Margaret

Earlier this month, I was going through a box of old files and memorabilia looking for something I had written. In the box was a small plastic bag I had not seen since I had packed the box many years earlier. What the bag contained were a few small items and a lot of memories.

The contents of the bag belonged to Margaret, an elderly woman whom I knew in San Francisco. I got them after she died more than twenty years ago, not long before I left the city permanently. In preparing to move, I had packed the bag away in that box. When I came across it again, I thought about not just my time with Margaret but also the responsibility the things in it carry for me.

I met Margaret in the late 1990s when, as a hospice volunteer, I was assigned to visit her husband. Paul was in his 80s and had recently had a stroke that robbed him of much of his mental capacity. I only visited Paul a half dozen times before he died, but by then I had gotten to know Margaret, who was in her late 70s. Margaret and Paul had married later in life and had not had any children. Margaret had no close relatives, only a niece and nephew who lived in the Midwest and with whom she rarely communicated. Paul’s nearest relative was a niece. She and Paul had been devoted to one another, and other than him, she had few acquaintances, mainly a neighbor she would see occasionally and an aide provided by the city who would stop by once a week.

After Paul died, I visited Margaret occasionally to check on her, and over time we became friends. We got into the habit of my coming over to visit her almost every Sunday night to chat and share a drink, a “beverage,” to use Margaret’s term. She drank cheap vodka she bought by the half gallon. I did not care for that, so I brought over a bottle of Canadian whiskey and told her a client had given it to me. She kept it at her house and poured a glass for me every visit. When I finished that bottle, I brought over another.

As her health declined due to age, I began to take her to medical appointments since she no longer drove. Because I was her closest acquaintance, she asked if she could give me her medical directive and durable power of attorney for healthcare. I agreed. When she could no longer live independently, she moved into Laguna Honda Hospital, the nursing home run by the City and County of San Francisco, and I continued to visit her there. Not long before she died, she named me as her executor, with her late husband’s niece as heir. I felt honored.

The plastic bag contains all that she had with her at Laguna Honda when she died. The staff there gave the items to me because she had no other close relative, no one who had followed the course of her life through her final years. Although I wasn’t sure why, I knew that I did not want to discard those things. I did not inherit any of her other possessions or the proceeds from their disposal, but I felt that in a way I was her heir and that as heir, I had a responsibility for those items. So, I put them away in that box for safekeeping.

In the bag were Margaret’s driver’s license which she used as an ID card, her checkbook, some notes she had made to herself when she was living in Laguna Honda, and a tiny memory book, the sort that parents use to mark events in a child’s early years. The memory book was one that Margaret’s mother kept for her, beginning in April 1920 when Margaret was born. In addition to a handful of entries from her mother, it contains a few notes Margaret made as a child. One touching one, written when she was nine, is her mourning the loss of her dog. I felt a catch in my throat when I read the words in her child’s handwriting:

“My Poor Collie Boy Died. October 29, 1929. Age 1 year, 5 months, 4 days. I loved him and He loved me. He was hit and lived about 15 minutes. He was my most beautiful and best Dog. I loved him.”

Now, more than twenty years after Margaret’s death, I am one of the few people left who knew her when she was alive. By holding onto the items in that bag, I consider myself a sort of caretaker of her memory. That feeling might seem silly, but I think there is something to it. I suppose that after I die, members of my immediate family will be caretakers of my memory, but what then? Who, if anyone, will remember me after they pass on? Maybe, as custodian of Margaret’s memory I am serving a function that we all need, someone who remembers and cares. My caretaking responsibilities to her will likely end with my own death, however, when my heirs look at that bag, wonder why it is among my things, and discard it. Until then, though, she still lives in my memory.

A coda on my relationship with Margaret. When Paul died, she had his body cremated and kept the urn with his ashes on her mantle. She made arrangements for her body to be cremated, as well, and to have her and Paul’s ashes scattered by air into the Pacific Ocean. Right after she died, I contacted the funeral home that was handling those arrangements and got permission to go along when the ashes were disposed. I sat in the back as the plane flew out over Half Moon Bay on a beautiful afternoon. The pilot circled a couple of times to make sure there were no boats below. Paul’s and Margaret’s ashes were in water-soluble bags. I had the honor of casting the bags out of the plane and watching them splash into the ocean. I was a lovely way to say goodbye.