Knick Knackery as Grief Therapy
(Part Three — The Doing Something About It Part)
In Part One, I talked about how grief doesn’t even make sense to me and I threw a very adult articulate tantrum about how I don’t wanna fucking do it, thank you anyway.
In Part Two, I talked about how I’m doing it. Even though I don’t want to. Because it seems I have no choice.
How I’m doing it is — barely. By the skin of my teeth and the hair of my chinny chin chin. (Which I need to pluck.) (Unibrow too.) (But, that falls behind cleaning my body and brushing my teeth, right?) (Hey, I showered today, with soap, so… that’s enough for now.)
That’s why the rest of this story makes no sense to me.
And complete sense.
I don’t know if I’m rationalizing?
Or — like the young lady locked in the nursing home, wandering the halls, greeting strangers, introducing them each time to her drool-wet teddy — I’ve finally found my “happy place?” Gone around the bend? (Wasn’t a long trip. Ha. Ha. Ha.)
I find my happy place, for hours, hand-washing thrift-shop finds.
I don’t mean clothes either.
I mean knick knacks, like American bisque pottery. I mean Depression Glass, Indiana Glass, milk glass, Carnival Glass. Limoges china. A 1930’s food mill. A 1960’s chef’s scale. Cast iron pans. Floral enameled cookware. Ancient Pyrex and Corningware casserole dishes. Hand-painted bud vases. 22k-gold hand-painted china tea cups and saucers.
Since my mom died, I’ve spent hours combing the thrift-shops.
Salvation Army, Goodwill, Savers (the Easter Seals outlet), you name it. Looking under price tags — trying not to mangle them — just to see the makers’ mark. To train my eye. To Google the names of old china houses and glass factories.
Learning how to clean china without “crazing” it. Learning how to strip, clean, and season cast iron. Learning how to spot reproduction Depression Glass. (Trying, anyway.) Learning the market. How it’s priced.
It ain’t priced good, friends.
I got all of Mom’s cherished antiques and collectibles.
Dad drove down truck- and trailer-load when Ted and I moved in together on Halloween.
Also got a couch, a recliner, secretary desk, a dresser, a corner hutch, a wall hutch, a bedside table, my little-kid’s wooden rocker. And, So. Much. Stuff.
(Let’s set aside how worrisome that was. That Dad emptied out his home. That that’s what people do before they commit suicide. In the passage of time, I think he was just removing all memory of her so it didn’t hurt so bad. And, setting me up with nice stuff for my new place.)
At face value, effectively, it’s my inheritance. I’m grateful for it.
I’d rather have it than for it go to Goodwill in anonymous plastic shopping bags. That seems such an undignified end for such cared-for possessions.
Gramma’s China set rimmed in gold.
The Waterford crystal decanters and champagne flutes that were Dad’s go-to Christmas gifts through the nineties.
The Swarovski limited edition crystal snowflakes that were somebody else’s go-to Christmas gift since the nineties.
Mom’s favorite porcelain deer, bisque piggy banks, black and white family photos.
Her entire jewelry collection. Remember when people wore heavy gold jewelry in the 80’s and 90’s. That. All of that.
Old-timey prints of kiddos with dogs. That one of the Angel and the kids on a bridge over troubled water. She’d had those in the bathroom of their cottage. When I was growing up, they were in the laundry room.
She loved those kiddos and dogs and the Angel.
Before she went into the hospital for the last time, which was three or four days before we brought her home to die, Mom took down all of those beloved pictures and made a tidy stack of them on the counter.
Just take that in for moment, would you please?
For me.
Because I.
Can’t.
I can’t access where she must have been, how she must have felt, what kind of blessed acceptance, and deep kindness and strength she had to be able to do that. She did it so that he didn’t have to.
Can you even fucking imagine?
After she died, like the next day, Dad and I packed up lotsa stuff. Stayed busy.
We dealt with the drugs. All the goddamned drugs.
Sent something “to remember her by” to everybody we could think of.
I think we even took back library books.
I put together boxes of everything I wanted.
They came down in the truck and trailer this fall.
Along with all the other shit that I didn’t want, that I hadn’t packed in a box, that I hadn’t labeled with my name.
Dad’s wise enough that I’ve heard him mutter a few times that he’s just foisting all these emotions to me. Like when he sent me the batch of sympathy cards he received. Like when he sent me more of her stuff from places I didn’t know to look when I was there. Freighted with loss and memory and emotion.
Here, hon, enjoy. How’s business? Got any new clients?
Fuck me, have I got any new clients?!
Grief has been my main client.
She’s a taskmaster and scattered as fuck. She pays for shit. She calls at odd hours and asks for a LinkedIn recommendation. She’s the kind of client I’d fire, but I can’t. She’s family.
I’ve asked around. About what all this stuff’s worth.
I’ve asked at the pawn shop.
I’ve never been in one before and I was timid to go alone. I made Ted come with me — not so much to defend my honor, but to be my beard. I hate being a rookie. THEY SELL GUNS. That spooked me. Because I fear what I might do if I had a gun.
