1.
On the second anniversary of my mother’s death, my aunt took the train down from New York to Baltimore to leave a stone on the grave. When she got there, she found dozens of rocks and shells amassed on the left side of the headstone, covering my mom’s first name and parts of the inscription—beautiful wife, sister, mother, grandmother, friend. The word Mother completely obscured.
My aunt sent the image out to my siblings and me with a note: “Marc must have put all the stones covering up her name, etc.” Marc, my former stepfather, likes to make his metaphors as literal as possible. His grief covering over others’ grief. The stones ask, what space is there for the loss that isn’t his? Whose experience matters more than mine?
My mother would’ve hated the garish absurdity of so many stones. The stones, like the inscription he chose, turns my mother, a woman who lived many lives before him, into mostly one thing: a beautiful wife. She would’ve rejected his epitaph, but she wasn’t one for confrontation, avoiding hard conversations at the end of her life that would’ve put her in conflict with my stepfather. From the words on the headstone to discussions about money or end of life care, silence or tacit agreement replaced directness; her own wishes mattered less than the desire to keep the peace. A lifelong avoidance of conflict. In darker moods I think: this is the price of biting your tongue until it bleeds.
To leave a stone on a gravestone is a centuries-old tradition in Judaism. We don’t do flowers—the dead don’t appreciate dying bouquets of roses and carnations—but it is custom to leave a found rock or pebble, a gesture that means this person is remembered. The act is physical. The act is living. One has to stop and bend over and pick up an object from the ground, tangible, solid, permanent, and carry it to the grave. In loss there’s so little one can do; much of the aftertime of grief is in the head: thinking of things you would say, memories that you try, against forgetting, to keep. The placing of the stone means you have a body. You are still alive.
There are other, more mystical interpretations of why people leave stones—to keep evil spirits or golem away or to ground the soul of the person who died. And since I’m a sucker for clever wordplay, the word in Hebrew for both pebble and bond is the same: tz’or. In a prayer for the dead, we ask that the dead are “bound up in the bond of life.” The stone acts as glue between us and the memory of the other person, a bond that transforms over time.
My stepfather’s obsessive nature in placing so many stones: an act of care and good intention becomes a form of suffocation. In the last months of her life, my mother described being overwhelmed at times by my stepfather’s love and need. “He’s driving me crazy,” she said once as she described the way in which acts of service become forms of control. I try to forgive him this—unimaginable pain to watch your partner suffer and not be able to do anything.
We don’t speak anymore. We never will, not in this lifetime. He comes from a family where that phrase “that person is dead to me” was often used. My stepfather, at a loss at who to blame for cancer, for the unfairness of it all, blames us, the children of my mother. Irrational, but also on-brand for him. A man who lives, for better and worse, by his feelings. Easier to cut out than confront the sorrow. Easier to live without than with.
2.
One year, and then another, and then another. My mother is still dead and Marc and I don’t have contact. I’m jealous of my stepfather’s ritual, the way he can drive to the cemetery and do something, anything, an act that says not gone. My own ritual is writing. Physical—each letter and word like those stones piled up over the gravestone, each letter an act of control. Proof of life. Setting the record straight. Or so I hope. But mostly the writing doesn’t feel like control. It feels angrier. Darker.
A story comes to mind, one Marc told as we were gathered for the last time in the house on Summerson Road. My mother had been dead for less than forty-eight hours. The rabbi wanted to talk about the order of the funeral service. He wanted to hear stories. Create a space to grieve. Marc hovered, pacing between rooms of the suburban ranch house my mother hated, refusing to sit down, before telling the story of the tree.
Beside the graveyard plots of his grandparents, there was an old tree, inconveniently growing in the spot his uncle wanted to be buried. And since the people who ran the cemetery wouldn’t take the tree down, the uncle instructed his kids and nephews to bring nails and a hammer each time they visited their grandparents’ graves. A ritual: to leave a stone on the grave and then drive a nail into the exposed roots of the oak. Slowly the accumulation of the nails killed the tree, and the uncle bought the plots where the tree had been. A great spot, my stepfather described it that morning. A great spot.
