The Salvage of Care

PART I: LIQUIDATION

My brother-in-law runs an estate liquidation business in Macon, Georgia. I help with the legal work—contracts, liens, probate documents—and occasionally with the cleanup afterward. What’s left when nothing sells. What gets thrown away.

Liquidation means converting assets to cash. That’s the technical definition. In practice it means adult children standing in their parents’ houses, deciding what’s worth keeping while their parents sit in nursing homes ten miles away, sometimes still lucid enough to ask when they’re coming home.

The houses aren’t hoarders’ nests. These are people who believed objects told a story about cultivation, about arrival. Mid-Atlantic sensibility transplanted to the upper South: elaborate wedding registries, china for twelve that got used twice, silver services that required polishing, Herend figurines on glass shelves. Art bought to elevate the living room. Lladró shepherdesses. Waterford vases still in boxes. Belts in seventeen colors because you didn’t wear brown leather with taupe shoes, and matching mattered.

Their children say the same thing in every house: “We already have plenty of stuff.”

What actually gets liquidated—sold—is the furniture. The dining table. The bedroom set. Sometimes the art, if it’s signed. What gets discarded is everything else. The small things.

I’ve watched them throw away: Knut Norman paintings. Beautiful collections of marbles. Tiny porcelain villages with a mailman smaller than a fingernail. Ancestral pieces with no provenance, therefore no market value, therefore no value at all.

The logic is always the same. “She won’t remember it anyway.” “He has dementia—what’s the point?” “We don’t have room.” “That style doesn’t work in our house.” “We’re minimalists now.”

What the children are actually rejecting isn’t stuff. It’s their parents’ entire belief system—that objects could prove you’d arrived, that accumulation was a form of cultivation, that a complete set of something mattered more than six mismatched pieces. Marie Kondo versus the wedding registry. Clean counters versus display shelves. The children have decided their parents were wrong about what matters, and they’re throwing away the evidence while their parents are still alive enough to know it’s happening, but no longer able to enjoin them.

Except most of them don’t tell their parents. “Clean break,” they say. “Fresh start for Mom.” As if the nursing home room with its single dresser, one-pole closet, and hospital bed is a fresh start. As if starting fresh means erasing a chunk of what you were by eliminating the things you truly believe were part of that definition of ‘self’.

I’ve seen a man throw his mother’s picture albums into a dumpster because “nobody looks at these anymore.” I’ve seen a woman pitch her father’s hand-carved decoys because “they’re not even vintage, he just made them in the garage.” I’ve watched adult children toss things their younger selves made—ceramic dinosaurs, needlepoint proverbs, wooden boxes with uneven joints—because they’re embarrassed by the earnestness of their own childhoods.

But here’s what I’ve learned from research, from stories geriatric nurses tell, from the one story I wrote about an object bringing a father back: objects anchor memory in dementia patients. A wooden squirrel can be a lifeline. Not to what it is, but to who they were. To the child who carved it. To the afternoon he brought it home. To the small pride of a mother whose son made something with his hands. For her.

When we discard the objects—the stuff—we’re not just cleaning out a house. We’re teaching ourselves, or reminding ourselves, that the person who valued it didn’t matter. That their way of loving—through things, through keeping, through arranging a life that looked cultivated—was wrong.

We’re rehearsing carelessness. First toward things. Then toward people. Then toward loss itself.

The nursing homes are always chosen close in. The fewer the miles, the less the guilt. Most of the children visit once a week, then once a month, then on holidays. After all, she won’t remember if you came yesterday or last week.

She won’t even know you’re gone.

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PART II: THE SIX OBJECTS

After some years of this, I couldn’t keep just watching it happen.

So I started taking things. Not everything—I’m not a hoarder, not building a museum. Just what I couldn’t stand to see thrown away: pieces that seemed to hold more than their material worth, objects someone had loved or made or carried across an ocean or kept on a dresser for forty years.

Now they surround my desk, sitting where I can see them while I work. Not decorations—witnesses. Reminders. Evidence that someone once believed objects could matter.

