NEW ORLEANS-I'm sitting in a coffee shop on Royal Street in the French Quarter, trying to come to terms with the purple satin stiletto I threw away a few days ago.
It was my mother's. And like hundreds of other things that once belonged to her, I relegated it to the landfill.
I, with full support from my three sisters, also approved the disposal of the cream-and-pink linen suit Mama wore to our grandfather's funeral.
We threw out boxes of perfectly good, old-fashioned Christmas tree light bulbs; the broken lamp that sat on our mother's bedside table when we were little; her knee-high black boots, which my youngest sister noted still held the shape of her calves; her long black wig; and her extensive collection of lingerie-all in all, 22 large, black garbage bags and six boxes full of earthly minutiae that once constituted a life, over which my sisters and I had been given sole authority.
The job of sorting through and dividing up a deceased parent's things is a duty, a ritual and a rite of passage that often falls to the children.
It's a job my sisters and I managed to avoid for 12 years since the twin tragedies that befell our family in 2005. First, our mother who'd already lived a difficult life of abuse, depression, disability, and poverty, died a difficult death in a fire she accidentally in her modest New Orleans bungalow.
Then, before we could finish sorting through her things, came Hurricane Katrina to drown 80 percent of New Orleans, including Mama's modest house and all the furniture on the first floor.
We shoved everything into an 8X10 storage facility, where it stayed until two weeks ago when my sisters and I decided it was time to confront the folder of heartbreaking poetry pieces we forgot she wrote; the three pages of a journal detailing the abuse her mother inflicted on her; her cookbooks and recipe cards, some of which I helped her write; our board games, baby books, Girl Scout uniforms and First Communion veils I didn't know she'd saved; the notebook of lottery numbers she played mathematically over the years so she could one day buy a big house where all her children and grandchildren could live happily ever after in one place.
One sister drove in from Memphis to help with the storage facility joining the sister who lives in New Orleans. Another Facetimed from Washington state.
And I flew in from Ohio with my 24-year-old daughter who knew the difficult task her mom and aunties had before them, who wanted to help, which she did quietly, contemplatively and non-stop it seems, for two days.
With the help of a professional organizer, the four of us on the ground spent a full weekend in the parking lot, sorting, deciding what of Mama's things could be tossed and who should get what of the stack of nursing notebooks from when she'd sent herself back to school in her 50s; the "good" china she bought piece-by-piece that one year at the grocery story; the Christmas decorations that helped supplant her depression; and the wedding dress she wore when she was 18, which was not white but Scarlett Letter blue because she was with child.
Our emotions tempered by time were nonetheless rubbed raw again as we saw and touched our mother's things. Laid bare before us in piles on blue tarps in a parking lot, even the smallest thing was a reminder of some significant part of our mother's life, not the least of which was how hard she tried.
There was no more stark reminder than the purple shoe. Maybe the shoe symbolized for me the priorities in her life. Mama was a beautiful woman for whom style was important. No matter what else was failing in her life, at least she was taking care of her shoes.
Maybe it's because I'd never seen the shoe before, leaving me to wonder what else I didn't know. Or maybe it's because I needed something sad and complicated to fixate on, other than the feelings I had about my mother.
For many long minutes after I found it, I held the shoe to the sunlight, trying to understand its meaning, purpose or place. Finding none, I cavalierly tossed it in one of the throw-away piles; I didn't want to be the one sister who was keeping stupid things for no reason.
And now four days later, I find myself wishing I could go to the landfill and get it back.
I say as much to Emily, whose response tells me what she is already made of, maybe as a result of this experience.
"It's OK, Mom. It's not the things that matter. It's the memories." She is wise and I know she is right. I also know we will be driving off day after tomorrow in a rented SUV packed stem-to-stern with a collection of mostly useless things that will sit in my basement until it's my children's turn to divide up what's left of me.
"It's our way of filling the void," I tell her. Just not, alas, with the help of a phantom purple shoe.
Tribune News Service