Episode 21: Transcript

"The things that are important are the things that get broken." - with Elizabeth Mosier

Doug French: Hey.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Hey, how’re you doing?

Doug: Good. I was up early. I was up for Donuts in the Dark.

Magda: Donuts in the Dark. What is that?

Doug: I have a friend who goes into work at, like, seven, but we meet at the donut place down here at the bottom of the street.

Magda: Ah, okay. The place with the Cambodian donuts. I love that place.

Doug: And it's dark now at seven o'clock.

Magda: Right. Well, for like two more weeks and then it's going to be light, for a few more days.

Doug: But it's just been overcast and grim for like three weeks now.

Magda: Yeah, Mike and I went for a walk this morning, and the leaves were really beautiful. And it was like, oh, wow, suddenly, it's autumn. After all this, just like sort of being weird and damp.

Doug: It's been moist for so long. And that's, that's the word that launched your romance! So we should give it the reference it deserves.

Magda: Yeah, and people are listening to that episode!

Doug: It's the fastest ever to become the top downloaded episode of all time.

Magda: Of any podcast ever, not just ours.

Doug: So we basically should have Mike on at least once a month now.

Magda: He's kind of proud and excited that so many people are listening to it. I think he thought nobody was going to care.

Doug: And what did I tell you? I went after him for months to come on.

Magda: I know, and you were right.

Doug: And now I hope it goes right to his head. He's going to be a total physics diva now.

Magda: He kind of already is a physics diva. We had a big extensive discussion about making pizza in the oven with the pizza stone versus in that little insert for the gas grill. Now that I've leveled up with the double 0 flour and the crust is really just magnificent. I was explaining my theory and then he was like, “well, actually, it's like”

Doug: Oh, dear.

Magda: I mean, he didn't say “well, actually,” but he did tell me what the, like the physics solution is.

Doug: What is double 0 flour? Is it like the universal donor?

Magda: It is, you know, it's the skeleton key of flour. I don't actually know. It's just, um, it's recommended for making pizza crust. And I'm talking about, you know, like thin crust, right? Let me look it up. It's a finely ground Italian flour. Okay, the difference between all-purpose and double 0 is how the gluten in each flour behaves.

Doug: Okay. So when does the gluten misbehave? 

Magda: I don't know, ain't misbehaving.

Doug: Naughty, naughty gluten. Well, this is excellent podcast material. You can listen while Magda Googles stuff.

Magda: This article that I've looked at really doesn't explain it to me as well as it could be. All I can say is I paid a shit ton for a bag of double O flour at the local grocery store. And I was like, how good can this be? But I'll be damned, the double 0 flour makes a better pizza crust. It's both chewier and crispier at the same time. So I would say if you are a pizza baking person, it's worth trying the 00 flour. I know that you are not because I bought you a pizza stone and you never use it 

Doug: Well, I'm happy to get my pizza out. I have to say there's a great pizza place here and I'm perfectly fine with that. But I will say the discussion this morning was about brisket. My buddy Mitch is a guy who will spend the day next to his smoker for like 12 hours. Okay, and he has this, this octopus probe because essentially, there's like a probe for the meat, there's a probe for the inside of the smoker, and it's attached by Bluetooth to his phone. And when he makes brisket in the neighborhood, it becomes kind of a thing. They're like, oh, he's out making brisket today. People stop by and offer their best wishes, uh, in return for maybe half a loaf.

Magda: That's really funny.

Doug: Um, all right. One second here. Um, do you want to talk about Staś?

Magda: Um, no.

Doug: Okay.

Magda: I don't want to at all.

Doug: Right.

Magda: He's off. Like, he's far away from here. So if he turns up someplace, and they scan him, I'll get him back. If he doesn't, then he's just gone.

Doug: I mean, he was born a rolling stone, right? I mean, at least he's 

Magda: Yeah, exactly. Like, he just popped up.

Doug: He'll be okay. Yeah.

Magda: Yeah, he popped up super friendly in somebody's backyard when he was four months old, right? So like, who knows where he was, he might have been somebody else's cat before. And they just didn't get a chance to chip him. I'd rather talk about my super high protein breakfast.

Doug: Oh, for God's sake. You don't want to talk about cat Kerouac?

Magda: Cat Kerouac.

Doug: All right, I hear you. I understand.

Magda: Well, my neighbor in Detroit knows to look out for him.

Doug: Right, and if he makes it out here to the Western Outpost, I'll look out for him, too. Right. Alright, well I'm sorry you're going through that. I miss him too, for what it's worth.

Magda: Thanks.

Doug: You know, he spent a lot of time on my chest too.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: He's a good egg, that cat. A very charismatic pickle.

Magda: Yeah, he really is a very charismatic pickle.

Doug: Well then we should talk about Elizabeth Mosier.

Magda: Yeah, let's talk about Elizabeth Mosier. So, she's a friend of mine from way back, and she wrote a memoir about the process of cleaning out and selling her parents' house when her mother's Alzheimer's was so advanced that her mother had to go into a dementia care facility. And the way for them to pay for that was to put her father in a senior apartment and sell the family house. And the only way she survived it was by using the techniques that she had picked up while she was volunteering on an archaeological dig in Philadelphia.

Doug: See, that's fascinating. When you're an archaeologist, the whole point is to find the story in the artifacts.

Magda: Right.

Doug: And here she is, she's got her own family's artifacts to sort through and piece together. And we talked a lot about that. I really, you know, especially when we talked about if you're in our age group and you're working on piecing together the lives that your parents had, it's great if you don't have to work as hard. Like if you've sat down with your parents, like I actually managed to do last summer and get their whole life stories so I could write their obituaries. They keep asking me if I've done it and I haven't.

Magda: Well.

