Lost and found
On storage, grief, and the things we never get closure on
In the summer of ‘99, while watching the Women’s World Cup and inspired by women chasing their dreams, my mother and I ganged up on my father to get a second dog. We already had a cockapoo, Houston, who was likely the most popular resident of our entire neighborhood, but Houston was my brother’s dog. I wanted my own dog, even though I was leaving for college in two years. My father thought the entire thing was “the most asinine idea [he’d] ever heard of” but agreed. In retrospect, it’s clear my mother wanted a second dog and made a strong case for it using me as leverage.
I named our new toy poodle Audrey, because, as I told my father, “she’s gray just like Audrey Hepburn’s poodle in ‘Sabrina.’” My father replied “it’s a black and white movie, all the dogs are gray.” Touché.
Audrey was never really my dog. She slept in my room but when I got up, she’d run and wait outside my mother’s door or next to my mother’s bed until the real alpha was up. And I get it because my mother was the one slipping Audrey brie on the side. Audrey managed to ingratiate herself into the family largely because of her kindness to Houston as he aged and what a great traveler she was, perfectly content to go anywhere and be both cute/well-behaved at the time.
When she passed away, I was sad but I also hadn’t lived at home with her full time in about a decade so it didn’t hit the way it might have otherwise. My mom promised her ashes would be scattered with Houston’s at the beach which felt like the perfect place.
Until I found out that was a lie.
Over the last few months, my father has been going through all of our stuff that’s been in long-term storage for over a decade. Some days he’ll share photos I don’t even remember being taken or memories I’d thought had been lost and am so grateful to have a keepsake of.
Going through storage is kind of like opening your own time capsule where you sort of look at these objects and see a mixture of fond memories, things you’d otherwise forgotten, and, frankly, trash.
In some cases, I’ve had major mysteries solved: a ring that my aunt gifted me that I was accused of losing while in New York (but always swore I hadn’t) was found in my jewelry box! A framed photograph of me, at 14 in New Zealand, sitting on the back of what seems to be a bison(?) serves as proof that I have both been outside and in close proximity to large wild animals.
In some cases, things I’d hoped to have found are still missing, and may never have been in storage in the first place, like the original art exhibition catalogs I bought when I was on study abroad in France and my senior year high school blazer. I definitely can’t still read those books and I probably can’t fit into the blazer (nor do I have occasion to wear it) but they’re things I’ve thought about over the years and missed.
And in some cases, I’ve learned that the remains of my beloved dog have been in storage for 15 years and not, as my beloved mother told me, reunited with the land where she had felt happiest in her short life.
Putting things in storage was unintentionally a way of deferring grief, making it hard to reach without a crane. You don’t realize what’s in there until someone pulls it out. I expected my father to unearth several of my mom’s things — photos of her, photos of us — where I could see in her face how much she loved me. As much as I expected it, I wasn’t prepared for what it would feel like to see a look I haven’t seen in person in seven and a half years.
If not deferring grief, then perhaps the storage serves as a way of observing hiraeth — the Welsh concept of missing a place or time you can’t return to — and grieving parts of my childhood that I’d forgotten or put on the backburner. We went to Egypt as a family when I was in high school; I was peak emo teenager, pre-depression diagnosis, too depressed to be present (or smiling) for any of it. But the photos tell a different story — one where I was actually there, actually witnessing something extraordinary.
I recently read “Empress of the Nile” and have been captivated by all things Egypt and had regrets about my own trip, knowing I didn’t get the most out of it. But seeing our own photos again reminds me that I was there. I saw Nefertari’s tomb and remember my jaw dropping at the color on the walls. I stood in front of things that survived thousands of years so that even my miserable sixteen-year-old self could have a moment of wonder, whether she knew it or not.
All those things were just in this nebulous category of “stuff in storage” but now they’ve been brought to the surface for us to do something with them. Saying I want any of it is loaded because I did mock my father for years for his hoarding tendencies. Recently I needlepointed him a sign that says “It’s not hoarding if your shit is cool,” but I can say definitively there are no framed photos of me from middle school that are cool, so that’s not applicable here.
I want some of the things. I don’t want most of the things. I don’t know what’s there so I have no idea what I want. And more than that, you can’t just throw it away because it was someone’s life, or even my life, or maybe a version of my life. So most of it goes to my basement. The box moves. The guilt moves with it.
Except for Audrey, who will finally have a chance to be at peace, reunited with my mother and Houston this summer.
