For the living, it’s never really over

A woman I didn’t know very well but hit it off with immediately and I got to talking.

She’d devoted the previous weekend to cleaning out her recently deceased mother-in-law’s condo. Rather than sell it, she and her husband were having their newly graduated from college daughter move in. Before she could, grandma’s personal effects needed to be removed.

This woman had known her mother-in-law for 25 years. They’d gotten along well. But when she cleared out her home, she was, well, disappointed.

“I found myself looking for more — for some deeper insight into who she was,” she said.

She continued to explain that her mother-in-law was the epitome of organization. Her house was clean and orderly. So had been her life.

But wasn’t there more to her, she had wondered? She wasn’t looking for revelations of, oh, an illegitimate child or secret affair, but she’d hoped to find some things she could connect to her by — words of wisdom, or letters — anything that might have provided a deeper window into her heart and soul.

But what was on the surface matched what was hidden away in the drawers and closets. She found nothing unexpected — or personal.

“That’s why I write letters,” this woman said, explaining that she has written her daughters via U.S. mail weekly while they have been away at college. “That’s why I collect little sayings and words of wisdom and tuck them away. After I’m gone, they’ll find them, and think of me, and get a little more insight into who I was.”

If that’s the case, after I go, my kids will be finding messages from fortune cookies promising success just around the corner and rewards for keeping up the hard work until the day it’s their turn to go.

 But I guess I would be of the mind that if it’s something I don’t want known in life, I probably wouldn’t want it known after death. Sure, there are times now when I wish I’d been badder — not in a breaking the law or hurting anyone else kind of way, but in the sense of taking risks and making spontaneous choices as opposed to always the sensible and safe ones. But if I had, I wouldn’t write about it and leave it for my children to find.

Still, I got what she was saying. The closest thing I can relate it to are the recipes I have from certain people I loved — my grandmother, a close friend, a cherished aunt. In their handwriting, with their notes on yellowed cards and pieces of paper, they give me comfort every time I look at them.

 Death may be the end, but that doesn’t mean it’s over — at least, not for those left behind, who inevitably, it seems, are left wanting more.

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