PEORIA MAGAZINE July 2023

ONE MORE THING

TAKING INVENTORY OF A LIFE

BY PHIL LUCIANO

H ow do you sort through a person’s life? After a loved one dies, can you pore over decades and decades of belongings, keepsakes and mementoes – deciding what stays and what goes – without feeling like the Grim Reaper? Chunk by chunk, pile by pile, a long lifetime undergoes quick scrutiny. What goes inside a scrapbook? What heads out with the potato peels? What survives? What doesn’t? Thumbs up. Thumbs down. Sigh. Perhaps you’ve had to undertake this unwelcome but necessary chore. Someone dies, and a home cannot remain a museum forever. Trash bag

after trash bag gets stuffed fat, while the keeper box looks relatively barren. You mind calls it practical. But your heart feels cold. In my case, I’ve been sifting through not just one lifetime but several. Aunt Donna’s weathered house makes for a remarkable time capsule, chronicling four generations of the family that built the place. In the wake of her passing at the age of 88, I have become the main caretaker of this ersatz museum, which soon will be sold. Aunt Donna had no widower or children, and her next-of-kin is my wife. So, for weeks, I’ve been rummaging through nearly 150 years of memories. I knew only Aunt Donna, none of her long-gone forebears. So, I feel like something of an archeologist,

examining a family from the inside out. Maybe that makes me suited for the job, with less sentimentality to get in the way of pragmatism. She kept a neat house: a place for everything and everything in its place. But there is so much jammed into so many places. She was no hoarder. She was a book keeper. Very thorough. At work, that’s efficient. At home, now that she’s gone, it can be overwhelming. There are papers and files and papers and boxes and folders and papers and copies and papers and frames and papers and certificates and papers and photos and papers and binders and papers and receipts and papers and coupons and papers and warranties and papers and manuals and papers and pamphlets.

110 JULY 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE