The memorabilia most difficult to deal with were those connected with my mother, who died five years ago. We had had a complex and ambivalent relationship, but had found peace and forgiveness. The difficulty was not that remembering was particularly painful, but that the memorabilia radiated a strange force-field of inertia (like "kryptonite")--no doubt connected with Mom's narcissism. The memorabilia were like a small heap of stones. To just leave them that way would not do. But any ordering seemed artificial and false--meaningless. In life she never got it together. Yet the fragments were not meaningless and could not be discarded as such. I thought of the legend of the broken Tablets of the Law, gathered up and carried in the Holy Ark, side by side with God's "reprint," through the desert to the Promised Land. I thought of the purification rites for corpses, the broken stone in Holocaust memorials. I remembered Mom's despair and how I absorbed it as a child and, with sometimes quiet, sometimes noisy desperation, fought it off. I found the writings of Patricia Deegan, an ex-mental patient who had endured similar despair and had recovered to help others. One of Deegan's projects was to restore the burial places of anonymous patients who did not recover, who died in institutions. She wrote:
This is grave marker number 359. It is round, 3-inch piece of concrete with the number 359 blazed. It is placed in a barren field. Who is number 359? We do not know.... Similarly we found Jew number 5 at Kings Park State Hospital in New York. You can see the Star of David indicating number 5's faith tradition. But we will never know number 5's name."
Of course I think of the Holocaust and of the righteous gentiles. Pat Deegan is a righteous gentile. Perhaps in the years since Deegan wrote some Jewish group has restored dignity to number 5. I hope so. I want to look into this. I would like to sanctify the Name of the God of the 23rd psalm, the One who keeps each person's tears in His or Her flask.