Doug: And I should have, but I haven't. Besides, I want to throw all kinds of fun details in there. All they want is like, “he worked at a bank, and then he worked someplace else.”

Magda: Well, then you know what? Why don't you write two versions?

Doug: Oh yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna write one that's like a stand-up routine. And one that is the most gray flannel suit you ever saw. And he'll definitely take the latter.

Magda: Right.

Doug: Which is fine, because that's what he wants, and that's what he should have.

Magda: I get it.

Doug: Mom is another story. I could probably let loose a bit with mom if she chose.

Magda: I get it.

Doug: And by the way, I was on the phone with them for about an hour yesterday teaching them how to listen to this.

Magda: Oh boy.

Doug: So mom and dad, if you're listening, I love you both, and I'm definitely going to write it, I swear to God. I have to have it done. I'm going to see them over Christmas, and I have to have it done. I've set a deadline. There, it's done. Right.

Magda: There's a lot about this whole idea of cleaning out your parents stuff, or your other relatives stuff, right? And I think the fact that people keep going back to it and keep rehashing it, and there are so many books and TV series and all this kind of stuff about it, is because it's not just needing a method to sort through the stuff. It's about our emotions, and how do we stay on top of our emotions, and experience our emotions, but not let the emotions suck us under, right, about the whole thing. And I think that's what's interesting about how Libby approached it, is that she really did use these sort of principles from archaeology that are about the emotion of how you do this work. And I think this interview was kind of like a Russian doll of it, because it's like the process of sorting, and how she went through the process of sorting, having used the archaeological stuff that she learned.

Doug: She was dusting everything with a very little brush.

Magda: Exactly. Then she wrote a memoir about how she put this process around the clean out and also examining all of her memories.

‘Cause a lot of the memoir itself is about sort of treating like the physical objects and also her memories as objects, all of them. And then she was talking to us about the process of writing the memoir about putting the process, right. I just thought it was kind of cool.

Doug: Just layers and layers of navel gazing.

Magda: Yeah. Libby didn't really get into it when she was talking to us, but I would highly recommend that anybody who's into this interview and is just like, “Oh my God, this is so much like my experience with my parents or like what I know it's going to be like with my parents” or my aunt or whoever it is that you have to deal with. Like, absolutely get Libby's memoir and read Libby's memoir because there is some

difficult stuff about her relationship with her mom and the way her mom operated in the world as a mother and as a person and Libby trying to sort of come to terms with that, that it was really delightful.

Doug: Sounds like it's positive.

Magda: I don't know. It was really satisfying to me to read that somebody else had gone through a process of reconciling who their elder, you know, not necessarily parent but like an elder in their family had been in the world and how that it affected them as a kid and also later as an adult.

Doug: Yeah, and I have a bunch of friends actually who recently lost parents who have lamented the fact, especially ones who kind of came up with us in the blogging era, who wrote a lot about their lives, but didn't spend a lot of time writing about their parents. And now there's so many stories they know their parents have that are gone forever. And so many of them have said, if I could do this again, if I could go back in time, I would sit with my parents, talk about their lives and essentially harvest enough information so I can write an obituary that's full, that's right, an idea more than just a resume, you know. It's like “this is what he stood for, this is what he did, this is who he loved, this is what gave him joy.” And so uh Dad, I swear to God I will totally do this by Christmas and I'm very sure you will be alive until then.

Magda: He's gonna be alive at Christmas, come on.

Doug: He's gonna be. He's gonna bury me, for heaven's sake.

Magda: It's true. Your dad is yeah. Your dad's very healthy.

Doug: He is. Yeah, I gotta say.

Magda: I mean, I gotta say, like, it seems funny to say “your dad's very healthy,” considering I haven't laid eyes on him in a while. But your dad's just that kind of person who always sort of exuded good health. Like my mom would say about people, “oh, he's just put together well.” Right? Like, that's just put together well.

Doug: He has a full head of hair too, the bastard.

Magda: Well, yeah, but I mean, you get to wear more hats.

Doug: Yeah, no, I note to self, never try to go for a laugh line while your partner is drinking coffee.

Magda: Exactly. I was like, sorry, I thought it was funny.

Doug: Totally stifles the laugh line.

Magda: I'm going to promo something that's going to be in the Friday Flames, which is our newsletter, which if you subscribe to this podcast on Substack, you get the newsletter. When Thomas was here, we went apple picking. It turned out to be the last weekend of apple picking at the orchard, which seemed strange because it's been so hot here, but it was far enough in the season. Anyway, we ended up with a gazillion apples, like they barely even fit in the refrigerator. And so I've been making apple cakes out the, you know, a lot of apple cakes, let's just say.

Doug: Yeah, I don't really want to know what your apple cakes are coming out of.

Magda: Right.

And the funny one was last night we made one and Hannah and I were like, “Oh, this is the best one yet.” And Mike was like, “um, I don't like this one so much.”

Doug: Oh, come on now. 

Magda: He can't find the one that all three of us really like.

Doug: For you. You have what amounts to a household now. You've got a whole new family to navigate.

Magda: I know, it is like a whole new family, and I'm in a whole new school district. It is exactly like wife swap.

[Theme music]

Doug: Did you launch your writing career fresh out of college?

Elizabeth Mosier: I studied psychology and I thought I wanted to get a PhD. And probably around sophomore year, I realized I would make a terrible therapist because I'm really interested in people, but I would be kind of useless. I would just be like, “Oh my God, tell me more.” And I'd be taking notes, the way a fiction writer thinks.

