What Will Survive of Us

On unpacking myself

My father hoards, and my mother purges. I take after my father. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a strong reluctance to let go of physical objects. A friend with a similar struggle told me he now asks people not to give him physical things at all, because he knows himself, and he knows once he becomes attached to a thing, it’s impossible for him to let go of it. I’m not quite there, but I know what he means.

I was newly forced to confront this part of my personality over last Christmas break while cleaning my childhood bedroom. Just as I was embarking on this project, a storm sent rainwater seeping into a storage room in the basement of my parents’ home (not the room pictured above, which is much more photogenic). Our basement is finished, and so over the years it’s become a repository for much of the family’s accumulated stuff. This storage room in particular has been an entropy sink. It houses our furnace, but it’s large enough to hold shelves full of books, along with all manner of boxes piled around the floor. What’s in these boxes? Easier to answer what’s not in them.

The rain-flood was, thankfully, not the disaster it could have been. A few of the boxes were rendered unusable, but nearly all our stuff was unharmed. Still, it catalyzed a reckoning.

Most of the burden fell on my dad, who spent the next week patiently and painfully sifting through some of the largest boxes. I didn’t know the totality of what was in them and knew better than to ask. Some of the paraphernalia was related to chess, a cherished family hobby—old clocks, boards vinyl and wooden, piece sets. Some of the stuff went back to that time when Dad was really getting into bookbinding. He’d practiced on old public-domain works of apologetics, carefully cleaning up the texts, then printing out and binding them into handy little booklets. They were adorable, once he actually finished them. But plans for more were arrested and abandoned at the stage of printing out the covers. One box was full of these. He still has the binding jig. There’s just not enough time. There never is.

My mom announced her implacable intention to dispose of a box full of old sheet music, some of which had absorbed moisture. My inner hoarder couldn’t resist seeing what could be salvaged first. And salvage a few things I did, including a couple of things even Mom had to admit were worth salvaging—a jazz piano piece signed to me as a gift from the composer, really too difficult if I was honest, but of course I’d kept it; the handwritten original of a psalm setting Mom composed in her schooldays, which she’d assumed was stored somewhere safer.

I didn’t really want to say goodbye to some other things in the box, like a couple books full of old gospel ladies’ trio arrangements. They brought back memories of singing with my mom and aunt. Probably I would have fished them out too had I known at the time that we were dealing with merely rainwater and not something worse. But I took a few pictures and consoled myself they could be found cheaply on eBay if I decided I absolutely couldn’t live without them.

Meanwhile, Mom unceremoniously marched several of the untouched boxes over to my room. This was my share of the burden: old school materials. My past hoarder self had kept almost every notebook, every folder, from college through graduate school. She’d never really wanted to keep these in the furnace room, but she tolerated them. No more. She was sorry to disrupt my bedroom-cleaning project, but the time had come. And so began my sifting process.

My bachelor’s degree was a double major in math and philosophy, followed by a doctorate in math. To earn a doctorate, you need to pass several qualifying exams (called prelims), even before producing a dissertation. Students were given two tries apiece to pass them. Some of my peers were talented enough to pass one or more on their first try. I used up all my tries for all three. You can imagine the sheer quantity of notebook paper this alone entailed, not even counting the books full of class lecture and scratchwork notes.

Why had I kept these? Initially, I had told myself it was because I might need to teach at least some of the material one day, when I got the university job I assumed I was aiming for. Then again, it’s not as if all my pages full of mathematical chicken scratch were error-free—quite the contrary. And the collection included courses I wasn’t likely to teach even if I did become a professor. No, what the collection really was—and this was the real reason I couldn’t part with it—was a monument to a version of myself that had faded away long ago. And if I were honest with myself, really honest, she wasn’t coming back.