My neighborhood is three roughly east-west streets and six roughly north-south streets, not a gated community by any means, but a little enclave nonetheless. Because two of our streets are one-way and because we abut a fenced-off university, cars have only four routes into the neighborhood, from only two directions. The resulting lack of traffic makes us a haven for kids, bikers, runners, walkers, deer, bunnies, the occasional fox and the kind of cat who, though domesticated, can’t accept a life indoors. Until last month, one of those cats reigned supreme as everybody’s favorite guy, the cat of our neighborhood’s collective heart.

Who knows where he came from. Sometime in 2018 he started showing up at a particular house on Varsity Road, lounging on the sidewalk out front and the porch around back. He was slender (if a little potbellied), young but not a baby, gritty street-cat white with a black tail and black curtain bangs parted down the middle and a large swath of black on his back as though he’d been draped in a bearskin rug. You or I might not have thought marshmallow, but the five-year-old girl of the house did, and it stuck. If the back door was open, Marshie would stroll in and find a comfy spot for a long, hard nap. “Like he was coming off a bender,” the mom of the house says. “Like if Uncle Buck were a cat.”

Obviously he charmed the family’s pants off. Obviously they fell deeply in love. But even though they fed him and took him to the vet and had him neutered, even though he slept in their beds, they didn’t think of Marshmallow as theirs. Stewards, the mom felt. Not owners. So in 2020, when the family decided to move out of state, they agonized: take him or no?

Of course, by this time, Marshie had charmed many neighbors. Such a people person. If he saw you coming along the sidewalk, he trotted up or sauntered over or flomped and rolled and stretched and waited for you to come to him. He bonded with toddlers through sliding glass doors. He snoozed on the warm hoods of cars. His territory wasn’t huge, but it was deep. Ultimately, the Varsity Road family decided that here was where Marshie belonged, and when they moved, a family around the corner, on Reynolds Place, stepped in to become his new people.

The years passed. Marshie had all the comforts at the new caretakers’ house, including a Christmas stocking at Christmas, but he was a cat of the world. He climbed trees. He prowled decks. He commandeered little kids’ backyard playthings. He had a taste for puddles and buckets of dirty rainwater. He killed birds and baby bunnies. He lost some fights and got some stitches. If a neighbor thought he was limping, they’d text the caretakers, and the dad of the house would check him over when Marshie came around for bed that night. He’d paw at your door at 6:45 a.m., hoping for breakfast. If you left a steak to rest unattended on the grill, he’d help himself. He was brazen that way. He had a gift—maybe his best—for making himself at home. He tricked multiple households into thinking they were his sole source of food. (My husband and I once ran into a college girl who, after meeting Marshie when she parked in our neighborhood, started regularly bringing him cans of tuna, believing she was singlehandedly keeping him alive. When we told her his name, she went all gooey like a you-know-what.)

Every time my husband and I went on our way after a Marshie encounter, we told him, “Be careful.” But the words were pro forma, because Marshie was so clever and savvy and wise. The last time I saw him, I called his name with the delight you feel running into a great old friend, and he promptly headed in my direction. And then kept going, psych!—because his actual target was a college boy carrying bags of takeout. He knew what he was doing, Marshie did.

And yet, on April 19, word went out on our neighborhood Facebook that Marshie had died. Apparently, despite our lightly trafficked streets, he was hit by a car, but the circumstances aren’t the point. The point is that two days after we got the news, Marshie’s friends and neighbors gathered in the early evening on Reynolds Place to celebrate him. Thirty-five-ish people showed up, on foot, on bike, on scooters, in strollers. Presiding over the occasion were the caretaker father (who is and always will be ID’d in my phone as “Marshmallow’s dad”) and a magnificent life-size Lego Marshie one of the caretaker kids had made a few months earlier. Someone (well, I) had laid a bunch of crepe-paper flowers at the base of the oak tree Marshie liked to climb. Children brought drawings of Marshie. People told stories about Marshie. And though opinions on the advisability of letting cats outdoors surely varied, the consensus was that Marshie wouldn’t—couldn’t—have been himself if he’d had to spend his life on the inside. He wasn’t at all averse to the comfort of a warm bed or a soft couch, but if he hadn’t been free to be outside, he wouldn’t have been able to shine his brazenly beautiful Marshmallow light.

Marshie wasn’t just a member of our neighborhood—he was one of the things that helped make it a neighborhood. He was a great neighbor: happy to see you, have a little catch-up and then go about his business, leaving you to go about yours. Even a terrible day was a good day when you turned a corner and there he was: louche or playful or sleepy or insouciant or lasered-in on prey. I’m not much of a pray-er myself, but a prayer I’ve sometimes prayed for ones I love is that they find a way to live up to their full potential. I think Marshie did. I think everyone gathered on Reynolds Place last month would have agreed. As the evening got cooler, people hugged themselves, and as things wound down, they hugged the caretaker dad. Someone said the birds and baby bunnies must surely be rejoicing. But we poor people went home with tiny Marshie-shaped holes in our hearts. 😔

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When Derek died and I cleaned up his apartment, I found so many things to hang onto, the way you do when you can’t begin to let go. His Periodic Table T-shirt that said “I only use sarcasm periodically.” The small black check tray, stolen from a restaurant, that said “Thank You” in gold cursive. A fortune-cookie fortune that said “Honor yourself and other people will honor you too.” Four years later, this pill bottle with his stack of laundry quarters inside is the one thing I still keep, in the console of the car he didn’t live to see me drive. When I flip open the console, the pill bottle makes me smile, the way you do when you have a secret.

We met on his birthday—September 8, 2017—at a visitors weekend at Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa, the U.S. hub of Transcendental Meditation. He was 25, I was 28. I planned to work for the university in exchange for meditation classes; he planned to enroll as an undergraduate. At the last minute, we changed our minds and swapped plans. While I went to school, he worked at the campus organic market, and later at a residential program for people living with serious mental illness. When I tapped on his dorm window after class, he’d come outside, reach into his black peacoat and pull out pale yellow Opal apples like a magician.

Once, after gathering his laundry, he tossed and caught the orange pill bottle to make the quarters rattle, and I could tell he was proud of having found the perfect vessel for them, a perfect match. He was brilliant that way. And man, could he draw. But when he first showed me his sketches, they were all pictures of men screaming. I asked him to make me a flower instead. The flower he drew looked like a rose might look on Mars, swirly and otherworldly, with a bee buzzing around. A year after he died, I framed it and stood it on top of my fridge, but eventually I gave it to Goodwill. Seeing every day what he’d been capable of hurt too much.

On the weekend of his funeral, in August 2021, his sister told me she was glad he met me because she didn’t think he’d ever been in love before. She said she always kind of thought he would get his shit together and we’d get married. Though I’d never said it out loud before, I told my should-have-been sister-in-law, “Me too.”

