Curating Grief - How It Started

That bottle of soy sauce – attached to it was memories of Thanksgiving dinner, the Chinese congee that she would make with the leftovers, all the everyday meals in her house. No wonder I was so attached to it.

…

Thanks for joining me for the Curating Grief Show with certified grief coach and curator Charlene Lam. That's me. It's really good to meet you.

If you know about my grief work, you've likely heard about the soy sauce. The soy sauce played a starring role in my own experience with grief and my struggle with all of the stuff in my mother's house after she died.

As an introduction to the Curating Grief Show. I want to share with you the story, the origin story behind it all. How it all started. The seed for The Grief Gallery and my exhibitions about grief and loss. Why curating? How I define curating. Why I believe that you too are a curator. And how curating relates to grief.
Hopefully this story answers those questions for you and more. Enjoy.

…

It was the soy sauce that stopped me in my tracks. I was standing in my mother's house more than a year after she died. Every time I looked at the soy sauce, every time I looked at the cooking oils, I froze. I just couldn't get myself to throw them away.

Every time I looked at them, I thought about the meals that she had cooked, how much she loved feeding people, and all the delicious dishes, Western and Chinese that she would make for us.
How was it possible that my mother would never cook in this kitchen again?

This house, my mother's dream house … it was my safe harbor. My mother was my anchor. I knew that no matter what happened – if I got sick, if I lost my job, if my marriage fell apart – I could always come back to her house.

When my mother was alive, I had security and certainty. Of course I could stay with her over the holidays. Of course, we could leave our boxes in her attic when we moved to Europe. Of course, one day we would move back to New York to take care of her.

After she died, there was no more “of course.” If anything, I was OFF course.

I found myself unanchored and adrift, lost in an ocean of grief, overwhelmed by the waves of emotion that washed over me.

Maybe you've experienced a loss similar to this, the loss of someone or something that anchored you, that made you feel safe, secure, certain.

When my mother died, I was living in London and for a year I flew back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean trying to figure out what to do with her house. I traveled with her purse slung across my chest on top of my purse. In her purse was her wallet and her death certificate. Why was I carrying her death certificate?

I think on some level I thought maybe I would need to prove to someone that she was really dead. Looking back, I think I was the one who didn't fully grasp that she was really gone. That she was not coming back to that dream house. I was like a lost child waiting for mommy to come back to help me.
During this terrible time of being unanchored, I found an anchor in the house. It was my safe place. I could cry or not cry. Be sad, be angry, be confused. Just be.

I tried to clear it out, but it was very slow progress. I mostly found myself picking up an item, walking to another room and setting it back down. And some spaces like her bedroom and the dining table – they stayed untouched, like a still life. I felt safe in that house.

But after a while, I started to feel the weight of being anchored to my mother's house. It started to feel heavy. I had been paying the mortgage on the house for over a year. The bills were piling up. My savings were dwindling down, and my husband was really confused. He didn't understand why it was taking me so long to deal with the house and its contents.

“Just throw it all in a dumpster,” he said. Yes, I considered divorce. It was my mother's dream house. How could I let it go?

But I also had a recurring vision of me tethered to the house, and it was pulling me to the bottom of the ocean. I had this vision, of me stretching, gasping for air, reaching for light, and getting dragged down all the way into the darkness. I felt like I was drowning. It was time to let go of the house.

Because that's the funny thing about anchors. On the one hand, an anchor can keep you safe and stable. An anchor can keep you from drifting out into the open ocean, keep you from getting dashed to pieces on the rocks.

And on the other hand, an anchor can keep you stuck, stuck in one place for too long, not moving forward.

And that's where I was. I was stuck. Stuck in my dead mother's unoccupied house, far from my home, my husband, my work, my life. It was time to let it go.

Having decided to let go of the house, I now had a problem. Actually hundreds of problems, and that was all of her belongings in the house. You see, after she died, all of these everyday things became precious.

Everything on her shelves, everything on the surfaces – precious.
That rock that she picked up on holiday in Greece – precious!
That ugly bookshelf that she bought at a garage sale – precious.

That McDonald's toy. My mother had picked it out. It might still have her fingerprints on it. How could I let it go?

Maybe you've experienced something similar with the belongings of a loved one. Maybe it was a musical instrument. That they'll never play again. Or a leather jacket that still smells like them. HOW do we choose what to keep and what to discard when we feel so attached to these objects when they have so much meaning for us?

Here's how I chose. When my mother died, I was working as an independent curator working with designers and artists. Imagine amazing people who made beautiful paintings, ceramics, and jewelry. I curated these exhibitions by looking at their work and selecting the best pieces, choosing them to put on display in a gallery space.

I would put these pieces together in a way that showed their creative work in the best light and told their story. The best stories of their craft and their inspirations.

So as I stood in my mother's house, overwhelmed by all this responsibility, overwhelmed by all this stuff, out of inspiration, or maybe it was out of desperation, I put on my curator hat and I asked myself:

If I was to do an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose?

