The Ghosts of us.

What do we keep?

It started with a wedding album and a tiara. My parents’ wedding album and my tiara from the day I said “I do.”

I wasn’t trying to uncover some truth about memory.

I was reorganising my physical space. It was a beautiful kind of chaos.

Before you know it, one thought leads to another, and you’re off on a mission. Try and stay with me, I promise I am going somewhere with this.

While I was going through the sorting ritual, I knew what I was doing. I do it every so often. I was letting go of things from the past and reliving memories at the same time, some beautiful memories.

I feel that our physical space represents our inner world, or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way, when my space around me is messy, so is my mind. This has become “my thing”: keep clearing and moving through it, whatever “it” is.

One thing I’ve always found very difficult to part with is photographs. I have parted with less than a handful in this lifetime. In fact, during my divorce, it’s all I wanted to take from it, if I’m brutally honest with myself. Ridiculous, I hear you say, but it’s the truth, my truth. Yes, I needed practical things like money and a roof over my head, but I needed my personal items more. I didn’t confess that to anyone, until now.

Now let’s move towards the point I was trying to make in the first place.

I found myself holding my mum and dad’s wedding album from 1977. Wow, can you believe it? If they were still alive, we would be celebrating their 50th anniversary next year. That made me stop in my tracks. 50 years! We all celebrated my grandparents’ Golden Anniversary with a massive family meal, and everyone came to eat together at ours. I have the photographs from this day.

In my family, it usually passes to the daughters, to protect the photographs like our lives depend on it.

Mum passed away in 2015. That’s when it was my turn to be the keeper of memories. Now I have the honour of protecting that love as if my life depends on it.

In the back of my parents’ wedding album was their stationery. Mum had kept it all these years. Mum remarried Eddie when I was 14. My biological dad, Jim, passed away with leukaemia when he was 36. I was 10, my sister was 7. The album mattered to Mum, more so after Dad passed away. It also mattered to my sister and me. It then mattered to Eddie too when he joined our story.

I was never at that wedding in 1977, but I’ve held those items from Mum and Dad’s wedding day more times than you could imagine. The album, her veil and tiara, and the stationery.

My sister and I played dress-up in Mum’s dress so frequently that their wedding day has become a memory so ingrained into my mind that I recall it and feel it as if I was physically there.

I wasn’t born for another two years, my sister 3.5 years after me. Of course, it was inherited memory. Note to self: I must ask my sister if she recalls it the way I do.

We would sit together as a family and watch old cinema reels. The ones without sound, with moving images appearing on a projector screen at home. These are some of my earliest memories.

The stars in those movies were my family.

I hadn’t met them all either.

My mum’s brother, Ronald, passed away in a very tragic accident before I was born. Yet I knew him. I have always known him.

That’s what I want to leave for the family coming behind me.

That’s the legacy.

Ronald has shaped me and touched my soul in ways that I can’t explain to anyone. His memory lived through others. That’s what happened. We did graveside visits to bring flowers, and my sister and I made daisy chains and blew wishes on dandelions while we waited for the adults to do their thing.

I guess what I’m saying is those rituals, the people and memories, have become part of my anatomy, my biology, my spirit, me.

It’s the core of who I am.

The physical items that I hold onto today represent continuity in a human story that I am now part of.

That got me thinking. Why do people attach meaning to photographs so strongly? Why do some people treasure silly little objects? Objects that mean nothing to anyone else apart from the keeper.

The answer is simpler than we think. Some people attach meaning to the experience and some attach strongly to objects. Neither is right or wrong. It just is. Items are a physical portal to the person.

Mum met Eddie when I was a very difficult teenager, and at times I still giggle to myself at how patient this man was with me. I think I’d scared everyone else away at this point.

Some people are story keepers primarily, with a deep need to know who everyone was, where they came from and what happened.

Some people are continuity keepers. They do two things: they preserve the object and they preserve the thread that connects generations.

I am the latter.

After 10 years of carrying that album and sifting through my parents’ possessions, including Eddie’s, the man I called Dad alongside Daddy Jim’s memory, I should now know the things I need to be able to carry forward.

What do I keep and what do I let go of?

You would think it’s easy when the answer is love.

