The Things We Keep After Someone Is Gone

A drawer can contain three expired warranties, a key that opens nothing anyone can identify and an object you would cross a burning room to retrieve. From the outside, there may be very little to distinguish them. The difference is the person attached to one of them.

When you want to write about someone who is gone, the size of the subject can stop you. How do you fit a life onto a page? Where do you begin with a relationship that lasted thirty years, or one that ended before you had said everything?

Sometimes you begin with the object. A recipe card. A watch that no longer runs. A screwdriver with somebody's initials scratched into the handle. You can describe a screwdriver. That is a smaller assignment than explaining everything you miss.

Look at it before asking it to mean something

Set the object where you can see it, if you have it. Notice its actual condition. The handle may be polished on one side. The paper may have a grease mark across the ingredient you need. A seam may have been repaired with thread that does not quite match.

Write those details before writing what the object symbolizes. “This represents my grandmother's love” tells the reader what conclusion to reach. The corrected measurement, the note in the margin and the way she insisted a cup did not necessarily mean that cup allow a person to emerge.

You are not required to make the object beautiful. The cracked plastic lid may be the point. So may the fact that nobody liked the lamp while its owner was alive, and now three people are politely threatening each other over it. Affection can include the inconvenient details. Often those details are where a reader begins to recognize a real household.

Find a time when somebody used it

An inventory becomes a story when an action enters it. Ask when you last saw the object doing its ordinary job. Who was holding it? What did they want? Who interrupted? What happened that was different from what you expected?

Take an invented example: a daughter keeps her father's old measuring tape. A description of its chipped case may start the piece. The scene might be the afternoon he measured a doorway three times while she stood beside a sofa she had already paid for. Now the object has a task, two people have different concerns and the memory has somewhere to move.

The sofa does not have to get stuck. Nobody needs to deliver a perfect sentence about life. Perhaps he finds a way to bring it through the back door and never mentions that she ignored his advice. That small decision can tell us something a paragraph of adjectives could not.

If you only remember fragments, write fragments in your notes. Do not manufacture the rest because the scene looks incomplete. A remembered gesture may be enough to carry a short passage.

Separate what you remember from what you learned later

Family stories acquire details as they travel. You may remember the kitchen yourself but know the origin of the recipe only because an aunt told you. Both can belong in the piece. Make the distinction clear.

“I remember” and “she later told me” position the reader differently. So does “I cannot remember what he said next.” That last sentence can be more moving than dialogue polished beyond anyone's plausible powers of recall. Acknowledging the limit keeps the reader close to the person doing the remembering.

Photographs, dates on letters and conversations with relatives can help you check what is checkable. They may also complicate the story. Someone else may remember the occasion as happy when you remember being uncomfortable. You can hold both accounts without pretending they are identical. Writing about real people means leaving room for the fact that they occupied a different place in the same room.

The object can stay ordinary

There is pressure in personal writing to make every saved thing deliver a lesson. The mug must teach resilience. The jacket must explain unconditional love. Before long, the cupboard is responsible for an entire philosophy.

You can let the mug be the one he used. Tell us how he held it, where he left it and whether he actually finished the coffee. Trust the accumulation of particulars. The reader can feel the absence without being instructed to feel it after every paragraph.

Humor can remain, too, when it belongs to the relationship. A person who made you laugh does not have to become solemn in every sentence written after their death. Let their impatience, peculiar habits and excellent bad advice keep some of their original energy. Care does not require sanding a person smooth.

A place to start today

Choose one object and give yourself a page. Begin with its condition now. Move into one remembered occasion involving it. Return to the present only when something in that occasion changes how we see the object you still have.

You may discover that the object is only the doorway. The real piece might concern an apology, a familiar sound or the way someone made room for you. Follow that discovery. You do not owe the screwdriver a starring role just because it helped you begin.

For a longer project, memoir development and ghostwriting can help organize memories without flattening their uncertainty. You can also explore my personal storytelling in My Roller Coaster Life.

A life is larger than any object left behind. Start with the thing you can hold, describe what you know and see which person comes back into the room.