So I wrote a lot at Bryn Mawr. I had a column in the Bi-Co News, an editorial column, and I always credit that as being the best training because not only was the audience super smart, but also super critical, like you couldn't get anything past them. And you would see them at breakfast, and they would definitely have an opinion about what you wrote. It made me think really about why I was writing, what unique thing I had to contribute, and really the purpose in the audience, which is something that I talk with my students all the time. You're not trying to be careful and correct. You're trying to actually convey something new and useful that no one else can say. Because I had to be able to defend myself, so it was really, really helpful.

And then about five years after I graduated, I started an MFA program. Sadly, the poet Louise Glück just died. She is the person who told me to go to Warren Wilson's MFA program in North Carolina. And Louise told me that it was the only way to study writing, this kind of mentorship model. And I believed her because, you know, Louise Glück, when she says something, it's considered serious. So I thought, right, I'll do that.

And because I was a psychology major, I didn't have the background that someone who goes to Iowa might have. I would have had to spend a year. I'm not sure that the writing programs do it. I never felt like I was lacking because everyone was kind of in the same boat. We were all reading contemporary writers. We were reading carnivorously, as my advisors taught us. You read the work that works for you. It wasn't about theme, it was about technique. You know, obviously we're imitating writers we admire, but if you read, you can always teach yourself. You can find works that do something well that you want to do.

Doug: It's amazing, isn't it? There's a book that just grabbed you by the throat for whatever reason. And what did you hate?

Elizabeth: Yeah, yeah. Either way. Yeah.

Doug: But I mean, I keep thinking of the Rabbit series.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah.

Doug: And the main weird coincidence is the start of Rabbit Run is Memorial Day weekend when Rabbit is 26 years old. And I began reading that book completely by accident during Memorial Day weekend when I was 26. I am now rereading Rabbit Is Rich.

Elizabeth: Oh, you've never read it before?

Doug: No, I did. I just I have all four. I've read them all. And I love them all.

But I read them all in my 20s. And I don't think when reading about a 50 year old man in my 20s resonates as much as reading about a 50 year old man in your 50s. And so I'm rereading that. It's a period piece at this point. But it is a very interesting revisit to something I thought I understood 30 years ago. And I had no idea what I was reading.

Elizabeth: I love that idea of rereading for better understanding. And for writers, I actually had my students when I taught writing for children, just particularly in this class, I had them come up with a syllabus of books that taught them. It's either books that they loved or hated, but that in some way, if they had to pick 10, what were the books that informed them as readers, as people, and as writers? And it was really useful for them to identify a writing aesthetic, but also a body of concerns. Literature is evolving. I got ideas from them about what to add to the syllabus, but it told me about what they were aiming for.

So they had a memory, like you might've had of the Rabbit series, of something that really spoke to you and that speaks to you at a different time when you now have the capacity to do your own original work. I have a friend that I reread Watership Down with occasionally. That was on my top 10, and it's a weird book for me to have on my top 10, but it was because it taught me so much about how to apply my interests in my own work.

Doug: Well, that's the good segue point, because you've been writing for a long time, but now you had an experience.

Elizabeth: Yes.

Doug: As I understand it, this latest book is your first foray into memoir, is that right?

Elizabeth: When I write, usually I'm very deliberate. I go research something, and I have people I want to talk to, I have documents I need to see. This was a project I got involved with, not by accident, but because in Philadelphia, there was an archaeological dig that was meant to uncover what had been President Washington's house during the brief period when Philadelphia was the capital. What intrigued me as a writer, the way in which we sometimes forget our own history in self-serving ways, people had forgotten that the house was there, the slaves' quarters were in the house, and I became intrigued by that disposition of images, really. 

Doug: I mean, that's the kind of thing that can

Elizabeth: But I went into this project just because Jed Levin, the archaeologist who was the head of this project, stood in the pit for like 45 minutes and talked to my daughters and me with this absolute love of what he does. And that just made the hairs on my arm stand up. He said, you know, this is a tangible link to the people who lived in this house. And he described finding, you know, they'd been digging for weeks and they hadn't found anything. And he described the moment when they found the mason's penny. That was the tradition. You would put a penny from the year that you began construction. And that's when they knew they were about to go into colonial era Philadelphia. They feared that it was all gone with all of the various renovations of the park. And I really just thought, I want to hang out with people like this. So I ended up spending seven years volunteering as a very low level, what we call myself, technician. I washed broken, dirty glass and pottery.

And, and in that time, every Thursday for seven years, I, for seven hour shifts, like it's extremely tedious and boring work, but I loved it because it seemed to me very much like what a writer does. So four years in, I got an idea about the way in which this sorting and what we keep as a culture and what we throw away, what that had to do with my mother's memory loss, which was also going on at that time. But in that time, as I was sort of mourning the loss of her memory, our memory, my identity as a daughter, I started to make these connections. And because I was at the archaeology lab every Thursday, picking through tiny pieces of shell and bone, and it was quiet in the room, it was a kind of waiting room where I could do this kind of repair work that I think we do when we grieve. 

And for me, what led me to really want to make use of this as memoir material, I never knew, and it had to be explained to me by these urban archaeologists, that the point of archaeology is not about the objects. The point is really information, that these objects tell us stories about the people who lived with these objects, who used these objects, who left these objects behind. It informed my writing when I wrote this collection called Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home. I didn't intend to connect them, but it was that piece, discovering that the thing is not the point, the people are the point, which made me interested in looking at everything in my life through that lens.

The first house that I had to clear out was my family, my childhood home. As many people find, memory care is expensive and in order to afford it, we had to sell our house and put my father in a condo and use that money to support my mother's memory care expenses. So it had to be done quickly, under duress, and in 2008. So as you remember, the bottom of the financial market in the worst housing market in the country, which is Phoenix, my hometown. And the task of doing that was so overwhelming to me.

Magda: But this was objects, right? Like this was physical objects.

