On Friday afternoon last week, I received a box of photographs from someone I did not know. The mailer contained images taken by my mother, a part time professional photographer, during a prolific and creative time in her life, roughly 1960 to 1980. The collection was an eclectic mix of nature studies, university students listening to a lecture, construction workers sanding wood, ballet dancers performing, and formal portraits. I had seen some of them before, but many I had not.
The collection had been maintained by the sender for a decade. She had received them from a sculptor friend who had salvaged them from a dumpster years ago in an artistic area in downtown Cincinnati. How they ended up in the trash decades after their creation is a mystery. The kindly conservator tracked me down from my mother’s obituary and then direct messaged me on Facebook. I am new to both Facebook and Messenger; if she had looked for me six months, she would not have found me.
I am not a spiritual person; however, there are times when my deceased mother speaks clearly to me. In the days before and after her death in 2014, her missives were unmistakable.
My mom lost the power of speech about a year prior to her death due to cognitive decline, although her expressive face would convey responses to my cheerful chatter. On July 28, 2014, when I met her for our almost-daily visits, she smiled at me, and cheerfully asked, “how are the boys?” I almost fell off my chair. We had a short, but clear conversation that day. I asked her how she was doing, and she responded with sincerity that she was fine, her tone implying that her answer should have been obvious to me. I did not know it, but she was saying goodbye.
My mother died suddenly two days later.
The day after her passing, my brother and I cleared out her room at the assisted living center. We carted her furnishings, and those stored in my garage, into a rented cargo van. After donating what we could, and keeping what we loved, we dumped the rest at the local transfer station. When we were done, we pulled onto the weigh station to check out. The cashier rang up the charges and informed us we owed $23.00. We searched my mother’s fanny pack, a decrepit accessory that she favored in lieu of a purse, and opened her wallet. It contained exactly $23.00 cash. My brother and I exchanged a long look. We knew Shirley: she never wanted her children to pay for anything that involved her. She left us the cash to pay her way.
Two months later, we held my mother’s life celebration. I was touched that the devoted nursing home caregiver who was holding her hand as she gently slipped away attended. He had been a constant and gentle figure in her final months.
Later that night, my young adult children connected and celebrated with their cousins at a downtown Seattle bar. At the end of the evening, they summoned an Uber car. As they climbed gratefully inside after a long and emotional day, my daughter in law looked at the driver and said, “you were at Shirley’s life celebration today!” He nodded, yes, that he had, and that he drove for Uber at night to supplement his income.
The odds that my mother’s caregiver drove for Uber, that he was working on the night of her life celebration, that he was in the area where Shirley’s grandchildren were assembled, and that his car was randomly selected as the one of countless Saturday night Uber cars is infinitesimal. Unless, of course, Shirley had a hand in it.
The timing of receiving my mother’s long misplaced photographs was not lost on me. They arrived on the final weekend of a 20-week project I initiated when I gave up my rented storage unit. One of my primary goals was to curtail the massive volume of my mother’s photographs into a manageable universe of carefully curated and labeled storage bins so that my brother and I could sort, archive, and give them to family members. Shirley knew there was inventory that we were not aware of, and she initiated in some mysterious and oblique way, their delivery to me.
I know that the gifts we are given by our loved ones survive the givers’ earthy presence, but it never occurred to me that they might be delivered in a box via the US Postal service.