Maximalisma

Before she died nearly three decades ago at age 93, my widowed paternal grandmother put her modest farmhouse in order, emptying the attic of what I saw as precious artifacts: children’s books and toys belonging to my father and his sister, vintage dresses from John Wanamaker, her 1928 wedding gown, a hooped petticoat belonging to a great-great aunt. She unsentimentally emptied drawers of greeting cards and photographs, gradually consumed the mason jars of tomatoes, peaches, and other bounty she’d preserved in her cellar pantry for decades. She did this not because she wasn’t a caring person, but because she was one. She didn’t want her children burdened with decisions about what to keep and give away after she died.

By contrast, my paternal grandfather’s sisters, Ethel and Ruth—who also lived well into their 90s, although neither of them married—did nothing of the sort. By the time my great-aunt Ruth’s failing health forced her to leave the small apartment where she’d lived for nearly half a century, it was almost impossible to walk down the hallway connecting her living room to her kitchen and bedroom. Rather than throw away anything that she thought might one day be useful or interesting—to herself or someone else—she filled brown paper grocery bags with rubber-band balls, cans of tuna fish, coupons, newspaper clippings. The hallway was lined with these bags, floor to ceiling, several deep on both sides. The living room and bedrooms were similarly claustrophobic, not only with more bulging grocery bags, but also with stacks of books, newspapers, and of course, even more brown paper bags. These were flattened and ready for filling. Unfortunately, my father and his sister (my aunt Joan) couldn’t simply toss the sacks, because mixed in among the used aluminum foil and 1940s A&P coupons were family photos, Daughters of the American Revolution papers,
elaborate diagrams of the Russ family tree, and valuable savings bonds. (Ethel at least kept a tidier house, but on her death, my father and Aunt Joan found a cellar heaped with hundreds of unopened sacks of sugar that Ethel had amassed during the Depression.)

In a first-year college psychology class, I learned about Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development. My peers and I were in stage five, a period of adolescence characterized by a need to feel seen by and connected to others by surrounding oneself with emblems of a nascent self—significant souvenirs, nostalgic objects, mementos. I thought of my dorm room, the walls covered with photographs of my family and friends, posters of Botticelli’s Primavera and Van Gogh’s Starry Night, taped-up album covers—The Who’s Tommy, Stevie Wonder’s Superstition, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust—all ways of externalizing some semblance of the person I hoped I was or might become.

Not until I was in my 50s, however, did it dawn on me that I might share more than a little of my great-aunts’ tendency to hold on to things. I was recovering from a running injury, and my physical therapist prescribed exercises to do at home. All you need, she said, is a wall to flatten your palms against and room enough to stretch your hamstrings and adductors. When I got home after that session and began looking for empty wall space, I realized that I didn’t have any. All the walls, upstairs and down, were lined with groaning bookcases and furniture, cut with windows, or cobbled with framed artwork, hung salon-style from floor to ceiling. I finally ended up holding my arms outstretched against my refrigerator, which wasn’t even totally flat—I had to work around the magnets and a defunct ice and water dispenser in the door.