, yes; every other month can go. Tax returns and supporting documents in recent years, yes; most other household records, no.)

Though I can handle the documents easily enough, I find dealing with mementos very difficult. I’ve had to throw out many things that brought me joy to remember (using Marie Kondo’s terminology). Other items brought bittersweet memories evoking transitions in my life, but felt worthy of remembering.

I’ve written about some of my mementoes in earlier blog posts:

• Sewing Doll and her fabric scraps that I played with as a child at Nanny Winnie’s house
• My mother’s last doll and my first doll

I threw these away. I kept pictures of them, but I no longer have the items themselves.

I also found things I didn’t know I still had:

• My wedding veil (the dress went in the last purge)
• The hat my mother wore every day in her last year—she didn’t feel dressed without it
• Silhouettes of my brother and me, taken when we were in kindergarten and second grade, respectively.

I’ll pause here for the story of the silhouettes. My brother’s kindergarten teacher made silhouettes of every student in her class. I think they were meant to be Mother’s Day gifts from the children to their mothers. My mother was so taken with my brother’s silhouette that she asked his teacher to make one of me. Which the teacher obligingly did.

These two silhouettes hung in my parents’ house in the dining room for several years. Over time, as two more children were added to the family, Mother must have decided the silhouettes were no longer suitable representations of the family. She hung framed school photographs of all four of us instead—reaching from my high-school senior picture down to my youngest brother’s kindergarten picture.

I didn’t remember that I kept the silhouettes after my parents died until I found them during my current downsizing efforts. I also have the framed photographs that replaced them of myself and the brother right behind me; I gave the younger kids’ photos to them when we cleaned out our parents’ house.

But last week I threw out the silhouettes, and now they exist only in a photographic image. I will toss the framed photos of my brother and me as soon as I dig them out of the frames; the frames will go to a thrift store for someone else to use.

There have been a few things that I haven’t been able to toss (yet). Somehow, it seems wrong to throw out Bibles and the prayer book that my mother carried during her wedding—a gift from my father. But I wonder how much longer I should keep them, or whether they, too should be passed along to a thrift shop for someone else to use.

I find these artifacts of past lives, of people loved and now gone, hard to deal with. It seems something of each of us should survive for posterity, and I wonder what of my parents and grandparents should survive.

Ecclesiastes 3:6 says there is a time to keep and a time to throw away. But I hate being the one to decide the time for each item.

Yet, if not me, then who? Because after me, no one will remember. No one else alive cares about the silhouettes except me. No one except me cares about the prayer book either. It is my sensitivity to tradition and sentiment that now determines what gets kept and what gets tossed. But who is to say that I am right?

When have you had to decide what to keep and what to throw out?