Filed under: Life
« Perhaps that’s why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived. »
– The history of love by Nicole Krauss
Andy, Sarah and I went to an estate sale this morning with hopes of finding our personal little treasure. An estate sale is the sale of everything previously owned by the recently deceased held in his/her house. It was my very first and I was tres excited. Up till recently, my dad and I use to go sieving through bazaars and flea markets all over the world from the chinatown area in Singapore to vintage stores of Quebec. He would’ve been in material haven today if he was with us especially seeing how soo many vintage records, like Puccini’s Madame Butterfly were going for sale at a dollar each. He loves records and even has a record player haha. Anyhow the estate sale got me thinking about my own mortality. Human beings often speak fondly of leaving a legacy behind for their offspring; indeed the evolutionary rationale for procreation and the religious belief of an afterlife are both entrenched deeply in the desire to prove that death is not finite. I looked around the house and realized that strangers like myself will only have material possessions through which we judge the personality of that lady. So as I looked through all her things for sale, I sculpted her personality and body shape in my mind. She must have been petite to wear size P jackets. She had a beautiful Punjabi suit so she must’ve been quite knowledgeable of other cultures, she owned a Puccini record and several Brahm ones so she was not a philistine. The Inuits believed that when a person dies, their soul shatters and each shard finds a home in every possession of the deceased. While I may be an atheist, I couldn’t help but respect the profundity of this metaphor; because every single item that we own has an eclectic of secret memories, witnessed things unseen by outsiders, contain invisible fingerprints and a sentimental value. In a beautiful way, we are what we own and our things tells an ornate story about who that person was.
Sadly, I started thinking cynically about how others descend upon the dead like vultures and your money/possessions get divided among relatives or swooped upon by others looking for a good buy at your estate sale. Suddenly there’s a bit of you sitting on the mantel piece above someone’s fire place or your heart is ticking away in that ornate little pocket watch your husband bought you in Germany, triumphant from the war. How terribly morbid.
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