Whenever I forget that I’m fortunate, whenever I forget how to love myself, I remember the way Derek’s eyes seemed to melt into pools of infinity when he looked at me. The way he’d admire my midi dress and weird black snow boots by yelling, “You are such a COOL character! You look like a Pokemon trainer!” The way he praised my eyelids by shouting, “You have nice CUPS!” The way he said that if aliens landed on earth and told him to take them to his leader, he’d take them to me. The way, whenever I cried, he insisted I blow my nose in his T-shirt, and the way that made me laugh. I had thought I’d been in love before.

We moved in tandem from the moment the air fell into place around us. No one else understood him, but no one understood me either. We walked trails and found cool sticks and made up stories about how they were magic—but the magic was outlawed by the king! We kissed the kind of kisses that are hard to stop. When Derek was good, he was the best. But when he was bad, he was the worst. I learned the hard way, over and over, not to ask him to stay when he suddenly needed to go.

He was protecting me from the screaming men. He didn’t want to be alive anymore. And he emptied a lot of orange pill bottles trying to get that figured out. Contrary to the fairy tales, though, you can’t bring someone back to life with a kiss. That, I learned the hardest way of all.

—Ganaia Praema

Ganaia Praema is the Iowa-based writer of the Substack Wild Moon Queen. She has self-published ebooks of poetry, historical fiction and travel memoir, and is producing audio editions to be released in 2026.

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Thank you for reading The Keepthings: stories of lost loved ones, inspired by the things they left behind. Subscribe for free to receive a new story every few weeks, plus occasional bonus content.

I didn’t notice it on the basement doorknob until nearly two years after my father died. Paint-stained and well-worn, it instantly conjured Dad in full dad mode, building or fixing something, making something better. It’s his army cap from Korea, where he avoided combat solely because he happened to be a fast typist. In those days, records of the soldiers who came and went and lived and died were typed by men like my father who traveled with their company into battle zones. In civilian life, at least in my memories, Dad wore the cap when he was attempting a physical task and meant business. I wonder if it gave him courage.

Dad laughed easily and always had joy in his eyes. He was an accountant by profession, but he’d grown up during the Great Depression on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, so beneath the suit and tie there was always a core of street kid.

It wasn’t until his later years that I heard stories of his impoverished youth. Not that he ever used the words “poor” or “poverty.” The stories involved the multitude of odd jobs he started doing by the time he was eight or nine: sweeping floors, shining shoes, fetching sandwiches for the men in the barbershop on Saturdays. Whatever money he earned, he spent on food. He described the perfect corned-beef sandwich and the proper way to make an egg cream as only one who’s known childhood hunger can.

I hung on every word, imagining the flights of stairs he climbed daily, the bed he shared with his three brothers. I asked him why he always studied at the library instead of going home after school. “There was no room to do homework in the apartment,” he said matter-of-factly. It wasn’t until I went on a Tenement Museum tour, after his death, that I got the full picture of the life he came from.

Dad was the only college graduate in his family. He learned to dance at the Henry Street Settlement. He had a beautiful singing voice, and Man of La Mancha was his favorite musical. “The Impossible Dream” would become my subliminal blueprint for living, though I didn’t know it as Richard Kiley’s baritone blasted through our house. All I knew was that my dad dreamed a better life for us than he had growing up, and he worked hard to make that dream come true.

After he retired, he did people’s taxes for free at the library. He liked being around people, joking, laughing, enjoying life. Judging by what mattered to him, his life was a success, though the radius of his fame didn’t extend much past the gas station where he bought his lotto tickets and the diner where he held court daily with his cronies. Marvin Levy loved a good meal, a good half-sour pickle, a Yankees game, going to the movies. One time when the lights went down and the movie started, there was picture but no sound, and Marvin, being Marvin, said, “I didn’t know this was a silent film.” The whole audience burst out laughing. Oh, Dad.

I have vivid recollections of him in this hat, standing on a ladder, paint roller in hand, having meticulously prepped as his own father, a painter, taught him. I live in Dad’s house now, the house he painted, the house I grew up in, the house I moved back to at the end—not just to care for him but to hear him sing as we ate breakfast. He taught me a lot in that house: to keep a song in my heart, to keep my word, to properly balance my checkbook, to have all the necessary elements at hand before starting any project. I view this cap as a necessity for the lifelong project of remembering him, which is why I’ll never let it go.

—Ilene Angel

Ilene Angel is a New York-based author and award-winning songwriter who became her father’s full-time caregiver in the final years of his life. Her fourth book, Caregiving for Your Parents—A Step-by-Step Guide for the Overwhelmed and Unprepared, is forthcoming in April.

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My dad had an innate sense of direction. He always knew which way the wind was coming from and which way he was headed, whether traveling by car, by boat or by snowmobile. He knew every channel and bay on Lake Minnetonka. He cut the fastest, smoothest, most fun routes through snowy woodlands on his Arctic Cat.

He built a house from the ground up when he was barely 22, and made a home with my mother, his high-school sweetheart, for 60 years. He worked in factories, starting in the family pickle business, then at another food company where he became transportation manager, after the pickle business was sold. He reliably knew the Dow and the news of the day. He figured quickly in his head, kept a well-mown lawn and crisp bills in his wallet. He was a keen observer who could always find the piece of machinery that had brought down a production line. He could identify any car on the road: make, model, year.

When I bought my first car, an Opel Manta with a bad muffler, Dad insisted I drive it home even though I hadn’t mastered the stick shift. He followed me as I lurched and stalled. Although he said, “It’s your car now,” he cosigned for the loan, replaced the muffler, made sure I knew how to use the jack to change a flat. He gave me a flashlight, an ice scraper and a Minnesota map for the glove box. Not that a map was necessary. Dad knew the roads that would take me to the State Fair, to Brookdale and Knollwood shopping centers, to high-school basketball away games. Anywhere I wanted to go, all I had to do was ask.

Many years later, when Dad was sick with melanoma and couldn’t drive after a seizure, I was the one who took him to medical appointments. He rode shotgun, checking the mirrors as I backed out of the driveway, nudging me to get into the proper lane for the next turn. It was a big blow to both of us that he wasn’t the one behind the wheel. I was happy to let him navigate.

After he died, my mom held a sale to pare down the things of his she would no longer use. The inventory included personal items that had defined him—hunting jacket, chest waders and fishing rods, bowling shoes and ball, vintage London Fog jacket, golf shoes and Tommy Bahama shirts. I knew he didn’t need this stuff anymore. But each item became more precious as it disappeared into the hatch of a van, the backseat of a sedan.

When a man tried on his snowmobile suit with the leopard lining, I held my breath. When it didn’t fit and he hung it up again, I pulled it off the hanger and brought it inside to add to the pile of things I’d be taking home. I held it close, seeking but not finding the rich old scent of oil and gas, fingering the badges—Arctic Cat logo, “Don’t Eat Yellow Snow”—that my mom had sewn on the sleeves. I checked the pockets and found a book of matches, replacement cleats for the snowmobile and something I didn’t recognize.

It was a compass. I held it and watched the arrow float and spin until it found stillness. “Find north,” Dad had taught me, “and you can always figure it out from there.” He didn’t need a compass himself, but he must have known I would. He left it in his snowmobile suit after his final time out on the trail. Tucked into the chest pocket, a shiny piece of him, meant for me.

