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A few summers ago we were visiting my dad and Louise. Quinn and I were in the basement with my dad, in a room that serves as his workshop and their storage space. It is orderly; they’ve worked hard for years to cull the extras from their separate and now joined lives.  As he always does, when he and I are down there together, my dad started to scan the room, looking for things he could hand off to me—things he’s saved for one reason or another. He opened a metal wardrobe that’s been around for a long time. I was doing something else and didn’t pay much attention, until he turned around and held out a green leather bag. “Do you want your mother’s pocketbook?” he asked. 

I was quick to say no, which I do out of habit, but also because I don’t carry a purse, much less a pocketbook. As he was handing it to me, I suggested he offer it to my sister—someone who does carry a purse. I felt no attachment to it—there are other things that were once my mother’s that show up now and then and I tend not to be too sentimental about them. But once her purse was in my hands, I felt its weight. I assumed he had stored other things inside it, so I unzipped it to pull out whatever other items were there. But what I saw inside was the actual contents of her purse—exactly as she had left them well over twenty years ago.

“You never emptied it!” I blurted out, part surprise and part accusation. Suddenly the experience changed. Instead of an easy refusal of stuff I didn’t want, I found myself protecting something that felt sacred—the artifacts of my mother’s daily life, from the last days she was alive. Each item I pulled out overwhelmed me more than the last. Quinn was curious and trying desperately to get her hands on things, but these were not things I wanted her handling. I felt like I was managing an archaeological dig—all the bones very fragile, waiting to be reassembled into the story they would tell.

My dad was surprised too, I think; if not by the unfinished business of her purse, then by the wave of emotion I was experiencing. He lured Quinn away and left me alone with it. In some ways I felt guilty for looking in—my mother was very protective of her pocketbook. We didn’t go into it without her permission, and usually that permission wasn’t given. She’d gladly retrieve a pen or a Kleenex for us, but we didn’t go in on our own. “Hand me my pocketbook,” I can hear her saying, but never an invitation to help ourselves. I felt nervous about what I would find, and worried that she wouldn’t want me to be looking.

At first I pulled things out kind of quickly, but as I started to see what was in there, I realized it was full of stories I wanted to someday tell, and I wanted them to begin as she had left them. I was relieved there were no dirty Kleenexes, and impressed by the orderly nature of it all. This was a pocketbook I could respect. I put things back, carefully, just as I’d found them, zipped it up and carried it upstairs. And then I carried it home to Vermont, and I put it in a trunk, and I started making plans, in earnest, to build my writing cabin.

It is a few years later now and I’m sitting here in my cabin on a cool wet morning in late July. It is the day after what would have been my mother’s seventy-third birthday, and two days after the twenty-sixth anniversary of her death. 

In the top of the bag is a lavender eyeglasses case, with her wire framed reading glasses. They are the same prescription as the ones on my face. Under the glasses there are other things neatly arranged. There is a blue leather wallet with her driver’s license; height 5’3”, the same as me. There are a number of credit cards and barely any cash (one dollar and some change), just like my wallet. There is an inside zipper pouch holding two disintegrating breath mints, a couple of tabs of Tylenol cold medicine, two tabs of Benadryl, an eyebrow pencil, a panty liner, and three lipsticks: Soft Pink Satin, Rose Mauve, and Kiss of Pink. Their powdery smell brings her into the room, along with the memory of my senior prom—my mom following me around the backyard, waving a lipstick at me, begging me to please put some on. In this way, we were not alike. The fact that she carried not one, but three lipsticks in her purse confounds me. 

There are three pens, a pencil, and a half-empty sleeve of Hall’s cough drops, an envelope with medical and insurance papers, and a 1993 monthly calendar book. These last items lead this story in the direction of her cancer, and into the work I can now see that she was doing, in those last months, to keep living, even while she must have known that she would not. And that is a story for another day. 

For her birthday, I’ll tell a different story—the one I can assemble from the last item in her green leather Land’s End pocketbook: it’s a taupe colored faux-leather bi-fold. It opens to two plastic sleeves of wallet-sized photo holders. The sleeve on the right holds her nonessential i.d. and membership cards—the essential ones are housed in her wallet. That she has so many of these cards is a wonder to me. There is a Staples card, the business card of her insurance agent, one from Friedlander’s Jewelry, and Sears, Sunoco, and Shell. There are three video rental cards, from Video Paradise, Video Club, and Lancaster Video, and two Mailboxes Etc Frequent Shippers punchcards. And then, a generic i.d. card, in case it all got lost. 

