The Necropolitan Sentinel

Almost a year and a half ago, I left Vermont to come here to Wisconsin, to prep the place for my parents’ arrival from Naples, FL, to spend a final summer at their lake house here, before moving to assisted living and putting the house on the market to sell. As I’ve mentioned before, Mom’s got prefrontal dementia, and Dad’s got advanced macular degeneration, and he calculated, correctly, that the retirement community in which they were living didn’t have adequate services to take care of Mom, if anything happened to him. In August, you may recall, he became very ill and had to spend 45 days in the hospital, and then rehab at the assisted living facility where we had moved Mom. During that time, I had to stay with her from mid-afternoon to 9:30 am, and over weekends. I then returned out to the lake home to get it ready for sale.

My sister Brigid has pitched in with the cleaning and preparation, driving all the way from near Ann Arbor, MI. My brother Tim oversaw the remodelling of the 80s-era kitchen. Enoch has helped drive Dad and Mom back and forth and had them to his place many times, which is not too far from where they live. It’s been important for Dad, in particular, to get away from their place and socialize, since Mom’s pretty well checked out. We’ve gotten some treasures moved to auction houses, set up the date for the estate sale, fixed most of the little, nagging defects in the house, got Mom and Dad situated and then moved to a different apartment in the same building on the first floor, where more of the residents have their wits about them. We’ve weathered the storm.

Now, it’s important for me to get back to my family, so I’m moving back to Vermont, leaving on March 10 in hopes of being there for Aidan’s birthday. I’m trying to land a job there, and have lots of matters to attend to before I leave, including these photographs.

My mom’s dad was a serious genealogist, as I may have mentioned, and left a mountain of material that I’ve had to scan and dump onto the web in the interest of the hypothetical madman (or -woman) who might have an interest in it all. Then, it was time to work on Dad’s family material in the same fashion, sending as much of it as I could endure into the cloud. Now, I’ve been breaking down most of the albums in which for decades my parents mercilessly stuffed photos. I’ve been breaking them into 5 piles, one for each of us, with those photos particularly devoted to us and to our respective monsterlings, but also with a sprinkling of materials pertaining to the other kids, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and so forth. In the process, I’ve been pitching out photos, many of them pertaining to travels that Mom and Dad took all over the world, featuring heavy doses of architecture, scenery and art. If Mom were able to help Dad reminisce, and Dad were able to see without the aid of an unwieldy enlarger, it might make sense to hang onto them for longer. As it is, it doesn’t make sense at all.

Most of those things are available to the view already on the Internet, if people want to go search for them. All that people really want to see is images of their loved ones, preferably at important moments or in candid shots that capture something of their essence. Some of the documents could conceivably be of interest to our hypothetical online lunatic genealogist, but probably not. All of that material I’ve scanned and made available, because my father would like still to be understood when he is gone. I don’t think that that’s an outlandish wish, but all that ever remains is the story of love, the stories that we hand down to one another as we teach one another to love. Those who know the stories will recall them when they see the pictures, and those who learn them may be interested in those particularities for a generation or two because of the love that they themselves bear for those who taught them in turn, but that is all. And that is as it should be, too, at least for those of us who believe that we are nothing but pilgrims, here.

We are all just inhabitants and chroniclers of a time in a place. The commentary that we leave behind on the momentarily fascinating kerfuffles of the Internet fade into obscurity, even as we write them. We are in no position to bargain or to demand the attentions of those who come after. They will have their own burdens and joys. Why should they care?

I have done a son’s duty, but it’s time for me to move on. Enoch’s been moving some of the pictures onto Facebook, where our cousins and their families and friends can comment, and I’ve loaded some of them up there, too. And it’s that conversation that means something, for now, because now is all we have or ever shall have, until then.

If your love cannot suffice, then nothing can; let the rest go.

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