—Debra Palmquist

Debra Palmquist is a fourth-generation Minnesotan who writes about loss and grief. A student of phenology, she records events in the natural and human world through daily drawings.

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When I was a little girl I used to go to my father’s store in our small town in central Illinois, where he sold office equipment and furniture. I loved spinning in a desk chair until I got dizzy. I loved running around upstairs where no one worked. I would have loved playing with the vintage cash register Dad kept in the checkout area—the circular keys fit perfectly under my fingers and made a wonderful deep clanking sound, and the hand crank dinged as you pulled it—but its drawer sometimes caught, and I was afraid I’d break it. Even so young, I understood that it meant a lot to my dad.

He was an entrepreneur who successfully ran his business for many years, but eventually times changed and demand for copiers and typewriters shrank. My parents kept the details from me, but when I was 12 or so, a classmate asked why there was a story in the paper about my dad and his business, and I began to grasp the extent of his money problems. I began to see he wasn’t infallible—a hard thing for a daddy’s girl. He closed his business for good when my mom left him. We lost our beautiful lakefront home. He moved to an apartment and had to sell most of his things. Not the cash register, though. He never would have sold that.

He’d gotten it from his best friend, Lewie, who had used it in his pharmacy. Lewie was a friend from back when my father was married to his first wife; after they divorced, Lewie chose him over her. During my parents’ marriage, my dad and mom and Lewie were very close, with frequent visits and lots of pinochle. Knowing how much Dad had always loved water skiing, Lewie bought him a used boat so he could teach my brother and me how to ski. Lewie and his friendship meant so much to my dad, but he died young—only 66, about a year before my parents divorced. No wonder the cash register stayed in the picture.

Dad ultimately moved to a different town in Illinois, to a lovely apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and tons of sunlight. He filled his home with plants and as many vintage and antique items as he could. He had a strong sense of nostalgia and a deep regard for objects made to stand the test of time. His mother had left him and his father when he was a little boy, and I wonder if that early experience of loss made him unusually appreciative of things that lasted and people who stuck around.

He was a glass-half-full person; his favorite phrases were “There you go!” and “Good for you!” I can’t recall a time when he didn’t support a decision I made. When I was nine, he encouraged me to take a job delivering newspapers, which I ended up doing until I was 18. On weekends he helped me deliver them—getting me up at 6 a.m. so I’d be done by the 7 a.m. deadline—and then let me go back to bed until noon because he knew I needed the sleep. He taught me how to knock on doors and have the confidence to ask for the money owed, and to always pay the newspaper company before I paid myself.

Dad was a planner. He liked to be prepared. Starting in his late sixties, he frequently reminded me where he kept his important papers and the key to his lockbox, so I’d know where to look when he died. Not that he was planning to die anytime soon. Over the years he’d rebuilt his life, taking a job as a tent-and-awning salesman and recouping a good amount of the money he’d lost when I was young—because he needed that money to last him into his 90s. His own dad had lived that long, so of course he would too. Nobody expected him to be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the day before his 78th birthday.

He died in August 2021, less than three months after his diagnosis. I regret not telling him not to do chemo; it destroyed him physically and made him miserable. Toward the end he didn’t talk much. We couldn’t get him to eat much of anything except peaches. Ten months after he died, I brought the cash register home to Denver. It’s on display in my basement now, and my kids are welcome to play with it. I imagine it will last forever, just like all my memories of my super, human dad.

—Jennifer Crick

Jennifer Crick lives in Denver with her husband and their two young children. She has an MBA from the University of California Irvine, and in her work as a business consultant she draws on the many skills her father taught her.

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I came across the box during the rushed cleanout of my mother’s independent-living apartment. I thought my sister would want it for one of her three daughters, but they get all their recipes online. I made room in my bag.

Things to know about my mother: She was Lutheran, she was German-American, she knitted and quilted hundreds of items for people in need, she was proud to have rid herself of her Queens accent, she was vain about her legs. She died in 2018, just shy of 92, alone in a skilled-nursing facility. I had planned to be there until the end, despite our 16-year estrangement and the prickly détente that followed. But Mom shooed us out of her room, tired of being watched, and I went off to the airport knowing that everything unsaid and unforgiven would remain so, at least in my lifetime.

She cooked three meals a day, seven days a week, for 66 years, and I vividly remember eating some of the dishes this recipe box produced, yet I have no memory of the box itself. I can’t conjure her flipping through the cards at the round oak table in our Connecticut kitchen or pulling out the perfect dinner choice with an Aha! I can only see her standing at the stove sautéing onions in margarine in her cast-iron skillet, stirring in flour, whisking in milk. She called it white sauce. I didn’t learn the words roux and béchamel until I was in my fifties.

I didn’t see a picture of her abusive father or even know his name until I was 28. All she was willing to tell us about her girlhood were everyday things: rationing and victory gardens and coloring white oleo with a packet of yellow dye. There are cards in the box from this era, including a banana cake that called for sour milk—handy when the iceman was late. There are clipped-out recipes from the 1950s, long before I was born, including one for traditional Maryland crab cakes from my parents’ time in Baltimore, when they had three—not five—children and life was undoubtedly easier for a woman who didn’t enjoy kids.

I didn’t know, when I was 28 and asked her about her father—I didn’t know that in just four years I would become estranged from my father too, and by association from her, after confronting them about my childhood sexual abuse.

My mother was not sweet, but there was sweetness to her—when she talked to my baby brother, for instance, or laughed with her friends. She was a highly competent cook who took no joy in cooking. She loved attention but would deny it if I said so. After she died, I made dishes from the recipe box for months, wanting to feel closer to her, wanting to understand us.

When she was alive, her anger at being implicated in a “terrible crime” (her words) lasted long after we’d reconciled, and so our phone calls were limited to safe topics like the weather. I wish I’d had the box then, so I could have asked her about her notes on the recipe for Good Casserole, or if she ever made the applesauce ham loaf that spoke to our German heritage. I wish I’d told her how often I thought of her when I sautéed onions, how much I appreciated her teaching me her pie-crust recipe. I wish we could have transformed our soured relationship into something as satisfying as that banana cake.

—Stephanie Weaver

Stephanie Weaver, MPH, is a writer and TED-style speaking coach. Her fifth book— Bitter, Sweet: How to Heal Yourself When Your Family Is Broken—is due out in April and explores family estrangement through the lens of her mother’s recipe box.

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My dad was born in 1913 and grew up in Kankakee, Illinois. His father, a pharmacist, owned a drugstore where Dad worked as a soda jerk. He told stories about desperate men—hobos, I supposed—who came into the store looking for fixes and cures and alcohol, any kind of alcohol. In summer he swam back and forth across the Kankakee River; in winter he skated across it. When I was a kid, he lived in my mind as a kind of Huck Finn. He had a dog named Muggins. He built wooden sailboats and balsa-wood gliders. The outdoors, stargazing, boys’ military camp—he loved it all.

