Currently Listening To

An old Radiolab episode, "Words."  Convincing scientist argues correspondence between what we call "language" and what we call "thought."  Language isn't just a tool for cooperation, but also enables abstract relations.  Children of five years can't remember which corner of a room an object was left in based on the color of the walls, or describe it as being "to the right of the blue wall." Descartes was half-right: of course thought is not fundamental to existence, but language is fundamental to identity.

As I hear this, I am tearing through my mother's papers.  She wrote constantly.  Plans.  Idle thoughts.  Notes and reminders that she never re-read.  The rarest and most wonderful treats: letters that she didn't send, written for conscious communication, because they can actually be understood by another human being.

Those we save, the rest is pulp.  It doesn't matter how much of her inheres in them, if it doesn't speak to the rest of us.  Half-illegible, whole-unorganized, they served a logical purpose for her in the writing, and an emotional purpose in the refusal to face their accumulation, refusal to abandon her past.  Like the rest of us Novitskis, she preferred to face forward and live positively, but regretted almost every decision, every home she abandoned, every friend she lost regular contact with.

In what turned out to be our last month together, she said that her year-long struggle with her own deceased parents' belongings had changed her.  After a lifetime of becoming hurt and angry at our insistence of the clear uselessness of the shit that crammed the rooms and hallways of house in Miami, like so much plaque clogging her veins, now (she claimed) she was ready to let go.

"I could clear out that house in a month," she said.

"Yeah, we'll see," my father said, when I told him this.  We both laughed, but of course, we didn't see.

We didn't see, and so I'm stuck, when remembering her now, remembering her as the person she had told me she no longer was.  Every time before, when my father and I tried to do what we are now doing, we knew that she would do nothing but get in the way.  Move herself physically to block our path, manipulate us emotionally to abandon the attempt.

"How could you throw this away," I can hear her exclaiming.

"It's my math homework from the sixth grade."

"Oh, you were such a smart kid, and Ms. Onorati knew it!"

"You don't need to keep this to remember that."

"You'll understand," she would frequently say to try to close the conversation, "when you're older."

We'll see.