| Tribute
to my Mom
Helen C.
Pickett
So live your life that when you die,
even the undertaker will be sad.
I
can give no greater tribute to my Mom than this from my youngest son, Daniel, shortly
after she died in January of 2001. Daniel is
a toy collector, he has been from his youth, and even writes a column for a toy
collector’s web site that he owns. The
following was written for those who regularly read his columns to explain his short
absence from the group. My Mom would have
sure been proud of him to hear his words and I share them with you as a tribute.
Jim
====================================
I get my collecting “bug”
from my Grandma….
I think collecting is genetic, and like hair loss it skips
a generation. No one else in my family really
had the zeal or drive to collect things like me and my grandmother. Collecting was the main thing my grandmother and I
always had in common and I think she always kind of looked to me to “carry on”
in her absence. She collected a lot of
things, plates, antiques, and truth be told she kept just about everything that passed
through her hands. Not in a scary,
“pack-rat”, “crazy cat lady” kind of way, grandma was a VERY tidy
person, you always knew that everything would be the same on each visit, but she kept a
running log of her life in the form of “things.”
She was a SHARP lady. Fiercely independent, flexible, you never saw her
unless she looked like a million bucks. She always told me that I was like her in spirit,
and depending on how old I was and how I looked at the time she would go back and forth as
to whether I looked like my dad or my grandpa. I
had never met my grandfather. He died of a
heart attack when my father was 17. Grandma
never remarried. She lived alone in that
house for another 40 years. She always
said I had my grandfather’s hands. That
always made me feel good, because she would hold my hands for a while and I always felt
like I was able to provide her some level of connection and comfort.
|
 Helen Pickett
Picture taken in 2001 - age 91 |
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|
Grandma
was 91, well on her way to 92 and we JUST convinced her to stop driving in October. We knew something was affecting her mind, but I
never heard a name given to it. We knew it
was the early stages of Alzheimer's, dementia, or just age catching up with her. Her memory was really slipping, she couldn’t
smell things any more, her hearing was shot, and she had a lot of trouble finding the
words she was looking for when she talked. She
never got to a point where she didn’t recognize any of us, but you could tell the
loss of her always sharp mind was starting to frustrate her.
Grandma had an odd habit that drove most of the family
nuts! It always gave her a sense of comfort
to know where her collection, where her “things” would go after she was gone. She wanted them to be with people who appreciated
them. So, any time you would comment on
something or even just pick it up and look at it, she would take a small piece of white
medical tape, write your name in blue ink and stick it to the bottom of said item. That meant that when she was dead this item would
go to you. This really drove my parents crazy
as I was growing up. They just thought it was
morbid and wanted no part of it. I was a kid and in the early stages of my collecting
“disorder” and all I knew was that Grandma was promising me cool stuff. So, my name was all OVER that place. Sometimes she didn’t want to wait until she
was gone, she just needed more room in her house, or she was just looking to simplify her
life, and so she would send you home with another item that had your name on it after each
visit. It gave her comfort to give her things to people who would appreciate them as much
as she did, it gives me comfort to have those things now.
In October (2001) she realized her limitations and agreed to move into an assisted living
center close to my folks. They hired a moving
company, and moved a lot of her furniture with her, but as they were packing up she
didn’t seem interested in taking very many of her antique/collected things. She took several significant pieces: a cup and
saucer set her father had given her, a pitcher given to her by her late husband, and a
Styrofoam wig-stand that still has the word: GRAND-MA spelled out in hat pins that I had
snuck into her closet and made when I was 8 years old.
Everything else she left behind in that house.
That house her husband had helped build, that house where she raised her kids, that
house where he died, that house where she lived alone more years than I’ve been
alive, that lonely house was now alone.
Still there was a LOT of stuff in that house. On our way back from a family celebration on
Christmas Eve we stopped by the vacant house my wife, my older brother, and me. We had been instructed to go through and see if
there was anything else we were interested in for the eventuality of either a. grandma
dying or b. them selling the house. It
didn’t have the same feel this time. It
was creepy, it was odd, and it really made us feel like grave robbers.
Then we really started to get a sense of what all Grandma
collected. We saw history; her history, our
family’s, our country’s. Grandma
was the keeper of a chronicle over 100 years old. She
kept, toys, cloths, magazines, and newspapers. She
kept almost every piece of personal correspondence from her 5th grade
valentines to the “get well” cards she died surrounded by. She had sheet music,
magazines and newspapers from the turn of the century and items that belonged to her
parents. She had many of her childhood dolls,
Three weeks ago grandma had a stroke. It was a serious one, that left her paralyzed on
her left side and left her unable to swallow. She
had a DNR order, so according to her wishes there was nothing we could do for her at that
point. We just had to make sure she was
comfortable as we waited for the inevitable. She
died on the 18th of January, and
we buried her on Monday.
Now my family is faced with the task of unraveling her
collection. Most of her things she had
labeled with when she got them, how old they were and who or where she got them from. But also we are starting to find things like a box
full of old BIC pen caps and the lid to every medicine bottle she ever opened along with
her more elegant, extensive collections of antiques, plates, butter dishes and the like. My family thinks this is odd, but I know exactly
where that comes from. And from here on out
every time I pick up some figure by Trendmasters or some odd thing in a line I don’t
collect or any time I hesitate throwing away the package or lame accessory to a figure I
have opened, I’ll know why that impulse is deeply rooted within me.
In going through Grandma’s things I have also found
many clippings, letters, and articles from 1895 to 1960’s. Some were from small town news, some were from
large companies from New York, and many we don’t know where they were from, we just
know that she liked them enough to save them all this time.
The one thoughline of all of these scraps of her history is that they all
contain a sense of poetry that you no longer find in letter writing or news reporting. Even the obituaries were something you could tell
were extensively researched and you could tell someone spent a lot of time on. I think that’s what this essay is. It’s an attempt to give her the obituary she
deserved, from someone that loved her dearly.
Helen
Pickett
1910-2002 |