I hold onto the love.

Someone asked me quite a few months ago, “What is love?”

Sounds like a very simple question to answer, doesn’t it?

At the time, I couldn’t put it into words. I just knew I represented everything it stands for.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. You have helped me.

Now I think I can attempt to answer that a little lighter and easier.

Love...

Love, I don’t think, is one thing.

We survive through the biology of relationships. Psychologically, it is knowing someone deeply enough that you feel it. That person is woven into your world internally and externally.

"Love is something we are when another’s existence permanently alters yours" I heard this recently and its very true.

My parents didn’t just exist in photographs. They changed what my nervous system notices.

It taught me that photographs matter. That memories should be preserved.

Family stories should be told and retold until we know them as if they are our own. Certain pieces of paper matter. Those aren’t rubbish. Someone’s handwriting matters decades after their hand no longer works.

People who aren’t physically present can remain part of the family.

So, who am I?

That is a question I am always seeking answers to, and what I am now matters to me. What I choose going forward matters to me.

I am not sure there has ever been a fully formed me. I’ve been growing since my mother’s womb, earlier if we get clever about it.

I know what my family gave me. What those experiences gave me.

What rejection has given me. Heck, I’ve rejected things and realised I was wrong instantly, the same with accepting things. I have transformed and evolved because of it, and I’ll keep doing so.

Which is why I now find myself in a dilemma. One that’s different to any I have experienced before.

What do I do with my wedding photographs now that I am divorced?

I haven’t even looked at them. I don’t want to open that just yet. Because now I’m stood holding my own wedding tiara in my hand. It’s tiny, so pretty, with delicate pearls wrapped into fine gold wiring. It looks like beautiful little threads woven with love.

I dreamed of becoming that bride when I was a little girl playing tea parties and dress-up.

I am now having the full realisation of that dream, all over again.

I’m recalling my vintage wedding car and dress, and how things don’t always go to plan. That’s what I learned quickly in life. That day was no different. I was running over an hour and a half late. My own doing entirely. I wanted my nails done last minute. As far as I was concerned, everyone could wait. I was only getting married once.

My dad was the only one there when I returned to the bridal suite, all pretty with my hair and make-up done. It’s usually the women waiting there to make a fuss, is it not?

But nope, all gone ahead to the church.

I was devastated. My childhood vision was now going sideways.

Dad was the one who calmed me down, saved the mascara and zipped me into my wedding dress… all whilst I’m doing a very bizarre side-skip in an attempt not to expose myself any further. Just imagine some bizarre Chinese dragon dance, with the person underneath wearing garments that only my husband should be seeing.

Still, Dad and I survived that moment, and we laughed about it many times afterwards.

Dad saw me in the most vulnerable of times and states, not just on that day.

He was there for my pregnancies and babies too. I sustained losses and won victories along the way; he was there for them all.

Our family have shared many joys in music, dance and jokes over the years. I loved my family and still do.

So, I ask myself again, “What is love?”

Perhaps there isn’t one answer to that.

I think it’s what has remained in a person or a family after someone they loved has gone. A letter survives, a photograph survives, a habit of storytelling survives.

And a daughter can pick up a 50-year-old photo album and smile with warmth and remembrance in her chest.

A divorced woman - what would a divorced woman want with her wedding photos and a tiara?

It’s not as if she misses the marriage or wants it back, for that matter.

Why then are my instincts to preserve it? The same with the ivory buttonhole roses? Real flowers I kept from my wedding day. The flowers now older than the marriage.

But why?

Who does that?

I got emotional when I sat with that for a moment, not because of sadness, but because I can’t gather all the witnesses of that day.

The conversational exchange now would be wonderful. What we all know now is so very different to the original vision.

I would have happily exchanged stories with my family for eternity.

Now I’m back in the room again, holding the tiara, and I’m saying today isn’t the day to throw anything like this away.

Why not today?

Do I need to throw it away, and what does it mean if I keep any of it?

So, I sit longer waiting until the answer comes…

I immediately think, “I shouldn’t have got married.”

Wrong answer… keep going.

So, what is the issue then?

It is 20 years’ worth of memories I’m holding, not just an object. I can’t erase 20 years of my life like it didn’t happen, as if it did not matter.