He was keen on architecture and photography and the saxophone, and he dreamed of sailing around the world. In the end, though, he chose a safer path, earning a degree in business from the University of Illinois and taking a job in a bank. His college ROTC experience prepared him for the army, and in World War II he served in England in the Quartermaster Corps, supporting the troops who landed in France on D-Day. For the rest of his life he spoke of his military days with great fondness.

Shortly before the war he’d married my mom, and in 1946 they started a family. Dad went back to banking and raised my three older brothers and me far from the life he’d dreamed of. No sailboats, no epic travel adventures, just an arduous daily 45-mile commute to downtown Chicago, then back home where cocktail hour awaited. One, two, maybe three drinks, dinner, bed and repeat. He never seemed unhappy, exactly, but he rarely seemed truly content despite the prosperous life he’d built for us all.

Dad and I were not close. I came of age in the 1960s, and the times—and our stubborness—drove a wedge between us. He was a critical, right-of-center, regimented believer in tough love who easily got hot under the collar once my hair went over the collar. There were many arguments and shouting matches. But mostly I avoided him, especially during “happy” hour. I didn’t get how the guy who loved Dixieland jazz, who now and again joyfully played “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise” on his saxophone, who gave pockets of change to the town drunk whenever he passed by—how was he so closed-minded and hard to please?

And yet I wanted to please him. Before I left for college, I built him this bird feeder, knowing he had a favorite window where he liked to watch the birds come and go. Though I was hardly a woodworker, I was handy and creative and had watched Dad build many things. I made the feeder in the basement, out of cedar, with hand tools. Two sides were glass so you could see the seed level—the wood sides had slots to hold the glass in place—and the pitched roof opened for refilling. It was based on a feeder Dad had made, but I embellished mine with an original hand-carved design. I don’t recall Dad’s reaction when I gave it to him.

Eventually I flew the coop for good. As the years went by, I saw Dad less and less. The last time, I was 49 and he was 89, in the hospital and very weak. That was the day he told me—softly, his voice struggling—“I love you.” And then: “You’ve been a good boy.” Words I don’t remember ever having heard from him. Words I’ll never forget. He died soon after, in the hospital, alone. I was still crushed a year later as we got ready to sell the family home. Going through everything in that house was dispiriting and draining. At some point, needing a break, I sat down in Dad’s old chair, glanced out the window—and beheld my handmade bird feeder.

It was sorely weathered and fragile-looking and much the worse for wear, but there it was, still standing on the pole I’d driven into the ground thirty years earlier. He had kept it all those years, right where I’d put it, right where he could see it every single day. And when it needed repair, as it obviously had, he had, with his own hands, repaired it—carefully, appreciatively, maybe even tenderly. The patches were there in plain view, as was my father’s love. Sometimes you have to be looking through tears to see things right.

—Stephen Rueckert

Stephen Rueckert is a visual artist whose interests span all things natural, scientific, ever-present, everlasting and unexplained.

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Until a few weeks ago, I thought that was all you really needed to know about the ILGWU: Union. Commercial. Catchy jingle. Then sent me a draft of her Keepthings story, “The Love Cuff”—about her ILGWU-member grandfather—and boy, was I wrong.

Having occasion to learn new things is one of the best parts of running The Keepthings. In this case, it started with a simple editing question: Did I need to spell out the union’s full name, or would most readers know it from the abbreviation? My northern New Jersey town has a large and active Facebook group, so I asked there: “Please tell me if you know what ILGWU means, and also how old you are.” I expected Yes, No and a corresponding range of ages. What I got instead were stories—of moms, dads, grandmas, aunts, uncles and cousins who were union members, shop stewards, workers at slipper companies and sweater factories, proud of the designer dresses and men’s suits their labor produced. Someone posted this link to the union’s awesome 1978 commercial, which I hadn’t seen for decades. (Please watch it! Also, btw, the lyrics were written by a woman: advertising trailblazer Paula Green.) Someone said their elementary-school music class sang the song as a vocal warm-up. Multiple people noted that the union built housing in Manhattan for ILGWU employees.

What? The union built housing for its members? My rabbit-hole research revealed that yes indeed it did! And a resort in the Pocono Mountains! The union offered citizenship classes and classes on law. There were ILGWU sports teams, ILGWU outings to symphony concerts, an ILGWU musical, an ILGWU chorus. The people singing in the commercials were actual chorus members.

What a pang it gives me to see those people’s evident pride, how stirring to feel their dear, can-do hopefulness! To think there was a time when the culture didn’t look askance at workers wanting to be paid a fair wage! Before billionaires and corporations and their bidding-doers in Washington hornswoggled so many Americans into thinking wanting to earn a living wage was un-American.

And all this is only part of where I went thanks to “The Love Cuff.” That story also sent me on a mini-dive into Southern Baptist groups (among other things, I now know that the “primitive” in Primitive Baptist means original, not crude) and the U.S. Navy’s Seabees, who I’d heard of but knew nothing about (not even that their name is the vocologue of CB, meaning construction battalion; I now think of them as the navy’s skilled worker bees).

So as 2026 dawns and I look back on 2025, thank you, Mary Tonita Austin, for expanding my world by expanding my knowledge of the world.

And thank you too, , for expanding my repertoire of Christmas treats. After meeting Amie through her Keepthings story, The Cadet Typewriter, I subscribed to her newsletter Cook & Tell, in which she reprints some of the many hundreds of recipes her mother typed up and sent out in a long-running newsletter of her own. The December 22 installment featured a recipe for a chocolate-enrobed candy called Needhams, which I’d never heard of and which sounded so bizarre—two pounds of confectioners sugar, two cups of firmly packed coconut, ¾ cup of hot mashed potatoes—I had to try it. I regret my rash decision to substitute almond extract for vanilla extract, my MacGyvered double-boiler could definitely be improved on, and my chocolate-dipping technique 100 percent needs work, but I’m sold on these decadent squares that are essentially homemade Mounds bars. Even though they’re not technically a cookie, Needhams have earned a permanent spot on my Christmas-cookie tray. Let me know if you try them too. Let me know if you remember the ILGWU song. Keep the Keepthings stories coming, and keep fighting the good fight in this new year.

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My dad was a very friendly, joyful man. A respected criminologist, he retired as CEO of the NYC Criminal Justice Agency. He was originally from the Bronx and worked in the city all his life, even after settling with his family in New Jersey. He was a Jesuit-style Catholic who graduated from Fordham, a place he loved dearly.

He loved my mother dearly, too. And our big old family home—so much so that he gave it a name: The Giving House, because it provided not just for us but for other families my parents helped over the years. He loved kids, and not just his own; he was the one who would sit up late at night talking to us or console us when we needed consoling. He really loved babies; in a restaurant he was always the guy making little faces to make the babies laugh. He loved the New York Giants. He loved talking football with my son and listening to my daughter read essays she’d written. And he loved Christmas.

Every Christmas when I was growing up, my sisters and I each got an ornament in our stocking. Generally they marked something personally special to us from that year—a bike the year we learned, a cake for a big birthday, a violin the year I started playing. The tradition continued when we were adults with our own families. Even when I was nearly 50, Dad was still giving me ornaments. This is the last one he bought me.