My family understands. My wife, my sons—they’d never discard them. They’ve been raised to see past market value to human value, to notice how a small carved animal or a chipped vase can still steady a person.

My brother-in-law helps. At some sales—or often in our home—he hides things in plain sight for me to find: a miniature porcelain seal with a beach ball on its nose, a letter opener with a pheasant carved into the handle. It usually takes me two minutes to spot them, three if I’m tired. He’s learned to see through my eyes, to look for what doesn’t belong and understand how it somehow still fits.

None of these objects were mine to begin with. I’m not their rightful owner. I’m their keeper. There’s a difference. And in more ways than I like to admit, they keep me. That’s the biggest difference.

Here are a few of the things that watch over me during the day:

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i. The Wooden Squirrel

The wooden squirrel haunts me most. Boy Scout project, circa 1976. You can see the knife marks where a twelve-year-old tried to get the tail right, where the blade slipped near an ear. His mother kept it forty-some years. Dresser, bedroom, morning light.

It was one of the things left at the end of the sale. I asked the son, now in his fifties, if he wanted to keep it. He said, “She won’t even know it’s gone.” But I imagine that she does. That she asks her nurse from time to time if he’s seen it anywhere. The one my son made, she says. A son whose name she can’t remember from a year she’s lost hold of, but she remembers the squirrel.

It sits on my desk now. I’ve never met her. Don’t know her name. But I’m keeping that version of her son safe—the boy who knew how to make something for someone he loved, and the mother who knew how to keep it.

I wait for him to come back for it, to say: she needs this even more now than when I gave it to her. He won’t. But I wait anyway.

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ii. The Cast-Iron Dog

Depression-era. Cast iron, once painted; the color worn mostly to bare metal where hands touched it. Someone’s childhood companion—you can see the pattern where small fingers wrapped around the body to carry it from room to room.

Estate sale: free box on the sale’s last day. The children called it “rusty junk.”

I don’t know who played with it. Don’t know if it was a boy or a girl, if they carried it to bed at night or left it somewhere with a light still on. But I know they loved it the way children love things—completely, without checking whether it matched the room.

It sits on my desk, still rusty, still bearing the marks of whoever held it seventy or eighty years ago. Whoever they became—salesman, teacher, the parent whose own children threw this away—they started as someone who chose a cast-iron dog and decided it was theirs.

I’m keeping that version of them alive. The one who didn’t yet know that objects could be junk, who only knew: this is mine, I love it, it stays. Here.

He has a few curated friends now. They gather beneath my monitor and speak without making a sound.

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iii. The Herend Elephant

Hand-painted porcelain, Hungarian. An elephant standing on the globe of the Earth—one of the few Herend animals done in multiple colors. The work on the globe alone is staggering: continents in relief, oceans in graduated blues, toenails on the elephant.

Estate sale tag: $15.

The daughter said her parents brought it back from Europe on an anniversary trip. Her mother kept it in a curio cabinet for decades, dusted it weekly, I’m sure. The elephant’s trunk was raised—good luck, in some traditions. I don’t know if she knew that or just liked it.

“It doesn’t match anything,” the daughter said. “Too busy. We’re more minimalist.”

It sits on my desk now, the elephant standing on the world, keeping everything in balance. I think about the daughter’s “too busy,” about the way minimalism has been promoted to virtue, and about what gets lost when we decide previous generations were wrong about beauty.

Meanwhile, the elephant is still doing the work it was made for. It steadies me on days I spin too fast, holding me to an axis the first owners once felt but can’t see anymore.

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iv. The Pelikan 100

A Pelikan 100, from the mid-1930s. Semi-transparent barrel, piston filler, tortoiseshell cap. Bauhaus-influenced design—form serving function without showing off. On the cap top: the old four-chick logo and the words Pelikan PATENT. The clip shaped like a pelican’s bill.

Unsold. The family likely didn’t know what it was. Just: tarnished pen, dried-out, dime-a-dozen, take it if you want.

It needed minor repairs. I tuned the original nib with micromesh and mylar, coaxed the piston back to life. Three evenings at the kitchen table. Now I use it every day.

