I spent Saturday morning with my father. First we had breakfast, then we went back to his house to continue the process of cleaning and reorganizing things to fit his life as it is now, his status that of a widower.
When my mother passed in February, there was so much to do. She had been in a long term care facility for 6 months, and the first consideration was getting her belongings back home, getting the house presentable for the visitors after the service, and getting through the first few weeks without her in our lives.Now, we've begun the process of cleaning out the house, including her belongings. It's an important process for my father (and for me, I suppose) in putting things into perspective. I cherish the jewelry of hers that my father gave me... things she had been very vocal about wanting me to have that had such great value to her. Today, however, I was in the middle of what she considered her greatest legacy... her books.
My mother was a voracious reader... we shared that hunger for words... for knowledge... for a fantastic escape from the mundane by losing ourselves between the pages of a book, no matter the genre.My father needed to clean out the office so that he could have more room to work. He's not a reader like my mother and I... he reads what he must, but not for pleasure. So, he asked me to come over and start packing books, taking what I wanted immediately, and preparing the rest for storage until I had the shelves up to display them all.
I knew my mother had a lot of books. For years they were stacked two high and two deep on every available shelf. Hard cover, paperback... you name it. Today, I was stunned at how large that library really was. I packed 10 large boxes (the weight just on the edge of what I could carry) of books today, and that wasn't even a third of what was there. I've brought two boxes home, containing those most precious to me, that I think I can fit into my own overflowing bookcases. I will have to buy many more bookcases to hold this legacy.
I realized that you really learn a lot about someone when you go through their library. You learn what they think about... what they enjoy... what piques their interest... and sometimes what horrifies them. You learn a bit about how their mind works, and you learn what you have in common with them. It was an exercise of remembering my mother in a different way... one more poignant in some respects than I have experienced thus far. Going through her life of collected books made me remember so many discussions... things we talked about for hours.
As I packed box after box... every novel ever written by Tom Clancy, John Grisham, James Patterson, James Clavell, Wilbur Smith, Ayn Rand, Dean Koontz, Louis L'Amour, Irving Wallace, James Michener, Jeffrey Archer... oh my word, the list goes on and on... political thrillers, murder mysteries, religion, philosophy, history, romance, biographies, spy novels, westerns, poetry, comedy... I was inundated with author after author... my head was swimming by the time I'd emptied the third shelf. I was looking at fiction, non-fiction... she wasn't a big fan of sci-fi.. that's where my bookcases take over.
I was looking at series of books that had 50 titles for each author... and she collected every last one of them. Throwing a book away is a sin paramount to murder in my home, and I learned that from my mother. I found old books... "Sonnets from the Portugese"... a first edition hardcover; "Constantine"... also a first edition hardcover... and some odd discoveries... the Book of Mormon (my mother wasn't Mormon) being one. My description of these discoveries is as random and frenetic as the actual event.
I don't know how to describe the feelings I went through as I looked at all these books... it was such a huge range of emotion. Overall, it was positive. I recognized a new way to keep my mother with me, to remember her in the pages of those books, knowing that she too enjoyed every quiet moment lost in those fictional stories or intrigued by the history and ideas presented in each non-fiction selection... and I look forward to blending the past with the present, and adding more in the future. I won't be the old cat lady in the neighborhood, I'll be the book lady... many of my friends on shelves surrounding me, characters I've grown to love over the years... enemies I've learned to despise because of their actions... heroes I admire more than I could ever express... and sorrow at loss so keenly described between the covers.
And, when I find the next house in which I must live, you can bet that there will be an entire room lined with bookcases to hold the ever-expanding collection; and they will be catalogued as they are placed alphabetically, by author, on the shelves. :)
Thank you Mother, for your legacy of books.