Elizabeth: Yes. And not just objects, but things that are my history.

and that evoke emotional response. I stood in the house and I thought, okay, think like an archeologist. What would an archeologist do here? And I don't say that lightly, that saved my life. It made it possible for me to think about my family's home as a kind of feature, which is what we call a space in the ground that you're digging up the objects from and then analyzing.

Doug: So yeah, I love that idea. It's like, it's like studying dinosaurs while they're walking around behind you.

Magda: Exactly. I think this idea of it being a feature, I think that's the crux of why this is so difficult for people to sort through the objects of their older relatives, right? And my brother and I identified this when we were sorting through all of my uncle's things after he died.

Elizabeth: You were posting about that and I found that so moving.

Magda: Yeah. And it was, um, I don't know, my parents have a lot of things. Their parents had a lot of things. But when my uncle died, it was so much easier to do the sorting through of my uncle's stuff. Because

It was very easy to understand that his house was a feature. You know, I didn't have that language for it until you just said it right now, but we understood what those things had meant to him. And you had said, you've written about the idea that the problem people have with sorting through stuff is that they don't know what they mean. And it was very clear to us what certain things meant. Like he had been the one who had taken all of the objects of the people in our family that didn't have children to take them or whose children didn't want them. And he had this entire collection of things that had no meaning to him. They had just been things that he had taken to make other people feel better. And those things were so easy to sort through because we knew exactly what the meaning was. The meaning was only the value of the physical object. And if it had no value or quote unquote “value,” we could just throw it away or recycle it or whatever. And there was no, sort of, “ooh, does this matter? Does this not matter?”

Elizabeth: That's such a great way to describe it. It's information. Yeah, there's something about curiosity that gives a project momentum. Because this is not just a pragmatic project, it's a forensic project. And especially when it's your own family, you have questions that you want answered. It doesn't make it fun, I won't go that far, but it does give it a kind of energy. I think the challenge with my parents was a little different because I was trying to numb myself to those feelings. And my parents just lived there since like 1975, so they never got rid of anything. Wow.

Doug: You had like so many different layers of crust over the decades.

Elizabeth: Yes. Oh my. As I'm going through, I'm thinking, “why would you hold on to the Hot Dogger from Ronco circa 1975?” that my parents were enamored of, like any gadget.

Magda: I would like to describe what it was. It was a gadget, and Ronco was the company owned by Ron Popeil, who was like a serial inventor of

dubiously necessary products.

Doug: Pocket fisherman.

Magda: Yes, the pocket fisherman. And the Hot Dogger was amazing. Like he must have been so just proud of himself when he came up with it. It was essentially just like a piece of wire that was bent and had these prongs in it that you would plug in so the electricity would flow through the wire and you would stick a hot dog the long way.

Doug: You got extra points for screaming, it's alive.

Elizabeth: My parents loved stuff like that so there was a little bit of that kind of experience but I think mostly the challenge I had was this kind of emotional numbness and when I said think like an archaeologist that was a strategy that was really helpful to do sorting because like you, I was like the family archivist in this situation. I had to make these decisions which felt like ethical decisions, like historical family decisions, what to keep, what to not keep. I was going along quite well until I got to my mother's books. My mother had something like 6,000 books. Her life, her resume was what she had read. And I'm sure that's why I'm a writer, because I grew up in a house like that. So they were very, the idea of getting rid of them was really upsetting. You know, it's a book that she learned from. There's a very intrinsic quality that a library book can't reproduce.

Doug: Exactly right.

Magda: There's also that essay in your Excavating Memory book about how the things she did for you when you were going off to college were, she bought you a wool coat because you were going to need that going to Philadelphia from Phoenix.

Elizabeth: Oh man, I wish I still had that coat. I hated it then, but it was beautiful. I just didn't realize how beautiful

Magda: Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, right. It's like your mother, and not necessarily YOUR mother, but one's mother has this ideal of what's going to happen when the child, especially the girl child, goes off to college. Right. And that just doesn't match up with what current fashions are.

Elizabeth: She also, as you'll recall, went to our family bookshelves and made me an alphabetical list of all the books I should have read by that point in my life. Which is so helpful when you're like two weeks from going to college. But when my mother did that, I think a lot of it was projection. As Magda said, this was her wishes for me. She only had two years of college before she married my father. So a lot of it was wrapped up in her own investment. That was the moment when I realized she was a different person from me.

So when I was standing in my house filled with despair because I hit this wall because of my mother's books and the emotion attached to them, I remembered that list and I thought, oh, I already have the most important thing. She made a list of the books that were important to her so I can get rid of the other ones. And that was directly, even though it was a breakthrough for me emotionally, it was directly from archaeology. What is important is the information, not the thing. I had a stack of all of these books that I was going to take home or ship home. And I ended up with one, and that was Joan Didion's A Year of Magical Thinking, because I needed to read it. Like I really needed to read it at that moment. And that's what books are for. Right? Even that list helped me to get through this, because it was the tangible record of my mother's wishes for me, of her preferences. It was kind of like a bio of her.

Magda: Well, and it was like a mixtape. I mean, I think everybody understands that a mixtape is love, right? It's a gift of love. When I read the Excavating Memory book, which came out in... 

Doug: Yeah, now that we’re almost halfway in, let's mention the book, which is called Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home. 

Magda: I think there's nothing more crucial to people our age, right? Aside from if you have children, helping your children be okay with where they are in whatever launch process they're initiating, right? Like, I think if you have the bandwidth to do so, I think the task of this age of your 50s is reconciling who you are in relationship to your parents. And a lot of that is about your parents' stuff.

And so I love the idea of talking about your parents' stuff, but the way you situated it in the book, Elizabeth, is that it was really like sifting through the memories and the meaning of these memories you had was exactly the same as sifting through the stuff and the meaning of what the stuff was. And I had not really thought about that before, although if you're a fan of the Swedish death cleaning thing, which I am, although I can't imagine that I will ever actually do it, right? The reason I'm a fan... 