It lives on my desk. I don’t let it travel; there are other pens willing to ride in a bag. This one stays home.

The pen was made in a moment when German craftsmanship still meant precision without cruelty, design without ideology. It survived whatever came after—the war, the displacement, the Atlantic crossing, three or four sets of hands.

It almost ended in a landfill because someone’s grandchildren decided it was a broken commodity. Trash.

I write with it when something matters—gratitude, apology, affection. Real paper, real ink, a tool that remembers what it meant to make things that last.

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v. The Émile Gallé Vase

Four inches tall. Cowslip yellow with white and dusty pink peonies painted around the body. Signed on the base: Gallé. 1890s. Art Nouveau. Museum-quality work from one of the movement’s masters.

Found in a donation box headed to Goodwill. The estate coordinator didn’t recognize the signature. Just: small vase, painted flowers, probably worth a couple of dollars—he’d put $5.00 on it for the “Frenchness” of it.

Émile Gallé worked in Nancy, France. His glass and ceramics sit in the Met, the V&A, the Musée d’Orsay. This vase—four inches of yellow with peonies that look still wet—was made by hands that understood how light moves through color, how to paint botanically accurate flowers that still feel like a dream.

Someone’s grandchildren almost sent it out with last year’s sweaters.

It sits on my desk now, holding dried flowers from a funeral I attended last year. Still doing the work it was made for: holding a few stems, marking beauty, making loss visible.

The vase outlived Gallé. Outlived whoever bought it in the 1890s. Outlived their children and grandchildren. Now it’s keeping my grief instead of theirs.

That’s inheritance too: taking on someone else’s objects when their own people won’t, becoming the memory keeper for strangers and for craftspeople whose names we’ll never know.

The peonies are still blooming. Gallé painted them that way. They’re not going to stop just because no one left remembers why they mattered.

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vi. The Woodpecker

Hand-carved, post-war Polish. Mounted on a birch branch made to look like a tree. Muted slate blues and tea-colored stain—colors that don’t announce themselves, that reward attention. The woodpecker bobs slowly on a clever mechanism, beak going in and out, in and out.

Estate sale: $1.00. The children called it “weird.” “Kitschy.” “Old-timey junk.”

But this isn’t junk. This is someone’s mastery. Post-war Poland—timber available, tools scarce, hands skilled. Someone carved those feathers, mixed those exact blues, engineered the bob so it would still work seventy years later.

It sits on my desk. I flick it when I’m stuck on a sentence, when the world feels too fast, when I forget how to breathe. The beak goes in and out. The slate blues catch the light. I calm down.

I wish I knew the story—who made it, how it traveled, whose house it lived in before the children decided it was nothing.

I’d write them a note on real paper, with the Pelikan, to say: someone kept it. Someone sees what it is. Someone watches it bob every day and feels steadier because your father, or grandfather, or great-grandfather knew how to make something move like it was alive.

They’re gone now, most likely. But the bird and I are both still here, doing the work we were made for: keeping each other company. Keeping each other at ease.

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These six aren’t all of them. The desk is full. A pair of pointers drinking out of a shared bowl. A forged spinning top whose physics haven’t dulled. A ceramic fingerbowl a child made in 1954, the year glazed into the bottom with the initials SKJ. Postcards from places that don’t exist anymore. A tiny magnifying glass with a mother-of-pearl handle capped by a rhinestone. Things measured in dozens, most smaller than your hand.

I’ve become the keeper of strangers’ inheritances. The memory holder for people I never knew, whose own families decided memory wasn’t worth the shelf space.

It is a necessary care. I’m sure of that. I’m sixty. Maybe I have ten years left, maybe twenty if I’m lucky. And when I go, all of this—the Herend elephant, the Pelikan pen, the bobbing woodpecker, the Gallé vase—would normally have become someone else’s problem.

Except I know it’s a problem already solved. These things will outlast me, and they’ll be cared for by someone who understands exactly why they should be.

He’s already claimed them.

