Our Children Never Leave, Even After They’re Gone

I returned a library book to my daughter’s middle school library the other day. The book was taken out in 2001. My daughter graduated from that middle school in 2003.
We found the book stuck among her old Harry Potter hardbacks and her Anne of Green Gables paperbacks. The books were diagonally across from what had been her old closet, which is still full of a variety of now ancient stuffed animals, including a zoo’s worth of beanie babies. In a corner of the closet is her guitar, which she stopped playing at age eight or nine.

Facing the bookcase, by the side of the bed is the end table with two drawers’ worth of drawings, writings, tests, book reports and other ephemera, from first grade through the end of high school. On the wall is a felt pennant from high school senior year, still exhorting the Chapel Hill High School Tigers.

My daughter has not lived at home—that is, our home—full-time since she went off to college in 2007. She has not lived at our home even part time since her graduation from college in 2011.

Her old room, with the books, the stuffed animals and the pennant, has been my office for more than a decade and yet we still frequently call the room “Nora’s room.” We also call the bathroom down the hall, “Nora’s bathroom,” because that, of course, was her bathroom when she lived at home.

I think we are not alone in all of this, in keeping reminders of our departed kids strewn around, in keeping their old digs as a sort of shrine to them, to the rosy time of childhood, and a conduit to our memories.

To be sure, we’re not totally in thrall. We try to always call it my office, but often slip back into older terminology. We have gotten rid of some stuff—a horse’s head bookend made during a summer ceramics camp; a series of CD mix tapes; assorted books and papers and very old t-shirts.

From time to time, when she is on a visit back home, we strongly suggest that she go through the old books or the old stuffed animals and let us know what we can give to the thrift store, what she might want and what we can toss without regret. Occasionally, we might send her a couple of her old books, stuff she might actually want in her place and we no longer need or want in ours.

We say, not infrequently, that we should get rid of some more of this stuff, that we should pare it down, clear it out, but then an item conjures up a reminiscence and we put it back in the closet, keep it on the shelf.  

I’ll open the top drawer of her old end table and the first thing I find is a congratulations card, from her orthodontist, congratulating her on having her braces removed. I smile and put the card back in the drawer.

It’s very likely at least some of the stuffed animals and the books and the papers—and, most definitely, the Tiger pennant—will remain, permanent reminders of the person who used to live here, the person whom we raised to be able to have her own place, 600 miles away, with her own accumulating ephemera. 

When I returned the old library book to the middle school, the woman who came out of the office to open the front door and receive the book didn’t charge our family $6,000 or so in overdue library fines. Instead, when I handed her the book and said it was from 2001, she said, “Wow.” And then she said “wow,” a few more times.

Indeed.