Kqeds Perspectives

Things are just things, but they’re also artifacts that tell the story a life. Dan Goldes has this Perspective. My 90‐year‐old mother died recently, and my two brothers and I spent a few days cleaning out her house in Santa Rosa. As we sorted through the drawers, cabinets, and boxes, we spent time laughing, crying a little, and ribbing her in absentia for all the things she saved: receipts from long‐ago purchases, paintings my younger brother and I made in grade school, books she’d read decades before. Why, I thought, does someone save all this stuff? Then I realized that what we were looking at were artifacts. My mother was born into the Depression and was divorced with a young son by the early 1950s. She made her way to a new life in California, married again, had two more sons, divorced a second time, and spent the next 40 years discovering her path. That path wasn’t always easy for a 50‐something woman who had spent 20 years raising kids. As I looked at the boxes of stuff we were giving to friends, donati