Early in April 2022, my husband, Mark, and I took our kids and my parents to St. Michaels, Maryland, for a short spring-break trip. Dad wasn’t himself on that trip. He seemed sick and was always cold, and he skipped several of our activities, including the sailing excursion we thought he’d love. But one day he went out to the little shop in town that sold Christmas decor and came back proudly exclaiming that he’d gotten all the ornaments for the family. Though it was unusually early in the year for this, we didn’t give it much thought.

A few weeks after our trip, Dad was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. He lived only three more weeks, all in the hospital—he never got to return to his beloved home. I don’t really have the words to express how devastated we were. In the five years prior, he’d survived prostate cancer, a quadruple bypass, spinal surgery and pancreatic cancer. It didn’t seem possible that there could be something he couldn’t survive.

The holidays were very hard that year. Dad was a huge part of what made Christmas magical. He was pure joy at Christmas and loved to be with all of us, and it was surreal to be without him. But it turned out we weren’t. Just before dinner on Christmas Eve, my mom announced that she had gifts for everyone. When we opened our boxes, we found the ornaments Dad had been so excited to buy in Maryland. He’d signed the back of mine “Ciara & Mark, Love Pop 2022.” Many tears were shared around the table that night.

A few weeks ago—three and a half years after saying goodbye to Dad—we said goodbye to The Giving House when my mom downsized to an apartment. My sisters and I took all the most important heirlooms, pictures and keepsakes that tell the story of our family. But while decorating this year’s Christmas tree, it struck me that no keepsake is more important than this little candy tree, the last ornament. It’s the perfect symbol of my dad’s ability to enjoy the sweet things in life and a reminder that he’s with us always, most certainly at Christmas.

—Ciara McElroy

Ciara McElroy, an oncology social worker and therapist, lives in South Orange, NJ, with her husband and two teenage children. To her father’s dismay, she became an avid Philadelphia Eagles fan, but still has a soft spot for the Giants because of her dad.

For a different reading experience, The Keepthings’ stories can also be read in their entirety on Instagram @TheKeepthings.

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In the summer of 1993, about a week after my grandmother Marybelle’s funeral, my grandfather asked me to take him to the hospital. He had been coughing and generally feeling weak but hadn’t wanted to leave Mom-Mom’s side during her extended illness. As I drove him to the emergency room he struggled to breathe, and I was terrified he would die, but he had no fear of death himself.

Pop Pop was my father’s father, born in Bainbridge, Georgia, in 1913. His father’s father was born into slavery but ended up becoming a teacher and owning the land he’d once worked. I grew up hearing how important it was to go to college, to own your own home, to own land, to have a strong faith in God.

When he was 17 years old, Pop Pop witnessed a lynching, and afterwards he left his home and family to go north. He attended a technical school in New Jersey. He got a job at the Lee Skirt Company in Philadelphia and joined the ILGWU. He married Mom-Mom in 1936, and by 1943, when he was drafted into the Navy and became a Seabee, they’d had the first two of their five sons. Several years after coming back from the war, he opened his own tailoring business in his home, making men’s suits. And somewhere along the way, he started preaching.

Pop Pop was a minister in the Primitive Baptist church, a dynamic preacher who stomped the floor and drew breath in deep heaves. He put his entire body into preaching the gospel, so much so that I sometimes worried he might pass out; to this day, there are preachers who carry recordings of him to study and imitate his style. By 1950 he was a church elder. Eventually he was the moderator of the Northeastern Primitive Baptists. He liked getting on the phone with his deacons and hearing what was going on at the other churches, how many new preachers ordained, how many people saved.

I never saw Pop Pop in anything but a suit, even when he was just sitting at home. Even gardening, he would only remove the tie and jacket. He liked to eat fresh produce from the garden. He liked sugar cane and boiled peanuts, which he always brought back from his visits to Georgia. He never lost his deep Southern accent, and he spoke in a dialect similar to the Gullah Geechee people. I didn’t always understand what he said, but he didn’t like being asked to repeat himself.

Pop Pop was not the type of man to laugh out loud, but I can still see his smile for Mom-Mom, the way he kissed her every time he left the house. I can still hear the sound of his voice when he called for her. They were married 57 years, and he died of pneumonia four months to the day of her passing. I believe he was yearning to be with her again.

Life as a young Black man in the segregated South hardened my grandfather, but this heart-shaped cuff shows me a softer side. He made it for Mom-Mom in the 1940s, out of sheet metal, etching his name on the left, hers on the right, and the word “Love” in the middle. I read it as “J.T. Austin loves M. Austin.” I think he’d be glad I still have it. I don’t remember him ever saying “I love you” to me, but from the example he set me and the legacy he left me, I’ve never had any doubt that he did.

—Mary Tonita Austin

Mary Tonita Austin is a self-published poet and community activist living outside Philadelphia. She’s working on a personal narrative and a second poetry book.

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Growing up, my mother’s mission in life was to be a good girl. By birth order, she was sandwiched between two brothers who were disciplined daily for causing as much trouble as possible, and she lived in fear of receiving the belt whippings they did. My uncle once told a story about how she was so successful at radiating an aura of goodness that, in her early teens, when she was caught stealing a lipstick from the drugstore, instead of punishing her, their father raised her allowance, rationalizing that only a lack of sufficient pocket money would drive her to steal.

As a young woman, my mother continued meeting familial expectations of correct behavior: She acquired a bachelor’s degree, a teaching credential and a good job. At 22 she met my father, a young, financially stable electrochemical engineer, and within a year they married. All through my childhood, the figurines from the top of their wedding cake sat on a shelf in the kitchen, the bride radiating an aura of spun-sugar perfection.

As was expected of mothers back then, my mom gave up her job to stay home with her children, but by the time I was five and my brother was three, she was chafing against her façade of propriety. She began writing and painting for self-expression, and pursued classwork to resume her teaching career. Alongside her personal growth, she asked for respect from my father, who was by nature irritable and abrasive. She bristled at the imperious tone he used with everyone, and his antagonistic attitude was the source of shouted arguments after my brother and I had gone to bed.

During some of these arguments my mom would fling the wedding-cake figurines into the trash, only to rescue them after the conflict was smoothed over. Along the way, the groom’s nose was damaged and the bride’s veil went missing. Still, the little gypsum-plaster bride stood stoically, fundamentally unchanging, while my mother quietly metamorphosed. Though she always maintained her outward aura of rectitude, behind closed doors she was a great one for irreverence and mischief.

The mother I knew stuck her arm up inside our uncooked Thanksgiving turkey, turned to me and, in her best Dr. Frankenstein voice, said, “My dear Igor, please hand me a scalpel so we can remove her brain.” She was a shameless gossip and told dirty jokes at the dinner table (“What’s better than roses on a piano?”). And after our Dalmatian, Spot, died, she nearly gave us all heart attacks by laying a life-size toy Dalmatian in Spot’s spot at the back door.

