Reclaiming Memories
It’s been a week and a half since I got to Japan and staying at my mother’s apartment. I have made a huge progress with sorting and disposing items here. Unlike when my father passed away 20 years ago when I ended up having to put a lot of books in the trash because the used book store wouldn’t even take anything other than comic books, I was able to ship all the books of literatures, art books, and picture books to a company who would appraise them and pay for some of them. I also had some company come to pick up a few pieces of furniture in the living room, which were actually ones I had bought as a teenager. Mind you that there’s no place like Salvation Army or Goodwill here, and I actually had to pay them to take those items.
Although it is definitely not easy to let go of things that my mother kept around in this small space all these years, I felt like I was finally able to have a little breathing room once the clutter was reduced. Yet, in the second week of quarantine I’m faced with a difficult task as I now dove into the closet where all the memories were stored. There are mom’s photo albums going back to when she had met dad although I didn’t find ones from her childhood as I hoped to find. Then I’ve uncovered boxes of my father’s albums and notebooks. He was a prolific photographer and a writer, and there were volumes of diaries, some of which are from when he was in the military in World War II, and some were meticulously noted photographic journals from the 1950s. I also found some published articles by both my father and my grandfather (mom’s father), who was a respected expert in social services. I only glanced at them, but they’re all topics of social relevance of the time.
There’s so much history both personally and at larger context in those images and texts that I would love to preserve them in some way. Yet I do not have the gumption at this point to take on a project to properly archive them. What do I do? What do you do? Surely, everyone has to go through this one way or the other.
Again, I’m reminded of this very constant current of time. Images of my parents in their youth and different stages of their life along with some familiar people, who are mostly gone, only assures of the Four Sufferings (Dukka) of birth, old age, illness and death. As my Dharma mentor, Diana Gould, reassured me when I was feeling rather afraid that I might not be able to survive all this suffering in my life of losing both my cat and my mother in addition to everything that was going on in the world, I’m fortunate to have the practice and the tools it provides to walk through these times without getting lost in the suffering.
#YouCanSitWithUs