I have no idea what portions of that story are true. I can’t ask him for more details. But I remember, as he recounted the story that morning, feeling something akin to gratitude for the metaphor. A story about obsession and bullying, privilege and toxic masculinity. The uncle thought of the plot, covered by the tree, as his to take. And through sheer force, one rusty nail at a time, he and his family turned the idea into reality. I too, sometimes, like my metaphors very literal.
In one daydream, I imagine going back to the cemetery and cleaning my mother’s grave. I throw all the stones he has placed on the grave into one of the metal trashcans at the cemetery—the shell he probably got in Rehoboth Beach, the river stones taken from the shore of the Severn, the black stones from garden paths at Cylburn. An act of spite I’m sure would feel good in the moment but then, of course, I’d regret. And so, I imagine lining those stones around the edge of the gravestone, one by one, a border, so the word Mother, and her name, would be visible.
Or maybe, slowly, over time, I would carry away a rock, one by one. A worry stone in my pocket. Taking something away rather than leaving something behind. In this way, it might more closely mirror grief, or my sometimes experience of it anyway: time lessens, lifts—but also takes away. A taking back of a future you might have experienced together.
3.
The cordial glasses are beautiful. Clear green glass at the bowl and rim, they hold no more than an ounce or two. Long thin stems—orchid, crane—light catches the green and casts a small shadow on the shelf. Delicate and impractical, they are a form of inheritance from an older friend in her mid-seventies, who has no children of her own. Each time we visit Greer in Oakland, she sends us back with more of her grandmother’s glassware packed carefully in the small shoebox we shuttle back and forth. For Greer, a landscape architect for much of her life, precision matters—as do pragmatism and directness. Better to give things away while she is alive.
There is a term in Swedish for the process of slowly giving away possessions before you die. Döstädning—dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning”—despite its name is done before death, an act of preparation for the inevitable. The process of death cleaning is the process of these cocktail glasses wrapped in brown paper and lovingly tucked into a shoebox and carried home from Oakland. Each time we make a Last Word, glimmering chips of ice floating on the surface of the chartreuse, we toast to Greer. Ownership, at its best, is a kind of guardianship. We care for our things and then they are passed along to the people we love, who live with them for a time.
I missed the idea of death cleaning when it was, for a hot minute, part of the cultural zeitgeist: a bestselling book, The Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, and scores of articles describe the virtues of the practice. It feels faddish to read these now, a burst of self-help articles that often compare Swedish death cleaning with the Kondo method of clearing away the clutter of modern life. How to let go? How to live with less? How to be happy with what we have? How to prepare for absence?
This is the mantra of death cleaning: if your children or friends don’t want something of yours while you’re alive, why would they want it when you’re dead? There’s some truth to this. My grandmother’s Hefty garbage bags full of discount yarn, my father’s shelves of paperbacks bought at Canadian thrift stores, my wife’s grandfather’s collection of ten thousand salt and pepper shakers, rows and rows of porcelain pairs that an auctioneer came to see and offered nothing for. Her grandfather was heartbroken. We don’t want these. Not in life or death.
But the logic of “death cleaning,” that anticipatory giving away, doesn’t fully work, not simply because it asks those who are giving away to let go of what they have and perhaps still use. More, it demands confronting questions that some people might prefer unsaid. It is one hour, one object, closer to death. As the receiver of these living gifts, we don’t always know what we’ll want or how one object or another will cue up memory, good or bad. Some things are easy: this painting worth some money—I’d like that; this photograph that hung on the wall for years—I’ll keep that. But things surprise.
In one kind of afterlife, we are not our hours but our objects. Not our time but our things. My grandfather’s prayerbook from the war. The pocketknife of the man my mother dated for a time. My child will never meet their great-grandmother, but when we watch tv on the couch, we pull the blanket she made over our bodies. I tell my child the story of these blankets, knitted with yarn bought for cheap from the 3M factory near their house in Clifton, New Jersey. “Picassos”—my aunt calls them to describe the mismatched patches of color, a Cubist masterpiece on the cheap. And in that story, a history of our family unfurls: the soda fountain and candy store my grandfather ran with his brother-in-law, the chemical pollution and cancer clusters around their house, the bad jokes and clichés my grandmother loved, and the way that this blanket once belonged to my own mother, one of the few objects I have of hers.
