“Memory Care”

by David Benjamin

“… Strictly entre nous/ Darling, how are you?/ And how are all/ Those little dreams/ That never did come true?… ”

— “Thanks for the Memory,”  Leo Robin & Ralph Rainger

MADISON, Wis. — Lately, I’ve been trampling on my sister’s memories.

Margaret Ann Benjamin, henceforth referred to as Peg, was a world-class accumulator of flotsam and jetsam. She threw nothing away. It’s more than six years since she died, but two of her friends, Shirley and Rosie, are still presiding over heaps of hoardings that Peg, who ran out of space, asked them to store.  

Recently, I got around to clearing a rented locker where I’d squirreled away several hundred pounds of Peg’s surplusage. As I opened boxes, I encountered dozens of books unread and largely unreadable. The books, all hardcover and seemingly brand-new, date back to Peg’s employment at Borders. There, as she once told me, the giant bookseller would regularly pile up great stacks of “remainders,” novels by unknown and unloved authors that did not sell to anyone and never would. Employees were granted the opportunity to sift through these orphan tomes and take them home, for free. 

Peg took them home, hundreds of them. She piled them up, filled bookcases and, as far as I could tell, never read any of them. Since breaching that storage locker, it’s been my duty to transfer this trashery of unwanted literature to the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store, whose employees, with no acquaintance with or reverence for Peg will probably deem the books unsaleable and feed them into a pulping machine.

Among the many items going to St. Vinny’s is a faux Tiffany lamp that  resided on Peg’s sideboard for years. She never turned it on. My wife and I inherited it. We’ve never used it, nor do we have a space on which to stand it. It has bounced around to our every room, sometimes intact, often disassembled, sometimes erect, usually tipped over and stuffed behind or beneath something else. It has become symbolic of the detritus left behind by death. Peg didn’t cherish the thing. She barely noticed it. Nor has it touched the hearts of any of her survivors. However, if some shopper wandering St. Vinny’s finds that homely lamp, likes it and has a place for it to stand, to light up a comfortable chair, where its discoverer might sit and read some unknown author whose book was remaindered at a Borders in Ann Arbor fifteen years ago, well then…

The hardest chore in my review of Peg’s junk was throwing away photos. Among the stacks of prints and slides, many photos recall Peg’s working life and her involvement in the Association of Legal Administrators. Because Peg was a chronic fussbudget, she turned, predictably, into a rigorous, meticulous legal administrator. Over her career, she very likely learned enough about the law to have walked into a courtroom and argued a case. But all of Peg’s photos with colleagues, at ALA conferences, are pictures of strangers. Peg wrote no names on the backs of those snapshots. Peg’s professional life barely touched her family or loved ones. Her best friend, Rosie, didn’t know any of those people.

I threw all those pictures away.

Peg was a traveler, venturing off with groups to Peru, China, eastern Europe, other places, where she snapped away with her Kodak or was snapped by her companions. Again, there are group shots jammed with nameless people, gathered on mountainsides or hotel lobbies, at parties and dinners, strangers to me and Peg’s family, anonymous to her friends. All these dear people are recognizable and meaningful only in Peg’s departed memory.

I tossed them all, whispering Peg an apology.

As I rummaged through box after box, I was callous and hardhearted, dumping almost everything. A lot of this was easy to toss—tax materials and receipts, office notebooks and conference agendas from a past century. Harder to ditch were Peg’s personal correspondence, including some I had sent her from Tokyo, California, Paris. She kept every dumbass card and letter I’d ever mailed to her. I skimmed a few and then got rid of every one—for sentimental reasons. 

The sentiment that stirred in me as I avoided reading too closely notes that I‘d sent my sister long ago was more painful than nostalgic. They brought to mind a bygone Peg, incisive and astute, reading—and passing judgment—on her peripatetic little brother’s latest dispatch from halfway around the world. It’s hard but unavoidable to picture that healthy, positive, lost Peg, because my more recent memories summon the ordeal of nursing her through a series of terrible illnesses—lupus, kidney failure, cancer and brain damage—until her quiet death in a care facility that bore the cruelly ironic designation of “memory care.”

As I cleared Peg’s locker, I’ve been purposely careless with her memories. I have no recollection of what she recalls, because I wasn’t there. Not being part of so much in her life, I can’t cherish images of people I’ve never seen in the flesh and never known, even in a passing mention by Peg. How do I value a memory never shared?

When someone dies, a vast scroll of her memories disappears with her, leaving behind just cartons and remnants, ugly lamps and white-elephant knickknacks that bear no significance even to those who loved her. Like most of us, Peg had myriad circles of acquaintance and intimacy that never intersected. There are denizens of all these circles who’ll never know, see or touch one another, nor understand what each other meant to Peg, and Peg to all of them.

I could have decided—as Peg would probably do if I had died first—to keep all this stuff. But with every passing year, more of those nameless people in these albums of anonymous photos pass, along with Peg, from this vale of tears. Without my sister to recall these faces, to explain and reminisce, they mean nothing. They are the flotsam left floating behind in the wake of a lifetime.

Of course, I’ve saved some photos—many of which I shot—of family with Peg, and of friends we know. I’ve labeled and organized these pictures toward a day when someone rummages through my leftovers—wondering who that smiling face belonged to, and why in Christ’s name did he hold onto this?—and starts throwing away most of this dusty, musty, yellowed and dog-eared crap.

Peg died in 2016. One of the more practical things she left behind was a bunch of money. She never spent as much as she made, just as she never drank the cases of wine we sent her from California (which she kept tucked in her basement ‘til they all turned to vinegar). We used some of Peg’s money on her care, and on ourselves after she passed, and to help out her nieces and nephews. 

One of her classmates, and one of my best friends, Bob Schuster, died a few months after Peg. As I thought about this coincidence of fleeting heartbreaks, I decided to make something that might last beyond mourning. I spent the last of Peg’s legacy on a scholarship for young writers at the high school where Peg, Bob and I all graduated. In the commons at La Follette High, there’s now a plaque listing the winners of the Robert M. Schuster Short Prose Award in each year since 2018. The plaque will add the names of those talented kids for years to come. My big sister Peggy, the benefactress whose name is etched on the plaque, will have made it easier for each of them to go to college. 

No one pausing in the corridor to read Peg’s name will remember her, or know who she was. But those who linger for a moment will note—they cannot help but do so—that here was a woman whose good works lived beyond her. Here was someone whose memory, if only in the name etched on a slip of brass in a high school hallway, will not go gently.