I do not want to erase any of it.

It’s not the tiara’s fault that it carries 20 years of evidence of a life once lived. It was the possibilities that it represented to 22-year-old me.

I still feel like I need to let something go, but I can’t put my finger on what it is.

There’s something extraordinarily human about realising that the person standing at the end of the aisle ultimately wasn’t deserving of what I was offering.

Yet that 22-year-old version of me was somebody quite different to who I am now.

Ahhh, that’s it.

I feel like “I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

That was my past life and it needs a line in the sand.

But in that idea of “letting go” stands another hidden trap I hadn’t seen before.

Sometimes we start to believe that letting go requires some grand demonstration by means of destruction.

It does not.

You can still throw something away and be trapped by what happened.

The opposite can also be true. You can keep something and be completely free of it.

Now the important question becomes…

What does the tiara really mean to me?

My marriage wasn’t particularly pleasant. I don’t suppose any divorced person’s marriage ended happily.

Still, it was my life and my children’s, and that was the issue.

That right there!

My children matter.

I matter.

Our experience happened, regardless of whether it does or doesn’t measure up to the romantic version I have painted in my mind of my parents’ and grandparents’ marriages.

I have been holding on for all these years because if I let go, I thought that would have meant our lives didn’t matter, it didn’t exist, it wasn’t real.

But it was.

It was all very much real, its my human-life experience.

To me, it was symbolic, like a certificate I’d proudly earned for attending the university of life.

My tiara is something much more complicated. It represented hope, innocence, motherhood, achievement, pain, endurance, disillusionment and growth.

It doesn’t need to feel counterfeit to my parents’ and grandparents’ versions of the story.

That’s when I realised: “I have been trying to preserve memories for other people.”

My children.

But I can’t preserve the evidence expecting my children to experience the same story as me.

They will not.

Perhaps that’s why it’s painful, partly because I so desperately wanted to give them what my parents and grandparents had inadvertently given me.

Knowledge of where I came from, surrounded by love.

Does that mean my children’s origin story becomes worthless because the marriage was toxic and ended badly?

They came from it.

Absolutely not.

This matters to me.

Our holidays happened. The birthdays happened. Christmas mornings happened. Businesses existed. Houses became homes for a period.

My children grew up. I became many different versions of myself.

None of that makes me or our story fictional.

I can relinquish the marriage without relinquishing the life I lived during it.

My children already possess their own memories of the marriage and our lives together. Their relationship with that history belongs to them. That should now become my children’s box to open, if or when they are ever ready to.

The objects can’t answer us.

But they are the nearest physical things we have to continuing a conversation after a person is gone.

It exists in touch.

When you hold something they touched, you suddenly understand something they understood. I find there is a beautiful kind of magic in that.

For a moment, different points in time occupy the same room.

Now I have another question…

What deserves to travel with me into the next version of my life?

I want my children to have the ability to hold my treasures, even the not-so-shiny ones.

My daughter isn’t ready just yet for the responsibility of becoming the keeper, nor do I wish to impose that onto her. She is only 22, the same age I was when I got married.

My story was different to hers, in that my father died. My mum’s brother had died.

My second dad, Eddie, did something wonderful. He allowed our story to continue, encouraging us to keep the memories of dead people very much alive.

I call that love.

My daughter doesn’t know the depth of the pain I have carried.

Nor do I know the depths of hers.

My story might give her continuity one day when she feels like she’s lost her way too.

So, in the meantime, all that is left for me to do is wrap my tiara up in pretty paper and store it away inside a treasure box just for her, because it matters to me.

Our threads matter to me.

Hopefully one day they will matter to her too, but for her own reasons.

I remain hopeful that one day she will gain strength from my story, our story, and choose to continue it with love.

Love does not require historical amnesia.

Mum and Dad Eddie taught me that.

So, whoever continues my story with me will need to understand that whilst I hold no allegiance to anyone but myself, I held one before.

I will not ask them to compete with ghosts of the past.

Instead, I will ask them to help me weave the legacy of us into the next one.

I carry little treasure boxes full of love; those are my legacy.

That is my home.

That is my love.

This is me, and I am ready to start a new box of little treasures full of love.