Generally, when I think of my mother, I think of her as my mother. But looking into her purse I imagine her as a mother, and as a wife, and as the person running a household. Looking at these cards, I try to imagine the conversations we would have now—as two women with shared responsibilities in our lives. So much has changed in twenty-six years, so much of how the work is done. Sears, where she bought everything from sheets, to school clothes, to family portraits, is a relic now; what would she think of Amazon? I imagine she would love the ease of it, though I know she is someone who charmed and enjoyed connecting with actual people, in actual stores. And all those trips to the video rental shops, renting and returning VHS tapes—how she would love Netflix! 

The “frequent shipper” punchcards seem random at first, until I remember that in 1993 I was in my fourth year of college, and my mom sent me the most amazing care packages. The one I remember best was for my twenty-first birthday: it was decorated with pictures of champagne and party hats and balloons cut out of magazines and taped onto the box. Inside there were two plastic champagne flutes and either a couple of single-serve bottles or a half-bottle of champagne—I can’t remember which. I love her subtle message of moderation. I love that she trusted I would have someone to toast with. I love that even though I was turning twenty-one, she still decorated the package for me. She made every occasion a celebration. Stuffed into one of the side pockets of this bifold there were two other mailing addresses, for the two college-aged kids of one of her best friends—clearly she sent them packages too.

On the left side of the bi-fold are the photos, my sister Amy’s senior high school picture is on the top. And behind that photo, in the same pocket, are five of Amy’s previous school pictures, a portrait of the two of us when Amy was a baby, and a photo of my mom and dad. The picture of my parents is the only one in which my mom shows up. It looks like it was taken in the basement, each of my parents with an arm around the other, they are young, and healthy, and smiling, and in love. I wonder if Amy took the picture of them?

In the next pocket up, my senior portrait from college faces out and, behind that, two school pictures from high school and, again, a photo of Amy and me—this one from 1979. Next is my cousin Jeff and an amazing black and white picture of my mother’s parents. 

Then there is a picture of my mother’s god-daughter Karen in a tutu and tiara, Karen’s brother Brian, and more pictures of Amy and me. Always they seem to come back to Amy and me. I never doubted my mother’s powerful, wild love for us; there is, and always has been, evidence of it everywhere.

In the topmost pocket of the lefthand sleeve, is a blue perforated “Patient Medical Record Card” from Morton Hospital in Taunton, MA. The patient’s name is Amy Litchfield. There is a patient number and her date of birth, but nothing more than that. At the bottom of the card is a line that reads: “Please keep this card with you at all times.” I have no recollection of why my sister went to the hospital, but I imagine that whatever the reason, it had a strong impact on my mother because she didn’t dare throw away that card. Who knows how long she carried it with her. If it were me, taking Quinn to the hospital, I imagine I would have purged such a card from my own wallet quickly—destroying the evidence, denying the threat. In my mother’s choice, I see my sister, clear as day: vigilant, serious, and determined to do her job as mother well. She was our lion, and she roars through each of us still, but most clearly through my sister.

Finally there is the pocket that holds my dad. It is the only pocket with the seam split open. I imagine it is because she’s pulled them out so many times, or because there are so many in there: five pictures of my dad, all young—at least one from high school, one clearly from the Navy, one from their wedding, and a formal portrait on the top, facing out. He has signed that one, as he signed all of his cards to her for all of the years they were together: All My Love, Dana. I know this about her cards because I read them, always.

Tucked just behind the signed photo of my dad there are two small slips of folded paper. One must be from a high school newspaper; it seems to be from some sort of gossip column: “What’s the story Claire Sylvester and Dana Litchfield? How did you both manage to be out sick with German Measles at the same time last week? We’ll be watching you two!!” The other is on yellow paper, with the heading South Weymouth News: “The bells are ringing!! Not only the Back to School Bells - but - Wedding Bells too!!” It announces one local wedding and then, “Last but not least for our ‘Social Section’ the latest sparkle at South Weymouth is on the third finger left hand of Claire Sylvester. Claire has decided she is not going to be an Old Maid School Marm and accepted (finally) Dana Litchfield’s proposal. Congratulations to a wonderful couple.” 

By the time it was 1993, her engagement to my dad was old news, and still she carried the announcement with her in her purse. My parents were married on July 11, 1970, just before they each turned twenty-four years old. They had been sweethearts since the eleventh grade. My mother was hardly an “old school marm”—and yet reading that announcement illuminates her, and them, for me. I can imagine her excitement, her sense of possibility, her happily ever after. My parents’ marriage always seemed like a fairytale to me—they were always young, they were always in love. I caught them slow dancing in the garage once when I went to take out the trash. I caught them kissing many times. My mother blushed when my dad flirted with her. My father beamed with pride when he spoke of her. Many times, as I’ve struggled through my own relationships in life, I’ve thought back to the romantic ideal that they provided and told myself it couldn’t have been real—only something I imagined—but the contents of my mother’s pocketbook suggest otherwise. 

Her pocketbook is orderly. There are no empty wrappers, no crumpled bits of anything. No extra keys or random refuse. Only things she needed. Only the important things.