I asked at the City-Wide Garage Sale.
I asked at the Antique Mall.
I developed this script, coded in euphemism,
“Hi, sorry to bother you, but um, I inherited a lot of my mom’s stuff this summer…”
~pause for them to nod slightly and lean in~
(which they always did)
“… And I’ve got all this China and crystal and Lladro. And I don’t know what to do with it.”
Translation: Will you buy this shit from me? Can you sell it?
FFS, I’m not a fence.
I don’t know how to move hot merchandise.
I know, it’s not technically hot merchandise.
But it sure feels like it. She had to die for me to get it.
How do you price that?
Pricing Algorithms
My dad worked his entire adult life for a utility, which was the job to have back then. 37 years at the same company. Gold watch, pension, and still has phenomenal health insurance. ’Twas truly a different world, young hipsters.
In the last decade at least, he was in the Pricing Department. A whole department for the figuring of prices.
He used to answer his desk phone, “[Last Name], Cost Models and Methods.”
What does that even mean?
Cost Models and Methods?
How do you spread out the cost for the 20 years you thought you had left with your mom?
How do you weight the factor of having to watch her die?
Getting to watch her die. Whatever.
It’s all upside, right?
I mean, since all these items came to me for free…
Horseshit.
Say instead these things came to me without monetary cost.
Not free. Not cheap. Not without a costly exchange.
Mom and I walked the house a few times before she died.
She knew.
She knew that Dad in his grief, in his inability to process the immensity of emotion, would turn to flurry and hurry, hustle and bustle. She knew he’d box all that shit up in a heartbeat and take it to Goodwill.
She and I walked the house and I pointed out all the things I’d always liked. And, she’d say, “Hon, it’s all yours if you want it. And you can sell it or keep it, I don’t care. If you don’t want it, that’s okay, too.”
And, then she’d apologize. “I’m sorry, hon.”
Me, too, Ma.
I took a box of her jewelry to the local jeweler before Christmas.
The stuff I don’t want and stuff that I’d like to get resized.
I coded the jewelry in that box. Catalogued it. Recorded the catalogue on my phone, just in case. Just in case what? I don’t know.
Took it on a Monday.
They aren’t open on Monday’s.
Carried it in my trunk for weeks until I got up the nerve to try again.
The owner wasn’t in.
Talked to a gal in her 20s with painted dreads and gauges in her ears and one of those things through her nose, like a prize bull. She was kind, compassionate, professional, and knowledgable.
But not authorized to make offers or appraisals.
There was another shopper there.
It’s spitting distance from one wall to the other. The shopper was dressed like she was well-to-do and in her fifties. She may or may not still have a (living) mother.
The way she was trying not to eavesdrop while clearly listening to every word, suggested that she’s going through it or about to or just did. A couple of times, I thought she was going to make a suggestion, but each time I felt her think better of it and pull back.
Shopgirl confirmed that Mom’s big locket, with my baby picture facing a photo of Dad in his 30s, is not gold, only gold-plated.
She listened patiently as I explained that I didn’t know what the sam hell to do with all this jewelry, and that I kinda needed the cash instead, and that I would feel guilty to sell it, but, um, you know?
She knew. She gave me some ideas based on what others have done in my situation.
Good grief — What Others Have Done in My Situation
Yes, I can see where that would be hopeful and helpful and a good healthy reminder that death is the only sure thing of the human experience and that we all “get the chance to die” as one person put it. (Which felt exceptionally abrupt and closed-hearted coming from a barefoot herbalist.)
The nurses, the doctors, the neighbors, the girl with the bull ring in her nose, the florist, the funeral director, the therapists, friends, family — all with the “what others have done in your situation.”
Maybe that’s how the antique sellers got into their situation.
They inherited a bunch of shit that they needed to move.
They needed the value of it, not the sentiment.
Nostalgia don’t pay the City of Austin Utilities bill.
Cherished keepsakes don’t keep the car running.
After my divorce, Mom helped sort my accumulated shit.
The wedding album. The dress and garters. The wedding gifts.
My take. My half.
What was left, materially, of the dream that had been my marriage. The remnants of the facade.
Her mom eloped during the Depression and had the sensibilities of a reconstructed hoarder.
“You never know when you might need it again.”
We always joked that it skipped a generation.
My mom was like, “Hon, just get rid of it. If you need it, you’ll buy another one.” (Thank you, Madison Avenue. Where would we be without you and the gazillion Boomers you mindfucked into conspicuous consumption?)
Obviously, I line up more with my gramma than my mom on this matter.
(On other matters, Gramma went to her grave calling them “Coloreds.” Even though she knew it offended my worldly sensibilities, she just couldn’t remember what she was supposed to call them.
Mom, on the other hand, insisted we never tell her about my black boyfriend in college.)
We all have webs and weavings, secrets and shames, threads tangled deep in our tapestries.
Until they’re cut.
Actually, that’s not true. That’s a nice bit of writerly fluff.
