No One Will Care
My sister is the family historian. She wrote the book, literally.
Searched manifests to learn the name of the ship and the date our maternal great-great grandparents came to America from Sweden.
Studied the history of the little town of Angelica, population 1,000 for the past 175 years, where our parents grew up and fell in love.
Collected stories from aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins to get facts straight or unearth new ones.
Collected photo albums of relatives looking out at us with what W.G. Sebald called the ‘spectral presence’ of the dead.
She did these things because she’s interested and is good at it, because they matter to her, and because time is running out. Our mother died in November 2022 at age 100, the last of her generation on both sides of the family.
Of all my visits to Washington, D.C., where she lived with my sister and her husband after leaving the house we grew up in in Rochester, New York, one stands out. I took a few of the family photo albums off the bookshelf one afternoon and looked through them with her. The best moment of a long, rich afternoon was seeing her face light up over the photo of an uncle long gone. ‘Neat guy,’ she said.
My sister went through her clothes, her jewelry, her desk, her photo albums after she died, and sent photos of them to her siblings. We were all trying to pare back. She didn’t have room for them either. On a phone call a few months ago she mentioned the photo albums, which she would not and could not toss.
“But what am I going to do with them?” she said. “No one will care.”
The sentence landed with a thud in me. Later, I sorted through it to see what I could find.
“No one will care about ME when I’m gone.”
Sure, somewhere at the back of our minds she, and we, are thinking about that. Too pat, though, too psychological. Too thin. Toast with no butter.
“No one will care about the past these photos albums tell of.”
Better. Sturdier, building on fact, lives, generations. Still . . .
“No one will care and all of it will be gone as though none of it never happened, and they never happened. And we never happened either. All of us, the places and times, the orange stone planted among a hundred gray ones in the riser of a front steps to our paternal grandparents house, all are nothing but ghosts in the memory of someone who never existed.”
Maybe that’s wrong, though. Maybe shreds and patches of the past will survive, to be tossed into a soup filled with the meat and vegetables of the lore of people, families, hometowns, the country. People will drink the soup and make fables, folk songs of them, or make them come alive in new forms of art, to the delight of future generations that we can’t even think of as our relatives, but everyone’s.
What about now, though? What will we leave to ourselves and those who survive us? Life’s a story, sometimes just of the narrator, sometimes of an uncountable gathering that appears heads first, then shoulders, then feet over the crest of a hill in a certain place at a certain hour of the afternoon, once upon a time.
Sometimes I wonder if we tell enough of them to keep us going.
https://sebald.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/the-migration-of-pictures-after-death/