Doug: You are totally an armchair death cleaner.

Magda: I absolutely am. I'm an armchair a lot of things, right? Right.

But I mean, the thing that distinguishes the Swedish death cleaning method, process, capitalist packaging, right, of that that I like versus, say, the Marie Kondo thing, even though I think she's trying to get at the same thing, is: What's the meaning? Does it have any meaning to you? And that, to me, is where everybody gets tripped up in this stuff with your parents is What did this object mean to them? And does it have to mean the same thing to me? And like, how do I just move through this?

Elizabeth: That's exactly right. And I should say I loved that book. I read it and I love the way she thinks about the usefulness of things. And I think it's a really ethical thing to give things away to people while they're still useful. I've given some things to my daughters inspired by that book.

Things that I love, that I still love, that I still use. Because in giving these things to them now, I know they understand what the value of it is to me.

I also think that our culture overvalues display as opposed to use. So I love anything that pushes back against that. This is an emotional task.

This process does not begin until you reattach the object to the person.

When we're considering what our lives will be like when our parents are no longer here, we start considering how really close are we to them? How much do we know? How much do we want to know? Because as we've talked about, archaeology is about filling in the dots. The more challenging the task, the fewer dots there are.

Doug: Right. And again, I'm going to bore everyone here who's not a Monty Python fan, but one of my favorite little segue links was when a group excavates a big toe from a sculpture. And they take it to the British Museum and they proudly say, from this one part, we've reconstructed what this animal definitely looked like. And it's a mammoth with a toe for its trunk. And it just talks about how they had no idea what they were doing. And I think there are adult children who feel that way when they're trying to piece together who their parents were. So when we talk about what people might get from this podcast, it's the idea of get as many dots together with your parents while they're still here to convey them to you.

Elizabeth: Absolutely. Right.

Doug: How much of that did you do and how much do you wish you had done?

Elizabeth: That's such a good question because I think we all have regrets. One of the ways in which we dispose of or make decisions about things in terms of their meaning is to turn the object into something else that we can use it. So we, you know, obviously we might repurpose something, but then there are all these questions that sort of, you know, now, you know, my parents were hot doggers and I'm not, you know, that was not, I'm not a gadget person. So that's easy.

Doug: Or just dorks.

Elizabeth: Dorks who like to electrify hot dogs.

Doug: And I mean that in the most endearing way possible.

Elizabeth: I have a personality that is about editing. I edit, edit, edit. My personality is different. And yet this is a process of recovery. And that is why we have to look at these things and consider them.

Doug: Do you think repurposing it helps with the trauma? Do you think repurposing it in a way helps off?

Elizabeth: It depends on the way in which it's done. You know, I think if we reevaluate what use means, sometimes use means not just literally using it, but what is the thing that will help me to process my grief? When my book came out, I started interviewing people for a kind of museum of objects. I would ask someone to tell me a story about an object and then I would edit it down to a thousand words and put it on my Instagram. And I learned from that, from this daily practice and just from talking to a lot of people about this process, that we tend to hold on to things that either evoke a memory from the past or a person that we love and we've lost. Or in the present, after trauma or a divorce or some sort of separation or refugees moving, being dislocated, we have objects that help reorient us in the present. And then we have objects that tend to be the way we envision the future. So I started thinking about things in those categories. What is it that the person needs to do? So it's very dependent on the situation that the person is in.

But in terms of like the ethics of, you know, reusing things, my mother-in-law, Chris's mother, was, I loved her so much and losing her was so sad for me, but she was a beautiful quilter who made you know, I can't even count how many quilts. We've got them on our beds. We've got them in our closet. They were all over their house. I can't keep all of these things. And part of honoring her memory was to remember that some of the quilts she made, she made for a homeless shelter or for babies who were born with HIV. She gave her quilts away all the time.

And that, and knowing that about her, helped me to honor that, and to give away some of these things. But because I’m a writer, and the family archivist, I also took pictures of everything, and made a little book on my Mac, for my daughters. There is importance, I think, in preserving this matrilineal line of what anthropologists call movable goods. These are the things your grandmother made. These were the shows she's displayed them in. These were the things she was really interested in and the way her work evolved. So I would never give a blanket recommendation to someone.

Doug: A blanket.

Elizabeth: Yeah, a blanket. But I think what I learned at the archaeology lab is some guidelines that helped me to discern what to keep and what to give away. And coming back to Doug's question, oh, I wish I'd asked more questions when my parents were alive or when my in-laws were alive about what was important. But I have some of those stories.

Doug: Well, I love the idea about quilting. Like they say, the health of a society comes from when elderly women make quilts, they know they'll never snuggle underneath.

Elizabeth: And then a second guideline I thought that only comes from working at the archaeology lab, everything that we were processing was stuff that some people had thrown away. That's where it comes from, right? The privy pit. That's what you're digging up. It's stuff that people threw away. It's broken, and it's in the privy pit. So that, over seven years, flipped the way I thought of use. That the things that we actually love, the things we actually use that are important to us are the things that get broken. And that helped me both to understand that some of the things that were preserved and intact in my own family's home were not important because they weren't used up and broken.

And I also, Magda asked me if it made me think of my own objects differently. I came home and started using my wedding china. Because it was, I had only really only used it Thanksgiving and Christmas and I thought “how will my children know this was important to me, unless it's scratched up and broken and missing pieces?” because, and because they were with me when we used it.