“You make a world out of the things you buy,” writes Hua Hsu in his memoir Still Life. “Everything you pick up is a potential gateway, a tiny cosmetic change that might blossom into an entirely new you.” Thrifted shirt. Hip novel. Crystal champagne flutes. These objects signal an intent to the world of the person you are by your ownership—or the person you want to be. But we make a world too of the things we inherit. Less choice or control, but they allow us to be another kind of person. I am a person who owns beautiful, fragile cocktail glasses. I am a person who owns a leather mid-century modern chair that once sat in the corner of my grandfather’s office. I am a person who once had a mother.
“Have you always been into glassware?” a friend asked recently, admiring our collection of coupes, some bought and others, like the cordial glasses, given.
“Sort of,” I said, not quite sure how to answer. It’s not that these new glasses were far outside what we might have bought or owned on our own, but rather they contain deeper wells of meaning and history. They map our lives into a geography of other lives.
In the blurred twenty-four hours after my mother died, my two siblings and I took objects from the house that had some sentimental value. An art deco lamp that belonged to my grandmother. An album of childhood photos. An abstract painting my brother made his freshman year of college. It felt both wrong—literally taking pictures from the wall—but also necessary. Dead to me: my stepfather’s words, doubling the loss and creating urgency. Words that mean, if you want anything from the house, take it now, you will never be back.
4.
The only things my mother distributed before she died was her jewelry. Much of her valuable jewelry, a few small pieces handed down from her own mother, gifts from my stepfather or father over the years, had been stolen—or maybe pawned, the murky circumstances of the theft never discussed or explained—about a decade before. What was left were a few small objects—a gold watch, an estate pinkie ring, a ruby engagement ring bought by my father.
I wasn’t there when my sister went through it with her, only weeks before she died. The targeted cancer drug had stopped working and so she had moved onto the experimental treatments, treatments that only seemed to have the effect of making her weaker. We had been told to think in months, not years.
My sister later recounted that they sat on the bed, my mom propped up by a pillow, and went through each of the items, gold and silver trinkets fanned across the duvet. They put rings and earrings and bracelets in small Ziploc bags with torn slips of paper on which my mother wrote names of family members, a matchmaking of pieces to people. These are gifts, so unlike the objects we took in those sad, frantic hours after loss, objects that still feel touched by something shadowed and needful at the edges.
The history of the piece my mom wanted my wife to have—the gold pinkie ring with vintage round diamond, early twentieth century—comes with another story about death. When the great-aunt of my uncle died, Aunt Sylvia to everyone, thick grapefruit glasses and a raspy voice, my aunt helped clean out her Washington Square apartment where she had lived for almost forty years, most of the time with her sister. Spinsters of a certain era, they worked for the telephone company as switchboard operators, then later as accountants for New York City’s transit agency. They arrived at family gatherings with big Bloomingdale’s shopping bags full of cheap toys and tchotchkes they bought in Chinatown. They seemed as if they’d come from another country, wrinkled skin and arthritic bones; as a kid, I remember a feeling of both awe and fear in their larger-than-life presence and embrace.
They were New Yorkers in the old way. And, like women of a certain generation, they kept everything that passed through their hands: newspaper, takeout menus, rolls of quarters, rubber bands wrapped into balls. You never know, a koan of thrift and fear and preparedness. Sylvia lived alone in that apartment until she died in her early nineties. What had been a manageable refusal to let anything potentially valuable go became the apartment of a hoarder, dangerously full, a layer of dust and grime. Around this debris and decay, she reoriented her life into smaller and smaller spaces.
