My mother, with the help of a well-intentioned friend, held a garage sale after Dad died. Thirty-five years of living in their suburban bungalow provided quite a bit of saleable stuff. I was working and unable to make the trip to help her, so I couldn’t rescue my fifth-grade project on American presidents or my two remaining dolls, Jean and Susan, or my coin collection, from oblivion. I hope they went to someone who found them of value. She wasn’t indifferent to my feelings, but she was increasingly indifferent to things—hers, Dads, mine, my brother’s. Well into her eighties, she needed to let go of all she no longer wanted to store or mend or dust or remember, and I needed to let her. My grandmother’s dresser went, and the lace tablecloths I would never have used anyway, and the carved bookends from India I somehow wanted her to want, though I didn’t want them myself. Letting her let go turned out to be hard, and surprising.
Years ago I read a story about an old Japanese-American woman, a post-war immigrant, who began releasing her possessions to neighbors, thrift stores, and backyard weather as she prepared to move into a small apartment. Her daughters were horrified. They didn’t want their “heritage” to be treated with such disregard. Oddly, though, they didn’t want the things, either. They didn’t have room. Or the kimonos and wall hangings and delicate obsidian and ivory carvings seemed out of place in their IKEA furnished living rooms. They just wanted her to keep them, to want them, to have them—not just to store them, but to be a kind of curator of the memories that weren’t really theirs—the stories they had heard and out of which they had forged a hyphenated identity. They writer clearly spun the story in the mother’s favor, but I understood the daughters. I do have my mother’s rosewood chest, full of artifacts she brought back from India after fourteen years working there in a school for orphans. I “cherish” it, whatever that means, but I rarely open it, as she used to, recalling people and moments that lingered with the old saris and sandalwood garlands in that chest.
Recently these mixed feelings emerged again when I read “The Will,” a poem my friend Chana wrote in the months before her death. “Let the university send a couple of students / to cart off the Russian novels I was always meaning to read,” she begins. The line made me smile. I remembered standing in front of my own copious bookshelves when I left my last workplace, realizing how many of the volumes were still on my “to read” list, and asking myself, “How long do you think you’re going to live, anyway?”
But as the poem continues, it gets harder. She names things I know—the big umbrella by the door, the etching of a wild boar, the deer who wander her street, refugees from dry hills. I was married in her back yard. I listened to poetry in her living room, and to the old piano. Each time her poem reiterates the strong, clear, simple verb “Let . . .” I hear not only relinquishment, but admonishment: let it be. Do not interfere. Do not clutch or cling. Do not claim what was never yours to control or keep.
I know we all have to let go, and that life keeps teaching that with every loss, change of plans, disruption of circumstances. But until recently I hadn’t reckoned quite so consciously with the challenge of letting others let go. Letting them change and recede and relinquish and finally depart. Letting them do that without regret or apology—even with a certain hard-won cheerfulness—Chana had that—when the rest of us are still resisting. “So beautiful,” was the last thing she said.
She was sad. She didn’t want to go. But she learned, perhaps by writing her poems, to let go with a deliberation that liberated her, even in her sorrow. She let us go, too, each one of us. And we needed to let her.
~ Dr. Marilyn McEntyre ©