And then the third thing that I learned is that the archaeological record is often created in crisis. There's a woman in New Orleans who does work on, who did work after Hurricane Katrina, who calls this the taphonomy of disaster. So archaeologists recognizing that what gets left behind and what gets taken is an emotional process. It's not just random. It's not just convenience. You know, if someone asks you, “your house is burning, what are you going to take?” It's an emotional, you take things that are perhaps not useful or valuable, but they're valuable to you. We can have systems. It was helpful to me to think like an archaeologist. But until I really started identifying what I could use in that house, I couldn't make any progress.

I found my grandmother's 1927 Farmer's Guide cookbook. I'd never seen my mother use it. So it wasn't something that I could say, Oh, I know what this meant for her. Right. But I researched that thing. I made a recipe for rhubarb pie, trying to just use what I had and do it the way they did it. You know, all the recipes start with “50 pounds of sausage,” you know, like, what is this? Not built for modern, you know, modern eating styles. And I did it.

Doug: We all know every old recipe began with 50 pounds of sausage.

Elizabeth: Oh, yeah. And this was Depression era. So it was like, you know, “here's a cure for warts.” But it was also stuffed through with my grandmother's ephemera, you know, postcards and things she'd clipped out of the newspaper. And even though I'd never seen this thing before, my mother must have gotten it when her mother died. For me, it was a research project that I then pulled the meaning out of it.

Magda: Well, to me, it felt like continuing the relationship, right? Like, you know, I mean, I had this very profound sense when my uncle died that he had died, but our relationship hadn't ended. It was just that I was keeping up the sort of living end of the relationship, if that made sense. It wasn't that I knew what all the meaning was right away. But as we worked through the stuff, we just discovered the meaning. It was really like rings of a tree, we would get down to another layer and be like, “Oh, remember when he was into South Beach diet.” And then there was this whole section, he was into microwave cookery. And you know, as a recipe developer myself, I'm reading through this cookbook. And I really should have kept it.   

Elizabeth: The kitchen as locus. That's what I mean about my grandmother's. That's why it was stuffed full of all that ephemera because it was right there handy. She, my mother never used it, but she used it every day. It's splattered with grease. It's, there are pages torn out.

It is well loved and well used. And I think that is the instinct that made me say. This is important.

Magda: Right!

Elizabeth: You know, you've seen it. An object that helps you to locate yourself in a kitchen as a woman, as a descendant of this person who used this book. That's the poetry of history. That's part of what we're looking for. And it connects me to my female ancestors at a moment when I was losing my mother and not just physically losing her. She was losing her memory. She didn't know who I was. So who am I? Well, I'm somebody who's connected to farmers who made 50 pounds of sausage from whatever, who cooked a roof-tiled pie.

Doug: I love this emerging theme, 50 pounds of sausage.

Elizabeth: You read these recipes and they don't even give you oven temperatures. They just knew how to do it. It was probably an oven you heated with wood, so there was no temperature. You had to gauge whether it was hot enough. That was a super helpful orientation to who I am, when I felt like I didn't know who I was, which is just a natural, I'm sure you've experienced this.

Magda: Yeah.

Elizabeth The first time my mother didn't know who I was, I felt like I had no identity because part of my identity is to be her daughter. So as a result, when I, you know, my daughters, I have two daughters, both adults. They're so tired of me, of hearing me say, “when I die,” Mom, stop.

I have made archive boxes, just two. One is of my writing, and one is of other things, ephemera. And I've said to both of them, “you will not need to sort through our house to discover what's important to me because I've put it in this box. This box, you donate to Bryn Mawr College because it's my writing. This box, you can do whatever you want with it. You don't have to keep it. You don't have to mourn it. I just am trying to save you the process of figuring out what was important to me. Now your task is going to be what's important to you.” And that will be very different from what I think is important. And I think actually saying that to them is my attempt to make up for what Doug was talking about.

Doug: Do you regret not, you know, you don't ask the story, you don't ask to... 

Elizabeth: I found out some information about my mother-in-law's quilts from seeing what she kept, seeing what she'd written on the backs of photos. But I wish I'd asked her, you know, when she was alive. And what I'm trying to do with my daughters is tell them, not overburden them. The way we want to tell our stories, but just say it's in this box. If you want to ask me about it, happy to talk about it, but you can make your own conclusions about what's important.

Doug: Now, would that have occurred to you before you wrote this book?

Elizabeth: No, not at all. Even though I don't like junk and clutter and I'm an editor by nature, I've used this example of my family's home, but in one decade, we did this process again for my husband's parents. We did this process when my father died. We did this process when my brother-in-law died at 61, which is a whole different, when you're going into someone's apartment in the middle of their life and trying to make these decisions. All of this tragedy and this pain, that's when you know what it means to be married. Because I thought to myself, I would rather be anywhere else doing it. This was the most painful thing I've ever had to do. And if I could have flown away and not done it, I would have, like any person, so I sound like I've got it all figured out. But oh my God, did I want to run. But I didn't because we're married and this is what you do.

We sorted through it together. We made it easier for each other.

Doug: And that's what I wanted to get to because you mentioned before you had to reconcile your writing and your grief.

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Doug: And we've referenced it in the past the push-pull of opening your heart to the process versus closing it off to protect it. That had to reconcile at some point. So what is the timeline in terms of when that dam broke a little bit or when those two could merge, did that happen before the book started or did it happen while you were writing? And if so, how did the book as a finished product differ from what you thought you were starting?

Elizabeth: That's a great question. And like all writing projects, I never know I'm writing something until I'm writing it. I'm just researching or I'm just you know I was sitting in the lab for four years processing artifacts until I finally thought, oh, this has to do with cultural memory and personal memory and family history and my mother losing her memory.

So then the pieces, the emotional piece and the research that writers do, it's like running around in your brain, finding a way to connect, you know, to make connections. And my book is a lens that I adopted to look at my life the way an archaeologist would.

