The importance of things

Well, I just accidentally watched a PBS program having to do with 9/11. I don't normally watch T.V. during the daytime -- makes me feel guilty, as in: you should be getting things accomplished -- but I switched on the television when the tedious task of putting photos in an album began to pall. The program that was just starting was called Objects and Memory, and it turned out to be not so much about the terrible events of that day, as the importance of objects, things in connecting people to those who died.

I cried several times during the program. As for example when the woman was talking about how a newsman had gone to Ground Zero, and saw some of the thousands of pieces of paper that filled the air that day, adhering to the grill of an emergency vehicle. He gathered a few of them up. One of them was the personnel review of the woman's husband, who had worked in one of the Twin Towers. The newsman tracked the woman down, and gave her that piece of paper that had her husband's signature on it, that he had held, touched. And it meant the world to her.

I understood exactly how she felt, how the others felt who spoke along similar lines, when similar "miracles" brought them some little something connected to their lost loved one, months, in one case even a couple of years, after 9/11. I said this a long time ago in one of my newsletters, when I was waxing rapturous about some ancient stone wall or other that I'd encountered in my travels: things make the past real to us. And it doesn't really matter what the item is, how insignificant. What is important is that it was there. As they said on this program, physical things forge a bridge between us and the past, a bridge that is stronger than just our memory of the past; indeed, they reinforce our memories.

I still have a couple of old shirts of my husband Micheal's, a Japanese-style robe I gave him at some point, one of his old hats, the velvet drawing of a dragon that a friend had given him for his last birthday, that he was busy coloring with colored pencils up until the day of his death (and which I finished after he died)...all of these things have meaning for me because they were his, touched him, were touched by him. They connect me to him.

The one time I felt a real pang during the massive "garage" sale (it actually ended up being a whole house sale) that I had four months after Micheal's death, was when I saw someone carrying the little drop-front desk he had had since he was a boy, out of the house to the "cashier" (my mother) on the front lawn. The desk had been cheaply made, and was not in very good shape, but I knew it had meant a lot to Micheal, because it connected him to his past, his youth. So in a way I was saying good-by to two connections to the past: mine to Micheal, and Micheal's to his youth. There were good, practical reasons for including the desk with all the other things being sold, but I still feel a small regret that I did not hang onto it, as I did to the hat, the shirts, the robe.

There was another aspect of the importance of things examined by the PBS program (which was really very well-done). Everywhere that New Yorkers set up impromptu memorials to the fallen, in the days following 9/11, people brought things and left them. Flowers, flags, teddy bears, poems, pictures drawn by children. The same thing happened following the Oklahoma City terrorist attack in 1995: people spontaneously brought things to leave for the people who had died. They did the same thing when Princess Diana died. In such cases the things are not serving as a link between separated loved ones, but as an acknowl-edgment that the missing were here. The message that is being sent: "I may not have known you personally, but I honor the fact of your life with this token." And people feel compelled to do this! This to me is both wonderful, and fascinating. We want, we need, a physical manifestation of how we feel about the death of someone, a physical affirmation that someone cares.