My aunt was tasked with cleaning it out, and my mother was there for some of the time to help. A Herculean chore of endless trash bags and patience. Decades collapsed like a folded fan into piles and piles. A bag of costume jewelry was passed on to my mother out of sheer exhaustion, the inability to go through another random collection of things. At a certain point in the cleaning-out process, I think my aunt just gave up sorting good from bad, valuable from trash.
My wife—a trained gemologist—identified the ring immediately by sight. Not ersatz but the real thing, a bypass ring with an old European-cut diamond, visible eye inclusion, nearly two carats. A small cabochon star ruby orbiting the diamond. Hand-etched and probably 18K gold. My mom kept the ring in the drawer of her jewelry box, never telling my aunt about this real thing mixed into the bag of knockoffs. Not deceit, but not truth either. One data point in the complicated relationships of siblings.
Now it is ours. It is beloved, not because of its value but because of its history. This uncanny inheritance, mixed up by accident then passed with purpose. When someone admires it, we tell the story. My wife’s hand, held out as light catches the edges of the stone: glint and flash.
5.
In the days after my mother died, I remember finding a note she made for herself, a list of strengths. It was the kind of the thing she might have done as part of a cancer support group, a way to stay positive. We are a family who writes notes: to ourselves, to the future.
I don’t remember all of what she wrote, except this: I’m not a worrier. At first, I was surprised. In my mind, my mother worried all the time, but what she meant I think was something like I’m not neurotic. When I told her about some decision I couldn’t make, she would roll her eyes, and say, “Just decide.” She had a sensible streak. Don’t hem and haw or live in a world of could have or might have.
Thinking about that note now, I wish I’d kept it. But what would I have done with it? In what drawer would it have lived? In what shoebox? Like so many precious, papery things, it disappears. For all our love of things, loss is inevitable. The note is gone. One less thing I must carry around, unsure of where to keep it, or where it will go when I’m gone.
My bookshelves have started feeling like burdens. My clothes. My love of buying things at yard sales. I look around my house and office and think of how many boxes it will take to pack it all up. How many hours to sort. Perhaps what I sense is a passage into a new kind of adulthood. In this version of what it means to be an adult, I have started to think about my own eventual absence—and all things left behind. My child will live without me, but with my possessions. The boxes of notebooks from grad school I haven’t looked at in a decade, the button-down shirts I don’t wear but don’t give away, the scraps of old wood stacked in the garage for future projects.
But what if I don’t want to stop? I take pleasure in the gathering, the collecting, the slow and random accumulation of objects I didn’t know I needed. Yard sale, estate sale, church rummage, garage and driveway, the sales on the steps of apartment buildings, the storage cleanout, going out of business, empty our warehouse, and all the versions of take this.
The pleasure isn’t simply the buying or owning. I like the randomness of it, not looking for something at the store but encountering. In this way, surprise rather than arrival is the end. The critic Adam Gopnik once wrote something to the effect of there are two kinds of tourists, the one who arrives with a list of sights to see, and the one who arrives with only a vague intent of where to go and what to see. Those who have that plan get what they want, but those who wander are surprised more. I’ve always preferred being that kind of traveler—and that kind of buyer.
I like, too, the ritual of it: the estate sale ads posted the week before, photos of folding tables with all the contents of a room stacked and sorted and priced, the wondering and anticipation, the lines where people waiting to enter make small talk about the best days and recent finds, the labyrinthian layouts of houses, rooms tucked away down hallways, the odd basement storage areas, the tea leaves of a life fragmented and offered.
And then there are the people. Some move with hawk-like intent and others stroll as if they were museum-goers on a lazy Saturday afternoon. Pickers there for profit, turning over piles of records, with their phones out looking up prices. The young adults, twenty-somethings, looking to fill out their spaces with vintage wares. The gray-hairs filling weekend mornings. I’m always struck by these older women at estate sales who collect in defiance of time, gathering lamps and lampshades, tablecloths and throw pillows, lawn sculptures in the shape of stags or Greek goddesses, eggbeaters from the fifties, sewing machines and hedge clippers, boxes marked X-mas, and paintings of rivers lined with red windmills.
