Connections: Can’t Take It With You

From where I sit, the world is getting narrower. It’s a given that the longer you live the longer your list becomes of colleagues, friends, and relatives who are gone. My sister-in-law is at the top of that list this week, having died on Monday.

Memorials and mementos are not salves, but they are nice and often meaningful. I want to remember what was said and written by or about someone who has died and to be able to look at their photographs. I’m proud of the way The Star has handled and written obituaries over the years, have edited hundreds, and written many. I’ve learned that the closer you were the harder the task.

Will the words and pictures we’ve always saved be lost to the digital revolution? Or will they remain somewhere in the ether forever? Will the next generation reject what we still hold onto physically as they wander in cyberspace?

My brother died more than five years ago, and his children — my niece and nephew — have posted many pictures of him and members of their extended family (including a young me) on Facebook; they have also unearthed what my nephew described as reel-to-reel audiotapes, which in the ’60s and ’70s the family used to mail back and forth between the East and West Coasts. My tech-savvy nephew must have had them digitized, because last week he sent a number of us a batch of these exchanges: conversations, poems, songs, stories. 

They arrived through Dropbox, an Internet file-sharing service, and even a somewhat computer-phobic person like me was able to figure out how to access one of the files. Imagine what a surprise it was to hear my niece, as a child in the early 1960s, saying she had just lost a tooth! She’s a grown woman now — and a grandmother. 

My brother and his wife were in the habit of storing lots of things, so it wasn’t surprising that the tapes were there to be found when their house was emptied after its sale. We are lucky to have them.

Which brings me back home to the myriad cartons and cabinets my husband and I have stowed away in the Rattray family house, but, thank goodness, not in the oldest part of the barn, which the East Hampton Historical Society is going to move to the Mulford Farm and restore. The historians call it the Hedges barn because a Hedges had it built in the mid-18th century, and it was later moved by my late mother-in-law’s father to its present site.

I’ve watched as friends have aged and begun to divest themselves of possessions (from souvenirs gathered on travels to furnishings and treasured mementos, not to mention real estate). Listening to my niece on that audiotape this week makes me realize that maybe, just maybe, the technology of the 21st century is making it possible to retain those words and mementos in a way that better values the past than putting them away in a box in some dark corner.