My mother died of cancer in 2017. At her memorial, when friends and family spoke about her sweet goodness, I wondered whether they knew her at all. I prefer my version of my mom—the one who wasn’t afraid to thumb her nose in the name of fun—and I’m grateful she dropped her veil and showed her true self to me.

—Margaret Bloom

Margaret Bloom is the author of two handcraft books (Hawthorn Press, UK) and is working on a third. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her family.

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When we signed the lease on our first and only flat—Windsor, England, August 2012—I was 23 and Alex was 24. I was from L.A., he was an Englishman, and we’d met as students at Oxford. Though we’d shared a tiny dorm room for two years, moving into a larger space somehow brought us closer. Alex’s keen mind and cool remove disguised a shy, affectionate nature. At home, he belted Anglican hymns in the shower and traded his contacts for the smudged, crooked specs he was too vain to wear in public. He left behind the grace he displayed on the cricket pitch and became a charming klutz.

In that flat I learned that for Alex, food was the engine of love. This Victorinox knife was his first financial splurge and became his prized possession. He sharpened it on Sundays with a whetstone and steel until the slightest pressure sent it tearing through paper. He used it to teach me how to make a proper Sunday roast: spatchcock the pheasant, julienne the parsnips before coating them in honey, slice the potatoes into thin half-moons to be shingled in a baking dish. We’d work side by side until all was ready for the oven, then retire to a scalding bath, tangling our legs, pruning our fingers, pinking our toes. By dinnertime, we were boneless.

We were “content just to exist beautifully,” like Bertie Wooster in Alex’s P.G. Wodehouse books. In our Windsor sanctum, we beheld our gorgeous horizon: marriage, a mortgage, kids one day. I knew my family would adore Alex, and they did. In 2013, we flew to L.A. twice: in May for my sister’s wedding, and again in December to stay with my parents. My father and Alex liked to talk Top Gear, so as a gift Dad bought him a racecar-driving lesson, complete with a smooth white helmet like the Stig’s. No one foresaw that during the lesson Alex would crash. Broken neck, bleeding brain, instant coma.

That night, instead of curling up alongside Alex as I’d always done, I lay numbly on a cot in a corner of his hospital room. The left side of his skull had been cut out to make space for the swelling. The nurses replaced IV bags, packed his body in ice and untaped his eyelids to measure his pupils’ diameter—4mm, 5mm, so close to death. Soon the right side of his skull would be cut out as well. I’d spend the next four months at his bedside, expecting some cosmic needle to tip one way or the other. But in April 2014, the neurosurgeon declared no prognosis—words that didn’t clarify, only confused.

As Alex’s family flew him to England, I went back alone to Windsor. I swept three years’ worth of trinkets and letters into my suitcase. I shipped Alex’s books, bicycle, computer and clothes to his parents in case he ever wakened enough to want them. But his Victorinox, I kept for myself. I can’t say I did so out of sentiment or even nostalgia—all I felt was tired. I’d lost interest in food. I’d lost my sense of taste and smell. The galley kitchen had gone sterile, the porcelain tub hollow and cold. I emptied the flat and locked it for the last time. So long, Sunday roast. So long, lemongrass bathwater. Pruned fingers, pinked toes, so long.

I moved in with a friend, returned to work and visited Alex in his new hospital weekly, then monthly. The shelves in his room were lined with old companions: the stuffed lions, tigers and leopards that had prowled the curtain rail above his boyhood bed. I reported on the friends who’d moved, changed jobs, gotten engaged. I read aloud his favorite fantasy book, Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett, struck by the poignancy of its first lines: “This is where the dragons went. They lie… Not dead, not asleep. Not waiting, because waiting implies expectation. Possibly the word we’re looking for here is…dormant.”

After a year of no change, I returned to the U.S. Until Covid, I visited Alex annually. It was a long process, leaving that life. I was still grieving when, in 2016, I met the man I’d marry, still grieving as I fell in love. Wedding, first home, child: each milestone inlaid with images of Alex, vacant and fed through a tube. My husband and I visited him in 2023. And in 2024—nearly eleven years after his crash—we attended his funeral. Now, each day, his knife makes its circuit from drawer to cutting board to drying rack. My husband sharpens it regularly. When he does, I can hear Alex’s voice: “Good things last forever, if you care for them.”

—Jaimie Li

Jaimie Li received a bachelor’s degree in jurisprudence from Oxford University in 2011, and an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College in 2022. She teaches workshops at Hugo House in Seattle and is working on a memoir.

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I love coming upon a memorial bench. A place to sit and appreciate life, knowing that somebody someone else loved also came there to sit, or to read, or chat, or enjoy a good hot coffee or nice cold beer, or meet a friend, or people-watch, or count the stars and maybe their blessings while they had the great good luck to be alive.

I’ve been traveling a lot in the past few months, both far and near, and when I was in Asbury Park a couple weekends ago, I finally got around to photographing some of the great memorial benches there.

There are so many ways to pay tribute to a life.

If there’s a memorial bench in your world—either because it pays tribute to a loved one or just because it happens to be in a place you go—tell me about it in the comments or send me a picture so I can appreciate it too. 💓

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I found it in a box of laundry detergent in 2009, a month or so after my brother, Marcus, visited me. As I dipped the plastic scoop into the soap crystals, it hit something hard, and when I saw the small green figure with its red eyes shining up at me, I burst out laughing. Marcus had to have put it there. So began a years-long joke between us. But more than a joke. An indication of how far our relationship had come.

Growing up, we were as different as night and day. Marcus was four years older and always seemed too cool for me. There’s a picture of us from back then: he in a jean jacket leaning against a fence, looking away from the camera à la James Dean; I standing straight in a matching navy sweatsuit, hood up, sweatshirt zipped to my neck, dutifully staring right at the lens. Marcus was the rebel, I was the angel. He had the street smarts, I had the book smarts. He pushed boundaries, I tried to please. Our differences seemed insurmountable.

He was bold and brash and outspoken. In high school he was a regular in the principal’s office. He had a mohawk that inspired the nickname Mohawkus. Way before it was popular, he dyed his hair numerous different colors—blue, orange, one time pink to match his prom date’s dress. As soon as possible after high-school graduation, he moved to Florida—as far from home as he could get. But he flew back to be my date to prom when no one invited me. Though I tried to pass him off as a family friend, of course the principal knew him instantly.

Once I went to college and we were both out of the house and the roles we fell into there, we were able to work on our relationship. As the years went by, we figured out how to spend time together. Marcus started visiting me in Monterey after I moved there at 30 to fundraise for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He’d moved back to Portland by then and would drive down on his Harley, 12 hours each way. I’d show him around town and introduce him to my friends. We’d talk about life for a couple days and then he’d be off.

Those visits went a long way to helping us understand each other. The biggest thing was coming to see how different our childhoods were. I’d thought we had the same upbringing, and I’d thought it was idyllic, but he saw and experienced things I didn’t.

