I'm going through some things now in one of our spare bedrooms and trying to decide how it was that I came upon so much stuff in the first place. I had a five shelf bookcase in there that was filled to the brim with books. The sad truth was that most of them were ones that I never even opened up. They just looked good at the time, and so I bought them. Today I was cleaning that bookshelf off so that Mike can use it for storage in his new shed. I decided that it was the perfect time to start culling through my vast collection of things to read and pare it down to only those that meant the most to me.
And so I did.
I figure I must have had about a hundred books on those shelves and so my goal was to at least get rid of 2 dozen of them. I ended up with one more than that. I packed a huge box for the local thrift store, chose some for my children, and the rest were put away into the closet. I imagine that in time, even those collections of the written word will have little meaning to me any longer.
As I was cleaning off the shelves, I came across several books that were the funeral registers for people in our family. Several of them date back from the 1940's and 50's when my great-uncles and grandfather on the Brown side of the family passed away. I'm not even sure why I was keeping them, but I suppose it was to honor the memory of fine people that I never once met. I had toyed with throwing them away several years back, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Not sure why that was either. I suppose it was in part because I felt like it was dishonorable to toss that record away, whether I knew them or not.
Today it was different. As I came across those funeral books, one by one I read through them a final time. I took a picture of the pages that I thought would be of benefit in genealogy research. After that, I held them close to my heart and said a silent prayer.
"God, these were all good people. They were my family. I have taken care of these for a long time but I am choosing this day to let them go. These folks are in Heaven now, with you and all of the family members that have left before me. They are in a way better place than this world will ever be. I don't need to keep these funeral books any longer. It's time for me to discard them now."
And so I did.
For the record, I felt pretty ok about it.
I'm just like my mom who was a keeper of things that were absolutely of no value to anyone else but her. I must have learned this by watching her good example, yet even after all of these years that have gone by, I think she too would have told me that it is fine to let them go.
I found my mom's journals again on that old bookshelf and read through them one last time. They too are going to be given away to my own children so that they can reread the things that she had upon her heart and mind. The handwritten scrawl that she had was so heartwarming to see once again. I smiled as I read her simple words of what she thought deemed any given day to be a good one. She wrote of seeing her children and grandchildren, and spoke of how it would have been hard to survive without their help. If she had done the laundry that day, it was written. The temperature was recorded and the news of the block reported. It was the simple things, the most mundane of things that she wrote of. She kept track of what the doctor told her at an appointment, what she ate for supper, and which part of her body ached the most on that particular day. My mom never realized that 15 years later I would be reading them once more and writing about them in this blog.
I found one other thing on the shelf, something that I will never part with. It was an old worn out Bible that belonged to my great-uncle, William Brown. William was a man I never met. He died long before a little baby named Peggy Ann was born to his niece, Lois Brown Scott. I heard stories of him though and the rest of his brothers. I wished I could have known him. When my grandmother passed away, the little Bible was something that was left over and no one else spoke up for it. I was the one who ended up with it that day and it's been in my possession ever since. The binding is failing, the pages are so fragile with age, and most all of the time it is stored in a special box where hopefully nothing else will happen to it.
I didn't see it at first but after I got the Bible home, I realized that my great-uncle had left a message inside for me. The minute I read it, I felt like I had known him all of my life and even though I had never met him, one day I knew that I'd see him again.
It was a simple, four word message.
It was one that brings me much solace.
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