And that question – if I was to do an exhibition about my mother, which 100 objects would I choose? – that gave me a set of criteria for looking at the things in her house. That souvenir from Brazil – that made me smile. She loved to travel, but it was also bittersweet. She would never travel again. We would never go to Machu Picchu together.

There was a pack of Oreo cookies on top of her refrigerator. Kind of random, but every time I looked at that box of Oreos, I felt so much shame, so much guilt, so much regret – because I had forgotten my mother's last birthday. And that package of Oreo cookies was a special edition, a birthday edition that she had bought for herself.

And every time I looked at those Oreos, there was the shame, regret, guilt, the certainty that I was a bad daughter. And of course there was the soy sauce that I was so attached to. Ultimately, I did clear out that house. I sold the house and two years after my mother died, I did an exhibition in London where I showed some of the objects that I kept.

People asked questions about them. I told stories about my mother. It was the memorial I really wanted to give her.

Now, you are unlikely to actually ever do an exhibition about your loved one. You probably don't have a gallery space. You might not be a professional curator. But even though you don't have a gallery, you probably have a bookshelf or a wall of framed photos, maybe a special place like a fireplace mantle.

You are choosing every day what gets put into your space, what gets pride of place.

And in this way, we are all curators. We're all making these choices, whether we know it or not, about what takes up space in our lives, whether it's an office, our closets, or our dresser drawers.

And these choices, they matter. These items take up space in our homes and in our lives and in our hearts. These objects have volume and they have weight, physical weight, but more importantly, emotional weight.

It's important that we make these choices consciously, that we choose with intention. That's really how I define curating: Choosing with intention.

After I went through the process of going through my mother's house and deciding – curating, or choosing with intention – what to keep and what to let go of, I felt so much lighter.

I realized I had anchored myself not just to her house, but to all of those objects in her house. Hundreds of small anchors. No wonder it started to feel heavy!

What's more, each of those objects in her house? They also had things attached. They had stories, they had memories, thoughts, ideas. That bottle of soy sauce – attached to it was memories of Thanksgiving dinner, the Chinese congee that she would make with the leftovers, all the everyday meals in her house. No wonder I was so attached to it.

But it didn't make sense to keep the soy sauce. It didn't make sense to put it in my suitcase and take it back to London with me. I didn't want to keep the soy sauce, but I did want to keep the memories and the stories.

The beautiful thing is that I could detach the stories from the soy sauce and attach them to something else. In this case, it was a cooking spoon from my mother's kitchen. I attached those stories of what she cooked and those memories of meals shared, and I took that spoon with me. And the most beautiful thing is, it fit in my suitcase and it fit in my life. It fit in the life that I wanted to live. It fit in the life that I wanted to create moving forward.

Remember the package of birthday-themed Oreo cookies? The heaviest package of cookies ever. And that makes sense too.

Attached to that package of cookies was my memory of forgetting my mother's birthday and the belief that I was a bad daughter. I tossed the package of Oreos and I tossed the stories that were attached to it and that terrible belief that I was a bad daughter.

Imagine for a moment what might've happened, if I decided to keep the Oreos and decided to keep those thoughts and stories and beliefs about being a bad daughter. Maybe I would be triggered every time I saw Oreos at the store. Maybe every year on my mother's birthday, I would get really depressed. Maybe I would avoid thinking about her or talking about her because I felt so much guilt, but that's not what I wanted.

This year would have been my mother's 76th birthday. I was not depressed on her birthday. I bought her some Portuguese pastries, and my husband and I dedicated them to her. I bought her flowers and threw some in the river. I celebrated her on her birthday and so many days. This is what's possible when we choose with intention, when we curate.

I had a lot of hard choices after my mother died. And by curating, by choosing intentionally what to keep and what to let go of, I get to move forward in the way that I want. The grief will always be with me. My mother will always be with me, but I have lightened the load. It's now easier to carry the grief and my mother with me.

After you lose a loved one, you too will likely have hard choices. I invite you to choose with intention, to make those choices consciously, to make those choices beautiful. I invite you to put on your curator hat.

…

And that's where it all started. The idea for The Grief Gallery and my exhibitions featuring the belongings of loved ones.

My work bringing the idea of curating into grief. And helping others as a grief coach, using this lens of exhibitions and curating.

I'd love to hear what you think, what that story brought up for you. What's the equivalent of the soy sauce for you?

Did you experience something similar with the belongings of a loved one after a death? Or did you experience something very different? I would love to hear from you.

You can connect with me on Instagram @curating_grief.

You can tell me live at The Grief Gallery’s free monthly grief gathering, which is on the last Wednesday of every month at 2:00 PM Eastern time on Zoom. And if you're interested in grief coaching, you can book a free one-to-one call with me.

You can find those links at www.curatinggrief.com or the links will be in the show notes.

Thanks for joining me for the Curating Grief Show with certified grief coach and curator Charlene Lam.