It was on one of his Monterey visits that he encountered the tiki at my place. I’d had a Hawaiian-themed party just before he arrived; the tiki had come with a deck of hula-dancer playing cards. After finding it in the soap box, I took it on my next trip to Portland and hid it in Marcus’s house. A year or so later, I was surprised to discover it on my mantle. What? How? Had Marcus been in my house? It would be totally like him to ride 24 hours roundtrip just to prank me—but then it struck me that my parents, who’d recently visited, could have brought it on his behalf. After much pestering, he admitted they were his accomplices.

Eventually I, too, moved back to Portland. A month after my return, Marcus died unexpectedly of a heart attack. He was 46. He was estranged from our parents at the time, but thankfully our brother-sister relationship was intact. I keep the freaky tiki on a shelf in my bedroom next to pictures of Marcus and me at all stages of our lives, a reminder of the good times and fun we managed to find a way—our way—to have together.

—Deborah Goldstein

Deborah Goldstein, a philanthropy advisor based outside Portland, Oregon, is working on a memoir.

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Alli didn’t talk for the first couple of years of her life, so as the big sister, I spoke for us both—asking for the cookie, a glass of water, to go outside. By the time we were teenagers we’d learned to communicate without any words at all. We could lock eyes and simply flare our nostrils to say “Can you believe this guy?” or “Let’s get out of here!” A language all our own.

We grew up in the late 1970s. Alli wanted long hair, but hers was so astonishingly thick that it grew out before growing down. So she improvised. Changing into her pajamas, she’d leave her shirt draped from her head, pretending it was Farrah Fawcett hair, and admire herself in the mirror that hung above our white, gold-trimmed dresser.

She was often annoyed by me—the way I easily got good grades and kept my side of the room neat, how the sound of Mom’s slippers on our bedroom carpet was enough to gently wake me in the morning while she had to be physically shaken from sleep, the “gross lip noises” I made when chewing food. But the night I choked on my ham sandwich and Mom had to stick her fingers down my throat, she ran and locked herself in the powder room, terrified I’d die.

School was never easy for Alli. She rushed through assignments to get them done, only to be told to erase her work and try again. She’d scrub at the paper so hard it tore, and then cry or curse in frustration. Therapists advised that she punch a pillow to release her anger, but for Alli it felt more satisfying to stab her pencil into the vinyl top of her white jewelry box, its miniature plastic ballerina the unintended casualty inside.

Alli turned heads wherever she went. I can still see her in a white eyelet bustier, acid-washed shorts, oversized gold earrings and red lipstick. And her hair: By the time she was a young adult, it had become her glory, framing her beautiful face and dark eyes. Yet as striking as her looks were, it was her presence you remembered. She was a light. She loved being around people and was often at the center of the fun. She did spot-on imitations of friends and family, and when she told stories her facial expressions were comic genius.

We took different paths—me to college, Alli to an early, unexpected pregnancy and a marriage that didn’t last. In her early twenties, she caught the attention of an older man who had money to spend on nice dinners and romantic gifts. She was infatuated. I’ll never know how long it was before she sensed danger from this man. He strangled my sister to death four days before her twenty-fourth birthday.

After she died, I kept this comb. It was in her bathroom among the things she used every day. She’d had many combs over the years, of course, but this one was the last one she bought for herself. More than thirty years later, it’s now faded and worn, but I use it every day after I shower. I find comfort in knowing Alli used it first.

—Shavaun McGinty

Shavaun McGinty lives and works in Chester County, PA. A licensed professional counselor and grief therapist, she is the school counseling supervisor at the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School and has contributed to articles for Healthline and well+good.

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Thank you for reading The Keepthings: stories of lost loved ones, inspired by the things they left behind. Subscribe for free to receive a new story every week and occasional bonus content.

On one of the pages of my father’s autograph book, a teacher wrote, “Remember you’re from 97,” meaning New York City’s P.S. 97, where my dad—we called him D—attended sixth grade. Inside the front cover, D inscribed a poem from those days, when books like this were more common than quaint: Go little album, far and near / To all my friends I hold so dear / And ask them each to write a page / That I might read in my old age. As sure as I am that my father always did remember P.S. 97, I’m just as sure he returned to this book in his ninth decade. It’s a perfect time capsule and illustration of who he was.

D was an exceptionally proud Brooklyn native and a sentimentalist who treasured the many souvenirs of his 88 years. He was so tethered to his roots, he named his home in western Massachusetts “Bensonhurst”—never mind that its lawns of wild thyme and canopies of beech and apple trees bear little resemblance to the streets where he played stickball against boys named Lefty and Bubba. Like me, he was a collector—of stuff, experiences and especially friends, as evidenced by the number of messages in the autograph book.

He must have been delighted by all the puns people shared: “I’ll remember you till Bear Mountain gets dressed,” “Your friend till Niagara Falls.” He loved one-liners, though the jokes he told as an adult grew exponentially longer with each telling. He was a man of many words.

The youngest of five—one girl, four boys—he was born in 1936 to Sol, a Ukrainian immigrant, and Brooklyn-born Nellie, a teacher and the family’s steady breadwinner. There were few dull moments in that household, and everyone gave as good as they got. D’s sister, Greta, signed the autograph book: “Here’s hoping you live up to the fine reputation I’ve made for the name of ‘Buchwald.’” In a letter from Korea when he was in the army—a letter that made its own way into the album—D kept up the teasing. The Dodgers had beaten the Yankees in the World Series; he hoped Greta— team Yankees—“didn’t do anything drastic.”

The rhyme D inscribed on the album’s inside cover is an apt bookend to the last years of his life, when he began writing poetry himself. He loved the art form and could recite some favorites—“Invictus,” “My Last Duchess,” the satirical “Strictly Germ-Proof,” a commentary on early twentieth-century sanitization mania. Most of his own poems—in the span of a few years, he wrote nearly 75—were humorous. He shared them proudly with family and friends.

Then there are the doodles. D was a lifelong doodler, and on some of the album’s pages you can still spot his handiwork—a precursor to the countless drawings he made as an adult in the margins of the yellow legal pads on which he took copious notes during meetings. (His longtime assistant fondly remembers the time she was going to a restaurant he’d recommended and he helpfully sketched his favorite waiter: a stick figure with a full head of hair and a nice smile.)

My father was a successful talent agent with his own bicoastal agency, a businessman whose hard work paid off, a philanthropist whose name adorns a building at his alma mater (Brooklyn College, of course). But I think his true goal in life was the one he listed in his high-school yearbook: “To have a million friends.” While he might not have hit quite that number, his was a vast circle, drawn from every stage of his journey on earth. What I’d give to go through this album with him and let him tell me all about the P.S. 97 folks. D had a deep appreciation for his life and the people in it, whom he held as dear as we do him.

—Laura Buchwald

Laura Buchwald is a writer and editor based in New York City. Her 2024 debut novel, The Coat Check Girl, is part of a trilogy and reflects her strong belief in the afterlife. She lives in the Chelsea neighborhood with her husband and dog.

