The sea in little boxes

His drawers are overflowing with memories. The Mother’s Day cards I gave her as a child, with flowers, hearts and birds. Drawings made with a lot of love and little talent. Damaged photos, most often poorly framed. Elementary newsletters…

Posted at 5:00 a.m.

“Here, take them…”

My drawers are the same, even though I try to heal myself. I find it hard to part with my children’s DIY gifts, awkward poems, heart-melting acrostics. Above all, I find it difficult to separate myself from my nostalgia for the time that passes and does not return.

There comes a time when you no longer have a choice. You have to tear the page or turn it. Objects must be thrown away and memories put away alone in the invisible drawers of a swollen heart.

This Mother’s Day Sunday, I will spend it helping my parents put 50 years of life in little boxes. A sea of ​​memories to classify without drowning in them.

They have to “break house”, as they say for a new life without stairs, closer to their children, further from their life before.

The bottom of my childhood triplex has become a storehouse of memories. The basement has become both a sorting center, an antique shop and a giant bazaar. The sweaters I wore as a teenager, my old cassette stereo, my work from high school, memories brought back from my mother’s native Syria or my father’s native Senegal… We throw away, we donate, we recycle, we bequeaths. And we realize in passing that we have enough dishes to organize a banquet for the entire city of Montreal.

Objects are less important to me than the forgotten stories they tell. I found in the family library an old Russian Assimil from the 1950s that belonged to my mother. “Did you learn Russian?” »

No, she didn’t find out. But she thought about it when, after her scientific baccalaureate in Syria, she obtained a scholarship to study medicine in Moscow. Since she liked math better, she ended up choosing engineering.

The Dusty Assimil, like most books, ended up in the pile of books to give away. But there are some that I can’t bring myself to let go. Like those old bound books of my Syrian-Armenian grandfather, with his name written in Arabic on them. These are hardcover copies of the journal Al Hilal (The croissant), a Middle Eastern cultural and literary magazine, founded in Egypt in 1892. Self-taught and passionate about reading, my grandfather treasured them in his library in Aleppo with copies of The Press to which he had mysteriously subscribed from Syria in 19211.

“It was the first thing he put in the container when we left Syria. »

I don’t even read Arabic. But I couldn’t help putting it all away in my library in the nostalgia section. Probably until the day I have to break house too…

Although this stage of life is most often a must, it can seem violent when it is rushed. My mother, who had to get ahead of her because of illness, doesn’t complain about it. Of course it’s sad to have to leave a house where you saw your children grow up, where you tucked them in, fed them, loved them. But it’s not the sea to drink, she told me. That’s life. If we pour ourselves out in front of every trinket, we’ll never get there. “You have to do it, and that’s it. There are no emotions there. »

Of course, it’s always best to do these things long before life forces us to. Because you can’t sort half a century into a weekend. It can take years… And it’s never really over. The Swedes call it the “household of death”. The Scandinavian practice, theorized in 2017 in a book by Margareta Magnusson that has become a best-selling work, consists of lightening, long before our death, the burden on the shoulders of our loved ones.2.

I can’t say that we do this at home as methodically as the Swedes. It would surprise me if our approach to an old Middle Eastern souk becomes a best seller. The disease drags us into a sprint when we would of course have preferred to do things slowly. My mother who, in recent years, has accompanied Syrian refugees who had to break into their homes in otherwise tragic circumstances, shrapnel in their living room, knows that things have to be put into perspective. She thinks of the Ukrainian refugees also forced to bury their whole lives in a small suitcase, fear in their stomachs, leaving everything behind. She still thinks of all those who, during the pandemic, experienced hasty bereavement. All those who live today a Mother’s Day without a mother, without having had the time to say what they would have liked to say, to put their hearts and their memories in order…

From our “broken” home to your broken hearts, our sweetest thoughts.


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