Just because she’s — both of ’em are — dead doesn’t mean their existence doesn’t continue to have an abiding gut-level, epigenetic-level, neuro-psych-level effect on how I live moment to moment.
The threads are never cut. The weaving passes through the veil. As much as I’d like to follow it through, I can’t. Yet.
Anyway, Mom said something to me then that I still hear.
(Seems to be the closest I’ll get to an Obi-Wan-Ben-Kenobi-in-the-Sky moment.)
We were going through all this stuff that I “got” when I got married and when I got divorced. Just like I’d rather have my mom back, I’d rather have had a happy marriage. Instead, I got stuff.
I was in agonizing, hand-wringing, whining, near hysteria about what to give away, what to trash, what to keep, what to regift, what does it all mean, and why fucking me, Jesus!?
She picked up one such item of stuff, whatever it was, trash and trinkets, toasters, gimmes, and asked,
Hon, do you think this is who you are?
“Do you think this stuff is you?”
Granted, she’d had years of practice with Gramma by that point. By then, Auntie Bert, Gramma’s older sister, had died. They’d found closets full of empty shoe boxes and plastic grocery bags and sundry other shit that nobody wanted.
But you never know. You might need it.
They had to bring in a dumpster to haul off all that shit.
Mom wasn’t usually one to go in for the Jedi wisdom nuggets. Not that she wasn’t a skilled and crafty operator in the family dynamic.
Notable quotables just weren’t her thing.
Now I hear her, asking me the same thing about all her stuff.
Hon, do you think this stuff is me?
Like those dumb damn Colony Riviera Amber Water Goblets that she must have gotten as a wedding gift.
She never liked them. I don’t like them. I didn’t ask for them. Apparently, Dad, the Spartan, doesn’t like them. Cuz, by blazes, I got the clunky fuckers.
Do I think they’re her?
No. Yuk. Blech.
Can I AT LEAST turn a profit on them?
After all, they’re Vintage, bitches.
Google that shit, I’ll wait.
The highest price I can find out there is $7 a piece, which I’d reckon is around what they cost the first time around.
Here she’s kept them, trotted them out for holiday meals, packed and unpacked them through I-don’t-even-know-how-many-moves just to yield to me a little something of value when she dies.
I’ve got eight of these ugly things.
That’s 56 bucks plus shipping if I can find a sucker to sell ’em to.
I didn’t get an inheritance. I got a project.
For months, I kept finding myself back at the thrift shop.
It became my happy place. (It already was. I’ve waxed philosophical about it before, elsewhere, and before Macklemore and Lewis did. TYVM.)
I finally realized just what the hell I thought I was doing.
I was supplementing the Stuff I Got from my Mom with Stuff from Other People’s Moms. Stuff that doesn’t carry emotional baggage for me. Stuff that I could afford to accidentally break without wanting to open a vein on the shards.
Like one of Mom’s two gold-painted signed ceramic deer. That she always kept in a high place. So that nobody broke them. Because she liked them so much.
Guess who broke one?
My boyfriend thought I’d lost my mind.
I thought we should be waiting at the window for a wagon from the ward and that I should be blathering about how I’ve always relied on the kindness of strangers.
If I weren’t in Texas, I’d probably sign my happy ass in for a nice long stay. Let a certified nutritionist worry about feeding me three squares. Play in art room. Pay four-handed card games with the other crazies.
I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I ain’t into all that.
But with Other People’s Stuff, I can relax.
And lessen the press of Mom’s stuff crowded around me.
As I wash these thrift-store finds, other people’s treasures, in the warm soapy water in my home, surrounded by my mom’s treasures, I marvel at how clean they come. How cherished they must have been. How dear.
Or how glad somebody must have been to finally ditch that shit. Who knows?
I think I got the vintage shopping gene. From Mom of all people.
I remember all the times when we lived in Indianapolis that Mom was delighted to go antiquing with her lady friends at Shipshewana. A great big flea market of apparently world-renown in the 80’s.
She collected Dutch and clowns and pretended she was collecting them for me. She collected pigs and deer for her and old-fashioned starch shakers for the laundry room.
Thrift shopping now, I remember garage-sale-ing for Mom’s birthday gift.
I think I borrowed money from her. I browsed several neighbor’s wares before I found some trinket that felt just right and was within my budget. I brought it back to her, beaming, like a handful of dandelions.
Knick Knackery is keeping me tethered to this world.
I connect to my mom in the finding of it and caring for it.
I connect to her mom in the hoarding of it.
And, with any luck, I’ll connect it to my bank account and con my main client, Grief, to pay up from the selling of it.
Anybody need a full set of Essex by Lenox gold rimmed fine china? Here’s that Etsy link.
I’m calling it Inherited Kindnesses. Because that’s what I did.
Product descriptions are still to come, but the photos are pretty, I think. Most of it’s not my mom’s. I need to test run with Other People’s Mom’s Stuff, first. See if I can deal with the nausea, you know?
I’ll give you a great deal. After all, I got it for free.
