purging a life and laying it to rest

We had left Pam’s house pretty much intact after she died, too grief stricken to deal with it all and my granddaughter Robin was moving in anyway to care for the house and the cats. My niece, Denny, my sister’s older daughter, had been coming three or four times a year to spend two weeks with her mom the last three years of Pams life and so since this was probably the last time she would come to Wharton Denny and her husband came in from Albuquerque Tuesday late afternoon to finally deal with all her mother’s things before the family gathered again on Saturday to take Pam’s ashes to the beach and lay them to rest. 

My sister was a collector though she was no longer actively collecting and did winnow out some stuff when she moved across the street because she had to, moving into a smaller place, but that house was crammed full. Every square inch of wall space, cabinet space, shelf space, available floor space was covered. My niece just described her as an organized hoarder, an apt description, because my sister was very organized. 

She collected a set of dishes for every one of her six grandchildren but sent them to the individuals while she was downsizing before she moved here. I’ve already gone through the christmas ornaments but I don’t really consider them a collection. What she had collections of were plates, dolls, teapots, dragons, cookbooks, books, goddess figures, Royal Doulton figurines, seashells omg the seashells, antique costume jewelry, clocks, an outfit of clothing from every decade (this was started by our mother) but those have been gone and I don’t know when she stopped keeping them, tarot cards, and this doesn’t even include her craft and cross stitch supplies. Besides the cross stitch pieces that she had made into pillows or framed, there were 23 finished works in a drawer.

I always called Pam the family historian because she knew everything about not just our family growing up but our parents as well. She is who I would ask whenever I had a question about things that happened and when they happened when we were kids. One of her many hobbies was genealogy and she pushed some of our lines back to the 900s. I forget how many binders she had of that, how many different lines radiating back into the past. Her younger daughter took those. She had boxes of bundles of letters from as far back as a paternal great aunt and uncle and our parents and god only knows who all. So much history and we did not delve into any of it. It was just all so overwhelming. She had a binder of stories of her own life that she had written down. Her oldest granddaughter asked for those. And albums of pictures, so many albums of pictures of generations of ancestors and her own generation and her kids and grandkids. I didn’t want any of that stuff, my brother didn’t want it, neither did her kids or grandkids. Who has the space to keep all that stuff? Who has the time or interest to research and ask over and over if some institution wanted it for archives? None of us in the moment though it's possible some of us down the line may regret that that stuff wasn't saved.

Wednesday we cleared out the small extra bedroom/craft room and most of her office. The hall was lined with boxes overflowing with stuff to take to the charity shop and three extra large bags of trash. Thursday first thing we took the first load to the charity shop and then we finished the office and did the living room and kitchen/dining space ending up with another load of boxes. And Friday morning, those went to the charity shop and then we did the master bedroom and the last few boxes went to the charity shop with two more large bags of trash and other stuff went to the burn pile. We finally finished early afternoon. Things that family indicated they wanted but didn’t take when they were here when she died we put in boxes with their names on them. My niece was intent on clearing out the house and she was brutal. Me too I guess. We had only a few days before everyone converged again on Saturday. 

And so people started arriving from Washington state, Virginia, Ohio, from Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Goliad, Houston; 22 of us and 1 boyfriend, four generations. It had been raining earlier in the day, in fact has rained nearly every day since the hurricane three weeks ago, was sprinkling when we left at noon for the beach at Matagorda, an hour’s drive away, but we were doing this rain or not. As it happened, it did stop raining and had even begun to show a few breaks in the cloud cover by the time we got there and we made our way from the pavilion at the end of the river road to the edge of the water. Because it is nearly always windy, I had brought a shovel and Pam’s step-son Michael dug a shallow trench just above the waterline and we took turns spreading her ashes in the trench. We had filled a box with all the small shells she has collected over her lifetime 

adding some of those, the rest we threw back into the gulf to be washed ashore again over time. Her younger daughter Shannon’s husband had picked a basket of flowers from their garden and those also went in the trench over her ashes. We stayed for a while as water slowly seeped into the trench and then as we turned to leave a wave came in just far enough to finally fill it and mingle her ashes with the sand and the salt water she so dearly loved.

We returned to our cars and headed to the restaurant at the harbor that had a table waiting to accommodate all of us for one last meal together before we all went our separate ways. Later my brother and I were marveling about how big our family had become from just the three of us siblings; thirty of us counting the ones out of state that couldn’t come…spouses, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren.