I have few physical treasures that have survived from the era in which my mother lived into the modern one in which I now reside as someone’s wife and mother. The last of these items that she had bought for me in one life and had endured into this one, was my spoon rest. It was the run of the mill spoon rest one finds as an impulse buy in the checkout aisle of Bed Bath and Beyond. My 12 year old unspectacular spoon rest had already cracked once, soon after she passed. My husband who isn’t often sentimental quickly ran out to buy the cheapest strongest glue and piece it back together because back then I was fragile and I couldn’t lose one more thing including her tchotchkes. So when I dropped the spoon rest on Sunday and just stared at it split cleanly and completely in two, the first words out of his mouth were, “I’ll get the glue.”
“No,” I responded. “Not this time. Sometimes things are not meant to be put back together.”
I have wanted to write something about 2018 for awhile. Some sort of angst and profanity laced tome that damned this whole stupid year to wherever it should go, and so no one is more surprised than me that I’m writing an obituary. Because as any avid reader of the obituary section will tell you, they are in fact love stories.
Always, they start with the basics. Usually these beginnings are also peppered with relevant information like where they lived, or graduated, or worked. These sentences go in the beginning and are usually the shortest, mostly because in the totality of our living, though we spend the most time wringing our hands about things like this, when all is said and done they are actually the least relevant.
What follows among the best of them are the stuff that make up a life worthy of living. And I tell you it is never, never about promotions, money, grades, success or other highly quantifiable levels of achievement. The best obituaries are descriptions of people who were loved and loved life. It describes relationships - people they will miss, that will miss them. To his beloved wife, her lifelong husband, her favorite friend or sister or daughter or brother or golden retriever.
And it is about what they spent their time on this earth actually caring about. They describe with careful attention the way they would lovingly plan the garden club luncheon, prepare a fantastic tuna casserole, root for the Yankees, restore old broken down cars, always look you in the eye when they shook your hand, and close down Karaoke night with their favorite Frank Sinatra song. Obituaries are a love story between people and life itself, about the webs of those we love and leave, and in the cracks the tiny most indescribable things that manage to fill our lives with joy and meaning, that in that moment seem small, but at the end you realize was the whole point.
The close of every year gives us the chance through good and bad and broken, to examine those cracks more deeply. Because that is what really defined us. Not what happened, but how we coped, who we called when we were happy and excited, and loved, what we tended and read. How we healed and sustained ourselves in the face of persistent adversity. Who was there to celebrate the tiniest of wins.
So RIP 2018. You leave behind a considerably more weathered version of me.
You reminded me time and again what a fantastic husband I have. The one who unapologetically dresses as the bun to my hot dog at the purim carnival and the one that was always there to help my Dad. You gave us a wonderful family trip together to Virginia followed by a wonderful family-wide case of the Flu. Thank you for that 2018. You gave us the opportunity to lie in bed together for six straight days and watch Despicable Me on a never ending loop. You gave us non stop school spirit days that I continually forgot about so that my kids participated in almost nothing. Thank you for reminding them to love me for other reasons. You gave us a happy reason to all come together and we celebrated and took lots of pictures and ate a cake with a manatee on top because, thirteen year old girls. You gave us birthdays and family illness. Student council wins and questions that became more difficult to answer as my kids got older.
You gave us aging everything. You smacked me in the face with the ultra fortyish nature of my forties so hard that I almost fell over. You gave me friends and family that understood. You also gave me friends and families who faked it and nodded and listened even when they didn’t. You gave me a Thanksgiving where I never even managed to put on a bra and served fancy appetizers like candy corn on ritz crackers. But it was perfect because of my people. On Hanukkah I wrapped a library book in unicorn paper and gave it as a present because Hanukkah presents hadn’t happened yet. On their birthdays I forgot to even buy the goody bags for their friends. But I remembered to take lots of pictures and make them their favorite cakes and remember their smiles always. You gave us winds that howled so loud and so hard, that they woke me up in the middle of the night. But you also gave us plenty of warm blankets and people that sheltered us from it. There was the opportunity to feel happy and sad and pain and finally, for the first time in my life, not preface the feeling of actually experiencing any of these things with the words, “I’m sorry.”
In Japan they have a tradition known as Kintsugi. It’s basically repairing broken pottery using gold dust. It creates something new and unique out of something broken. It is designed to highlight the beauty in your scars. The tradition sounds lovely and maybe in another year I’d write up some special thing about how I’m dusting off all of the wounds from this year and highlighting them with gold and celebrating them but I don’t think so. Anyway not this year. You were a lot of things 2018, but gold dusted you were not.
My mother in law’s sister is an artist in England who purposely breaks bone china tea sets and creates something new from the pieces. She describes her work as hovering between “order and rupture” and I don’t know, that feels a bit more my speed as I round out this year. Maybe I don’t throw out the pieces and maybe I don’t highlight them either. Maybe I just stay broken and turn it into something new.
Though I rightly hope I’m jumping the gun here, no doubt someday the final words written about myself should include the extremely important nugget of information that never in her life could she pass up actively rotting bananas without immediately making banana bread. I don’t have many hard and fast rules in my life, but the idea of passing on a piece of rotting fruit that I will surely throw out in the next day or so without giving it at least the fighting chance to become tomorrow’s breakfast? That just seems wrong. Maybe it’s an impulse to avoid being wasteful. Or maybe I just love that old story about turning something new out of something brown and withering.
Anyway, a memorial service for 2018 will be held on December 31st. In lieu of gifts, the family requests that all who are left behind with their hearts roughly straddling that line between order and rupture, take their broken pieces into 2019 and repurpose them for something else new and better and different and unknown.
The family also requests that you never ever throw out overripe bananas without first attempting banana bread.
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