We place our loved-ones’ remains in graves, but things used by them often stay with us for a while and become mementoes. Those relics are not buried. We then say something like: “This is all I have left, now.”
When mom died her favorite earrings were kept by my sisters. Dad’s hammer (which he loved to call “the persuader”) still hangs there above his tool bench.
I remember two other relics of my family members. Each of them comes with a story.
Often, in a winter of my Chicago childhood, my mother would say: “Go out into the shed and get some oil (kerosene) and don’t spill any!” Mom would ensure that we had heat all night and didn’t run out of fuel before morning. So she sent me out to the shed most evenings. I was six or seven years old and big for my age.
The weathered, gray, shed stood there in the shadows. As I unlocked it and opened the door, the heavy, oily smell of that shed added to the uneasy feeling that I always felt out there. Then, I would flick on the light switch and a small bulb would dispel some of the darkness.
Most nights I could just make out the stuff that had ended up in the shed that dad just couldn’t throw away. Among the paint cans, various pieces of wood, an old car battery and jars of assorted screws and bolts, there were mementoes. Reminders. Relics. Some of those things stored away in the shed reminded me of family members. I thought about them often as the ten-gallon oil can slowly filled.
One of these things was a body cast, a plaster mold of a torso, my father’s torso. Some years before, dad had fallen off a roof at work and fractured his spine in several places. At the hospital, wet-plaster infused bandages were applied over his chest and abdomen. As the casting dried, it began to shrink. Dad couldn’t breathe. Somehow he was able to phone my mother from his hospital room. Mom called the nurse on dad’s floor and the medical people cut off the front of the abdominal part so that he could breathe.
He wore that cast for at least a year until a doctor instructed a tech to saw through the sides. They gave the cast to dad. For the rest of his life, my father struggled to ensure his breathing was OK. He loved fresh air and hated neckties.
The doctors at the hospital told him that he would never work again. Not work? Tell that to a young man with a wife and three little kids at home. No more a roofer, dad became a carpenter, building new homes and remodeling others. Maybe, he kept the body cast as a reminder of how his determination squelched the prediction of the doctors.
That soiled, white, plaster cast dangled there on a hook driven in just behind and above the oil drum, the ghost of a man’s form. I wondered as only a child can wonder as the kerosene poured into the can.
On the same wall, next to the body-cast, hung a deep-brown leather apparatus with long straps. It had been used to restrain my brother. My brother, Leroy, was one year older than me. During the birthing process, he had been deprived of oxygen for some time. Although you wouldn’t know it to look a him, he had brain damage. He walked and ran like other children, but he wasn’t right. He was epileptic, mute and did not engage well.
He loved to run. I knew he was going to make an attempt when we were outside and he’d begin to smile. At every opportunity. after he learned to walk, he’d try to get away and begin running. He was uncontrollable and fast.
My father crafted the harness from shoe-store leather. The straps were leashes that dad would hold to keep Leroy under control when we went to visit family or went to the park. He had been raised on a southern Illinois farm. His experience with farm horses and their harnesses had given him the idea. The harness fit around Leroy’s chest like a bodice.
My father and mother are buried next to each other in the same cemetery where Leroy is interred. The body cast and harness are long gone, thrown out in some move. I no longer can touch the hard cast of dad’s form nor feel the soft leather of Leroy’s harness.
The relics of my dad and my brother remain a matter of the heart, now. I miss my brother and father deeply and long to embrace them in eternal life where there will be no restraints, only wholeness forever.
h