Magda: It's a memoir. It's not a how-to. At all.

Elizabeth: Exactly. And I said, what I found is that the book was an entry at a, it gave me breakthroughs in thinking and these, these new, a lens that was useful, but the work goes on. I love talking about this with people, but it is always very personal and particular to the person's concerns. You know, what the relationship was. It's like, a little like being a therapist, you know. You can't just write a book that's like tips because it's so emotional and personal.

Magda: Well, and I don't think people want that to be true. You know what I mean? I think people want there to be some sort of universal value or universal system of valuation or something like that, right? Like when you go into your parents' house when they've died or when they're relocating to a small unit or to memory care or something like this,

“This is what you keep and this is what you donate. And this is what you throw away and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But I don't think that's the case at all. And one of the things 

Elizabeth: I can only get you so far, right?

Magda: Yeah. One of the things that my brother said that I thought was just like the crux of everything, because my uncle had these collections.

He had some unusual items, items that he'd paid a lot of money to have displayed and framed, and that I think he thought were going to increase in value.

Doug: Didn't he have, like, a stained glass window? From the Wolverines?

Magda: Yeah. He had, it was either Wolverines or I don't know, it might've been Red Wings. It was like a Tiffany lamp, like a stained glass Tiffany lamp, but, and I mean, just all kinds of stuff. And my brother and I were talking about the idea of value, right? Did it have monetary value? Did it have emotional value to anyone? And it didn't have any emotional value to us. We had never really interacted with it. It had just been my uncle's collection. So my brother said, this might have both financial value to us and emotional value to somebody else in the world. There might be

50 people in the world who would be delighted to have this thing, would use it, would feel a lot of it. We just can't access that value.

Elizabeth: That's a really great way to put it.

Magda: And it like that to me was just like, Oh, okay. This is not that we are not trying hard enough, that we are not smart enough. It's okay. If we just, leave it by the side by the curb and somebody comes and picks it up. He also had a lot of objects that were stand-ins for memories, right?

They were souvenirs. So he was a very avid singer, German-America men's choirs, right? Mannerchor. And there's this whole like Mannerchor circuit. And every time there was a convention or a big singing meetups, they would make these glass beer steins. They were just plain glass, but they would have the event and the date etched in them, right? And so he just had a zillion of these and they were all just crammed into every corner. He clearly didn't care about them. And I remember my brother and I had gotten to this point where we were like, nobody wants just free glasses. Okay. We had just filled the recycle bin with them because they were glass, they could be recycled. And my mother happened to be in town that day and happened to come over to my uncle's house and she burst into tears when she saw that we had put all these memories in the recycle bin. And that was when I realized that my brother and I had come out the other end of it. We really were able to understand that some things just didn't have value, like they were in the recycle bin going to be recycled as glass. And so they had their real value.

Elizabeth: That's so profound and for your, if you'd said that to your mother, it wouldn't move her.

Magda: No. Not at all.

Elizabeth: She needed to go through the same process that you did to think about it. We, Chris's brother, whose apartment we cleared after his death, was a collector of airline seats. His entire apartment was filled with airline seats and airline paraphernalia.

Doug: How big was this apartment?

Elizabeth: It's like a two bedroom California, not big.

Magda: Oh, about the size of a 747.

Elizabeth: Yeah, right. And he had, I think he had 14 of them. He was a nuclear physicist, and this was his thing, from childhood.

Doug: Would he take the seat with him when he deplaned, that kind of thing?

Elizabeth: No, he did not do that. He was thinking about it because of what Magda said about these special pockets of interest. So, we obviously couldn't take these 14 airline things. But what we did as a grief ritual, we found a prop house in California, because this is who buys this stuff. We've tried to set it up in a way that was worthy of the collection, so that we could do justice to it. We made them better than they were.

And then we sold them. And I think there are other things like that you do that for and then you give it away. In the spirit of “this was something someone collected that was important to them, but it's not something we can keep or it's not important to us, but we love that he did this. We love telling the story. We love looking at the pictures of how we repaired those objects.” We made them beautiful again, and then we could let them go.

So I'm a huge believer in rituals like that. And we had this we hired this Mormon woman. And the Mormon I only mentioned her religion because I grew up with Mormons and they really believe that you're walking into the afterlife and you're going to see your ancestors like right now.

Magda: Okay.

Elizabeth: It was a delight to have help us. She works for a law firm and her job is grief cleaning. So she was in the apartment with us. And she would say things like, “He lived with what he loved.” Like, I'm like, you know, overwhelmed by grief. And I'm trying to process this. And she would say, “he lived with what he loved.” And I thought, hey, that's right.

He lived with what he loved. And we remember him. We remember that he loved planes. And it's a nice way to have a little piece of it and to honor his collection without having a house full of airplane seats.

Doug: I wonder what it must be like to be a grief cleaner professionally. I think it's an amazing industry to get into. It's an amazing service to provide. It requires a very specific way of thinking, a bit of emotional discipline, a bit of empathy and bedside manner, for lack of a better word. You really need to comfort, but with a very expeditious way about you.

Elizabeth: That's why it was so helpful to have that perspective. She was pragmatic where we needed her to be, but because of her faith that your ancestors are just on the other side, you know, she was actually uplifting in a way that I couldn't really muster on my own.

We were talking about giving things away and I think there is some joy in doing that, but also, you know, we've been on the receiving end of this. My daughter outfitted her new apartment by, these estate sales where the custom now, at least in California, in Los Angeles, is to give a little biography of the person whose things these are. I thought that was just lovely. There is what they call an ownership effect that enhances our perception that the things that we have are really valuable, which is why we're always trying to get money for them or at least make up the money we spent when, as Magda said, nobody's going to pay for that.

