The flames rise higher and higher, hotter and hotter, as they burn their way through the packing paper that covered the silver, the crystal, the porcelain pomander, the photos and the old newspapers announcing the beginning and the end of World War II.  They all came from Granddad’s house. They were up for grabs a year ago last Thursday. He never made it back to his house after his collapse, and realized his second biggest fear – dying in the hospital. The biggest fear was having to go to a nursing home, which was the fate that awaited Granny as she descended into Alzheimer’s. At least he was spared that.

The boxes have been in my study for almost a year, next to his desk that arrived with them last August, after the USDA finally determined that they had not been on a farm recently and so probably posed little risk of introducing hoof and mouth disease into Michigan. I don’t know why tonight was the night I opened them. Perhaps somehow a year’s passage was necessary to begin to feel that the things in the boxes might be placed into my house, instead of in his.

I open the first box, and one by one unwrap the cut crystal glasses that Granny and Granddad had once used to drink their evening sherry in England, and their gin and tonics in Chile, and their brandies in Liberia. The Dubonnet in Rio would have gone into the mid-sized fluted ones, while the larger rounded ones would have served the red wine. Never water—one didn’t drink water in those places at those times. Way too risky. You never know what critters might be inhabiting the murky depths of the water glass.

Then come the photos. I had forgotten that some of them were being shipped. I thought that when I unpacked the boxes I’d brought with me on that last flight that I had the last of them. My father and his sister at various stages in their lives. A whole album dedicated to the weddings and offspring of his grandchildren, my own included. I haven’t seen my wedding photos in some years. They reside in storage with other things my son may want to see when he is older, but I have no desire to revisit. With them I find the wedding announcement for my parents’ marriage. They have fared better. At least on the face of it.

The second box is, I think, a bit more innocuous. Towels my mother gave her father-in-law that he never used. He was a child of the English post First World War depression. Not only did he use his linens until they were literally threadbare, but he felt guilty, I think, about using ones as fluffy and luxurious as the Ralph Lauren ones that Mom provided. African baskets that I thought were so neat, and have no idea what I’ll do with, but couldn’t stand the thought of them going to the tip, which is where they would have ended up.  Then more photos. Weddings, retirement parties, birthdays, stray scenes, some with people I recognize, some with my grandparents in them where they would have known the event and the people but now I can’t ask them about it.

I have to do something with all the paper in which all this stuff was cocooned. The fireplace. I start the fire with the paper, and keep feeding it, and then move to the boxes in which all the stuff came. The ribs on the corrugated cardboard of the boxes glow red, like the corduroy ribs of Granddad’s trousers.  Bit by bit, they blink out, leaving a big pile of ashes behind. There are more ashes in my fireplace than there were in the box that we buried in the little hole above Granny’s box in the cemetery near their house. How can a whole man, a vibrant living man who sired two children and 6 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren (so far) and who lived around the world and loved cricket and lived in Hampshire (at least until the government moved the parish line) be reduced to a pile of ashes small enough to fit into a 4x5x7 inch box? It just doesn’t make sense.

I watch the fire dance and flare and rear its way toward the chimney, and watch as it diminishes. It tries to find the fuel to flame, to lick the brick walls, to reduce the rest of the boxes to ever finer ashes, but there just isn’t enough left to burn. Maybe that’s how it goes. We fight, and burn, and fume, and flame, and rail against an event that is so personal and so cruel and so wrong and so impersonal… And therein, perhaps, lies the answer.  Every one of these little wrongs that loom so large in our lives are so small and meaningless when considered in the light of passing time that, in retrospect, or in introspect, we wonder why we care so much about them.  But we do. And therein lies our humanity.

©2003, Kit Howard, All rights reserved

Page last updated: 05/11/2005