Recipes, Teeth, and Things Left Behind

One of the many recipes that my Mom saved in her cookbook cupboard

Today, I am angry.

I am angry but I feel like I shouldn’t say that. It would be easier, more comfortable, to say that I’m sad. That’s true, too, and everyone understands sad, especially if you have recently lost a loved one. Anger, though, is ugly. There’s so much strife in the world already. Why would I want to bring out more?

Maybe it’d be better to talk about the things I’m grateful for. There is so much! I am grateful for the birds at the feeder outside. The fire blazing in the fireplace. My cozy home. This cup of hot tea. An encouraging text from one of my best friends.

Yes, so many beautiful, good things.

Except.

Grateful as I am, I can’t escape the fact that I am mad. Though it makes no sense, I am angry that my Mom had to die. I am also furious that my sister and I have to figure out what to do with all she left behind.

I want my Mom back. I want to walk through her kitchen door and have her sitting at the table, reading the paper and having coffee. I want to talk about the news with her, and have her tell me that avocados are on sale this week. I don’t want to look through all the drawers. I don’t want to have to touch every item in her five bedroom home to make sure we don’t miss something important. I don’t want to find the get well cards that my classmates sent me when I rode my bike down the hill and got a concussion in second grade. Or every single report card I ever had. Or the box of teeth and hair that was tucked away in a drawer. Whose teeth? Whose hair? No one knows.

I don’t want to figure out what to do with the walls of family portraits, my grandparents and their parents, looking young and happy. They are all dead and my Dad is dead and my Mama is dead and I live in a 900 square foot house that is already full. Of course, I know we can scan these beautiful photos. And we are lucky to have such lovely shots of those who went before. But there are so many of them, mostly professionally framed. I hate to dismantle them, but who has the wall space for these? And the terrible truth?  Even if I did have the wall space, I’m not sure I’d want to fill it with these portraits. They are important to me, but I don’t know if I want to see them everyday. Is that ungrateful of me?  Does that show a lack of respect for my ancestors?

Another small example of the sorting we have had to do: my Mom’s cookbook cupboard. She had dozens of cookbooks, some dating back to the 1950s. Also, there was a stack of newspaper and magazine clippings, probably nine inches high, all recipes that she had spent years collecting. Pumpkin bars and chili cheese casseroles and spicy Mexican nuts and apple crisp.   She hated throwing away her magazines without going through them first. I don’t know if she ever cooked any of these.

The dedication page from one of my Mom’s older cookbooks. The times have certainly changed!

We threw these in the trash.

I didn’t want to do this. But recipes aren’t what they used to be. Not with the internet, where you can Google anything and have 15 versions of it with reviews at your fingertips a moment later.  It was just another death, another good-bye, another small loss in a long parade of death and good-byes that won’t be ending anytime soon.

I hate this.

I am angry that my sweet Mama did not realize how emotionally devastating it would be for my sister and me to do this.  I remember her joking with us about it. Not recently. Not after she was sick. But years ago, when she was healthy. “I am leaving all of this for you!” she laughed.  I laughed too. I laughed because she was my Mom, and it was her house, and she loved her things and couldn’t throw anything away, and I loved her, and that day was far away. So far away that I stupidly didn’t think that it would ever arrive.

Except it did.

I know my Mom loved us and wouldn’t want us to feel this extra sadness on top of the sadness we already feel at her death.  But I do feel it; I do. Every time I say no to keeping something that she saved and loved, it feels like I am betraying her. That when we get rid of her things we are getting rid of her. Moving past her. Leaving her behind.

I don’t want to leave her behind.

I know this isn’t true. But this is one of the hardest things I have ever done. And there is still so much left to do.