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PART III: INHERITANCE

My seventeen-year-old son is autistic. I gave him that. The pattern recognition, the social blindness, the inability to read rooms until it’s too late, the tendency to see deviation before similarity, the exhaustion of vigilance. He knows where he got it. A time or two he’s even thrown it at me like blame. It was brutal. Not because he was wrong—he wasn’t—but because he was right in a way I couldn’t argue with. I had given it to him. The same wiring that lets me see what’s wrong in contracts, that makes me notice when fence posts are spaced wrong, that pulls me toward these objects when everyone else sees junk. The inheritance nobody asks for.

Last month he said something that stopped me.

We were in my office. He was looking at the desk—the Herend elephant, the Pelikan pen, the woodpecker, the jadeite ink blotter, all of it. We could hear his brothers downstairs talking about what they wanted from the house someday. Normal conversation for boys whose father is grey-headed. Dividing theoretical inheritance the way families do, half-joking, half-serious. The truck. The books. The art. The furniture. The rugs.

My son wasn’t joking.

He said, “When you die, they can take anything they want. But everything on your desk is mine.”

Not the house. Not the car. Not the actually valuable things. The desk. The objects that weren’t originally anyone’s. The strangers’ inheritances. The rescued things.

I asked him why.

He said, “Because you’re keeping them for people who don’t exist anymore. Someone has to keep doing that.”

He’s taken this on the way some people take on religion—quietly, completely. Like Heidegger’s Eigentlichkeit: owning your being, acting from your own authority rather than from what “they” say. The objects on my desk aren’t stuff to him. They’re evidence that care can be practiced on things as well as people, that attention matters, that memory has physical form.

I didn’t sit him down and teach him this. He watched me bring these things home, watched me arrange them, helped me repair some of them. He saw it. The same way he sees fence posts spaced wrong. Pattern recognition works that way. You don’t learn it. You just see

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Here’s what keeps me up at night: I don’t know if this is good.

I don’t know if I’ve given him a practice of care or a pathology. If I’ve taught him to value what others discard or just trained him to become the keeper of strangers’ grief, the curator of loss nobody else wants to carry.

He’ll be alone with these objects someday. The Herend elephant standing on the earth. The Pelikan pen that’s afraid to travel. The Polish woodpecker that bobs when you flick it. The cast-iron dog worn smooth by Depression-era hands. The Émile Gallé vase holding dried funeral flowers. The wooden squirrel a fifty-year-old man threw away while his mother asked where it was.

My son will inherit all of it. And he’ll know—the way I know—that these objects are keeping people alive. Strangers. People neither of us ever met. People whose own children didn’t think they were worth remembering.

That’s the loneliest kind of care.

And I’ve passed it to him. Like eye color. Like the autism. Like every other inheritance children don’t get to refuse.

I think about the families sometimes. The ones who threw these things away. The daughter who called the Herend elephant “too busy.” The son who said his mother wouldn’t remember the squirrel. The grandchildren who put the Pelikan in a free box and the Gallé vase in a donation bag.

They’re living lighter now. Minimalist. Clean counters, empty shelves, nothing to dust or maintain or remember. They’ve moved on.

They’ve practiced carelessness on objects until carelessness became their default. First toward things, then toward people, then toward loss itself.

And my son has seen this. He’s seventeen and he’s already learned that the way you treat objects and the way you treat people and the way you treat loss are inseparable. That carelessness in one domain teaches carelessness in the others. That someone has to be the keeper, even when—especially when—it’s the loneliest work there is.

He won’t mind it. They’ll stay on his desk. Still working. Still holding memory. Still doing what they were made to do: proving that someone existed, that they loved things, that their particular way of caring mattered enough to be kept alive.

That’s not the inheritance I imagined giving him. I imagined leaving him a house, maybe. Some money. The kinds of things parents are supposed to leave.

I’m leaving him the work of keeping.

And he’s already claimed it.

While writing this, I asked if he understood what he was taking on—what it means to be responsible for other people’s memories, to keep strangers alive through objects their own families discarded.

He looked at me the way he does when I’ve asked something he thinks is obvious.

He said, “Yeah. Someone has to.”

Then he flicked the woodpecker and watched it bob.

In and out.

In and out.

Still here.