But if you give it to someone or if you sell it to some 20-something person who's outfitting their first apartment for an affordable price, what joy does that inspire? And that's part of what this grief cleaner who helped us in California taught me. She had strategies, but mostly she had joy. And she helped us to feel that when we were really in pain.

Doug: Magda, did you ever look at, like, were there archives of Tim's radio show that you ever listened to? Do those exist?

Magda: Well, that's a good question. I never really thought about that. So there was a show, The German American Radio Hour, and it was on WCWA radio. For years, it had been run by this guy named Pete Peterson, who was an actual immigrant from Germany. He would just play German music. And so when Pete Peterson died, my uncle and a couple other people took over the radio show. And, you know, one time his co-host was on vacation. And so he brought me in to talk and we just did the radio show. It was really kind of funny. And then you announced these records. And I was like, really, people listen to this? Everybody that was being talked about on the show knew, everybody knew who they were.

And everybody had probably been in an event with them and something like that. But I never thought to ask if there was an archive, I guess I could find out.

A thing that was very interesting was one of the sponsors of the show was the funeral home that we had had my grandmother's funeral at. And my uncle read the copy for that, and they just had it as a, you know, like they would punch it in. He wouldn't read it every time they did the show.

And I have to say it is a good funeral home. We had my uncle's funeral there. And then I don't know, it might have been like a year later, I happened to be listening to the radio show. And my uncle's commercial advertising the funeral home where his own funeral happened, came up and I was just like, “Gahh!” It didn't feel horrible. It was just like a wash of recognition. And, “wait a minute, what?” Yeah, why would they 

Doug: The mind fuckery. Absolutely. My God.

Magda: Oh, but I mean, why would they have bothered to re-record that ad if the ad was still A, working, B, everybody knew it, C, everybody who listened to that radio show knew that my uncle was dead. And so when they heard it, they would have just been like, Oh, Tim. Oh, that WAS a great funeral. You know, because everybody who heard it had been at the funeral.

Doug: Imagine if he'd said, you know, these guys will probably bury me someday. So I like them that much.

Magda: Oh, I know.

Elizabeth: What you're describing is exactly what objects should be, both this original show and then perhaps the record of it, is a way of connecting people, right? And serving something of cultural history, which is really the point.

You know, when I was working at the archaeology lab, a lot of the artifacts and documents, you realize that, especially with the enslaved Africans, this was the only evidence that they had lived. You know, they weren't buildings and monuments. They were things that connected us to people and sometimes the only evidence that they had lived. And I really believe in that. We often, in these kinds of situations, don't have time to sort through all of it. But I think that's the impulse to sort, right, is to keep it, to try to preserve it. And we can all like at the holidays, remember people through stories, not just objects, the story becomes the object. 

When people have trouble letting go of things, and this is different from hoarding, which is a whole other psychological issue that it is not the same thing as what we're talking about. When we have trouble letting go of things, it's really just because a cluttered house is like a cluttered mind. It's full of these abstractions, and we don't know what to do with any of it. And perhaps because I'm a writer, I have made a lifelong practice out of seeking clarity, seeking meaning. And that doesn't mean that I want to keep everything. It means that I can decide what I want to let go of. A lot of the stuff we got for our wedding, what were we thinking? What kind of life did we think we would have?

Those plates are actually better than most of the things you could buy at Crate and Barrel nowadays. It's bone china. It's well-made. And the only shift is that I'm not worried about breaking it now. I'm just going to use it and it's going to end up in the privy pit and that's just fine. So it will be a record of what was important to me.

Doug: What you've done a great job of today is kind of not codifying, but just giving a sense of how this is a rite of passage that most of us will go through. And even though every situation and every experience is different, there are some universal truths that we can confront. And if there's anybody who can help someone get through cleaning out a parent's house, it's someone who's been through five of them.

Elizabeth: Yeah, right. And particular advice for particular people in situations, but with an intention of really recognizing that it's an emotional process, not just sparking joy, or, you know, being good for the environment that it, you know, it's harder than it seems until you do it, and then it gets a little easier, or there's something you bring back that makes it a little easier, right? And there's some joy in it, as you both expressed. There's some fun in it. There's some moments where you think, how good is it that you know your uncle so well, right?

Magda: Yeah, really.

Doug: So and Elizabeth, as we go, where can we find out more about your writing and about the work you do, the people you teach? Where can we find you online to learn more?

Elizabeth: You can find me online at elizabethmosier.com, and I've done a sort of curated selection of my favorite works that I've written, with links.

Doug: Well, again, Elizabeth, it's been great chatting with you about this.

I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot from your book, Excavating Memory. I love the concept of equating the emptying or clearing out a parent's home as a discovery, similar to what an archaeologist does. It's a complex process, but the more we talk about it, the easier it gets. So thanks again for talking with us today.

Elizabeth: I just loved talking with both of you. This was so much fun and I appreciate your stories and I appreciate the thought and heart that goes into your thinking about, you know, what, even why to do a podcast like this. I think it's super helpful. So thank you for having me on. I didn't say to you guys at the beginning, but I'll say now you both have really great radio voices and the combination of your voices is really good. It's so important.

Doug: Well, I could become a bit more relaxing. “Thank you for listening to When the Flames Go Up.”

Elizabeth: It's a meditation podcast.

Magda: That's a little bit weird.

Doug: “Sponsored by Sominex. Excedrin PM brings you the When the Flames Go Up.”

Elizabeth: “You are getting sleepy.”

Doug: And thank you listeners for listening to Episode 21 of the When The Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Elizabeth Mosier, author of the book Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home. When The Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC, All Rights Reserved. We are available everywhere you get podcasts, but please subscribe to us at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. If you do listen on Apple, please give us a review. We appreciate it. We'll be back next week. Until then, thanks a lot. Bye-bye.