There’s pleasure too in the intersection of thrift and discovery: the steal, the bargain, the rare treasure bought for a song and worth hundreds or thousands. It’s the pleasure of a lottery ticket. The pleasure of getting more than one deserves. Sometimes the difference between what something is worth and what’s paid is tens of dollars. Sometimes the difference is millions. Once, a man bought a Dürer drawing at an estate sale; $30 for a drawing now listed at $50 million. He didn’t know what he was getting. It was, as he said, “a wonderfully rendered piece of old art.” But like all gifts, a cost too. Years of his life spent trying to figure out the authenticity, a small army of experts to test the paper and examine the lines and find Dürer’s signature watermark. Years to trace the arrival of a masterpiece, a study for the watercolor The Virgin among a Multitude of Animals, from the artist’s studio in Nuremberg through a gallery in Paris to an American architect’s estate sale. Countless versions of this story; the wondrous and miraculous found in the stacks of nearly worthless tchotchkes and homemade art. I once dreamed of finding, in the yard and estate sales around Lexington, Virginia, the early works of Cy Twombly his mother sold out of their attic. Maybe apocryphal, but I liked to believe that perhaps, mixed within the bad art projects done for a middle school art class and prints of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, I would find a lost masterpiece.
And sometimes, the pleasure is the feeling of service. It’s not hard to notice the signs of an estate sale for someone who is either gone or older, the jumbled archive of a life on display. A quiet desperation by family members on the second or third day of the sale, Sunday afternoon, when much has been bought, but rooms and rooms of things remain. I imagine that what we, us treasure hunters, gather and take away lessens the burden for someone else. I like to imagine that I’m giving these objects—inanimate, dead things—a new life, a temporary visa in the beloved country of my possessions.
6.
To think of the dead on holidays, secular or religious, always feels so obvious, as if grief and loss, in addition to it all, can’t even be original. And still, obvious as it feels, I think of my mother, and of Marc, each Rosh Hashanah. All that is unsaid. On these days of reflection about error and forgiveness and the evergreen possibility of a better self, they return.
Each Rosh Hashanah my mom hosted a lunch at their house after services, a way to gather family but also a reason to leave synagogue early. She never was really into religious services and so the lunch allowed her to slip away. But still, she was a planner. Preparation started days earlier: she wrote the names of dishes she was making and put the small scraps of paper inside the serving bowls. Her dining room table filled with paper futures: brisket, carrots with honey, potato kugel. For many dishes she had a special collection of plates and bowls and trays in the shape of the food they’d hold: a ceramic dish glazed with spears of asparagus, the scales of the fish on the platter, its fisheye and tail at ends, the red apple bowl with the green leaf and stem, and so on. When people ask about her, I sometimes describe those shards of paper: her systems of order, her handwriting, her sense of humor. I miss them now, those slightly absurd plates and bowls, like so many things of hers that I remember but did not take in those hours after she died. Goodwill or attic or trash, I don’t know.
This past year, I didn’t go to services. The only real way I marked the day, besides feeling guilty for not doing more, was Tashlich. After Rosh Hashanah services, it is custom to walk to a body of water and toss in pieces of bread to symbolize all that one is letting go from the previous year. This is Tashlich, literally “casting off.” The year is behind us. All our errors and weight, all the mistakes and half-truths, all the times when we didn’t do what we knew was right, let go into the water. The past is carried, effortlessly, away. It’s a ritual of letting go: a cleansing. A lessening.
And like Marc’s story of the tree, there’s something beautifully literal about it, as if it were so easy to gather up the mistakes and errors of a year, toss them into the fast reverie of a current, and watch them slip downstream. Still, I walked down to City Creek Canyon, the small inlet canyon just down my street, to cast off all my own faults and harms. By the time I got down to the slip of running water, I realized I’d forgotten the piece of bread I put on the counter. So instead of bread, stone. I gathered a few rocks from along the creek, a poor substitute. Instead of being carried downstream, or eaten by fish and ducks, the rocks sank with a final, unremarkable splash. This was no spell. No magic trick of watching my grief disappear. Instead, stones slipped into water the moment they touched the surface and disappeared from sight.