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My dad was a mechanical engineer and quality improvement manager. He carried a briefcase, wore a tie and sometimes used flip charts he let me make. (I was the only kid who knew the phrases “paradigm shift” and “think outside the box.”) He was a member of the school board, an instructor at the community college, a skilled woodworker who designed and built a balance beam for our backyard, nightstands for my bedroom, a hidden desk in my closet. But other than at breakfast with his Bible and the local newspaper, Dad never struck me as a reader—until the day he showed me this spiral notebook, his running list of “Books I’ve Read.”

That was in 1992, when I was 18 and about to head off to college. He’d started the list in June 1960, the summer before he left for college himself, filling the first page—29 entries—with every book he could remember reading at McKinley High School in Niles, Ohio: the month and year he read it, the title and author. For a time, I tried to keep up our newly forged connection by reading whatever John Grisham novel he’d just finished, but my college assignments quickly took precedence.

In 1999, when I was 25, Dad was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, and given a life expectancy of five to seven years. He asked everyone in the family to read Love, Medicine and Miracles, by Bernie Siegel, a book full of stories of medical cases in which positive attitudes seemed to lead to treatment outcomes that defied doctor’s predictions. Given Dad’s work in quality improvement, it wasn’t surprising that he wanted to optimize results. And in fact his treatments were effective. In the end it was a heart attack, not cancer, that took him. He died in May 2005, at the age of 62.

The week of his funeral, Mom asked us if there was anything of his we wanted. I asked for the notebook. She was shocked I knew it existed and said no. I suspect she'd never thought to study the list herself and now wanted the chance to do so. Fortunately, my husband decided to sneak the notebook out of Dad’s top dresser drawer and make me a copy, which he surprised me with before we returned home.

The list included 412 books—spanning college, business school, 36 years at the Dow Chemical Company, 44 years of marriage, four children. There were classics (The Scarlet Letter, The Grapes of Wrath), bestsellers (Ordinary People, Catch-22) and, after his diagnosis, inspirational titles (The Five People You Meet in Heaven). About a year before he died, he began reading biographies of all the U.S. presidents from his lifetime, starting with Truman. He made it only to Clinton. His final book was Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the Soviet Elite by Ilya Dzhirkvelov. I assume he’d have chosen differently if he’d known it would be the last.

I still have many things my dad gave me. The flannel shirt he bought me so I’d stop wearing his. The letters he wrote me when he traveled, often noting turbulence by drawing a stick figure tumbling from an airplane. But the book list was something by him, for him, as unique as a fingerprint. When my mother passed, three years ago, I found the notebook still in Dad's dresser drawer. It’s been opened to the list for so long that I can’t close it without tearing the yellowed pages. I love seeing his block-letter handwriting in different colored inks. I love crunching the data.

Over 45 years, my father read 179,484 pages. What a silly, wonderful thing to know. The author he read most—19 titles—was Robert Ludlum, creator of Jason Bourne. The last full year of his life, 2004, he outdid himself by reading 30 books. Most years he averaged 12, but between 1970 and 1975, he read only three total. Was that because my brother and I, his third and fourth children, were born in that time? Why did he read 1984 in 1979, and Roots in 1988, a decade after it aired on TV? I don’t need the answers; I just like playing with the questions. They make the list interactive, letting me read with my father alive in my mind.

—Jen Machajewski

Click here for the full, searchable, shareable list of all 412 books Jen Machajewski’s father, Joe Bowman, logged in his spiral notebook.

Jen Machajewski’s work has appeared in Hippocampus, Multiplicity, 5 Min Lit, The Brevity Blog and elsewhere. She lives in Central Texas and is writing a memoir-in-flash about ears, teeth and a medical mystery.

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My mother did not have a particularly green thumb, but she had a great sense of humor. Near her potted plants, she displayed a framed Earl Engleman cartoon featuring a woman in cat-eye glasses leaning over some fallen flora, asking, “Was it something I said?”

She always had at least one successful philodendron, though, whose stems could be snipped off and placed in water, where they thrived with no soil and very little effort. The built-in bookshelves in my childhood living room were thoughtfully arranged with framed photographs, knickknacks and philodendron cuttings in vases of all different shapes. This, I learned, was how you could have greenery in pretty much every corner of your house. For my mom, the point wasn't to propagate new plants—it was just a frugal way to share the love.

She enjoyed interior decorating and making a home come alive, something she had numerous chances to do after she and my father divorced and she sold our house and moved into a series of drab rentals. Eventually she got to put her flair to use professionally; at 65, following years of working as a secretary to help put my father through chiropractic school, then staying home to raise my brother and me, then working part-time, minimum-wage jobs once she and my father split, she got a full-time job showing model homes for a local builder. She delighted in helping prospective homeowners pick out their flooring, cabinets and countertops.

When she was 67, almost two decades after her divorce, she bought her own home, in a 55-and-over community: an airy three-story townhouse complete with a loft and cathedral ceilings. She’d helped so many people fulfill their home-ownership dreams, and now, at an age when most people downsize, she finally fulfilled hers too.

She outfitted her home with elegant things she’d saved from our first house. She started entertaining again, trying new recipes, joyfully creating tablescapes with eclectic candle holders and bird-shaped napkin rings she called her “bits of whimsy.” She had an entire cupboard filled with napkins for every occasion and often lit a candle in the kitchen, even at breakfast, for “a little ambiance.” She’d always been jokey, but now she seemed to laugh more. She was more at ease. Even her plants came into their own, flourishing by the bay window in their new living room—an area so burstingly verdant that my brother and I took to calling it “the jungle.”

She passed away at 77, after two years of aggressive dementia. My brother and I kept many of her beautiful possessions, speckling our houses with memories of her. When I claimed this earthen jug containing one of her philodendron cuttings, I never imagined it would still be alive more than 12 years later. A resilient flourish from my resilient mom, it seems determined to hold on, much as she held tight to her faculties until she saw me ensconced in my own happy home.

—Jocelyn Jane Cox

Jocelyn Jane Cox’s memoir, Motion Dazzle, about becoming a mother while she was losing her own, will be published by Vine Leaves Press on September 30.

For a different reading experience, The Keepthings’ stories can also be read in their entirety on Instagram @TheKeepthings.

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For the past year, in fits and starts, I’ve been sorting through the contents of my basement. Yesterday I found a little trove of correspondence from my dad’s mom, my Nana Pauline—cards and notes she sent when I was in my thirties, living 600 and later nearly a thousand miles away. Just the sight of her handwriting overcame me with my love for her and hers for me. (Handwriting that at this point in her life pained her not just to produce but to behold, as arthritis and rheumatoid arthritis made her hands ache and her fingers stiff and her penmanship sometimes wildly crabbed; more than one note interrupted itself to exclaim/apologize, “Can you read this?”—her indignation and frustration loud and clear.)

For more than twenty years I’ve kept on my desk a framed copy of the last words she ever wrote me, when I was nine months’ pregnant: “Think of you all the time, and I am counting the days with you.” Yesterday—among notes in which she admired magazine essays I’d written (“I like your style”), sent love to my husband (though she had yet to meet him), thought back to ballet recitals and Easter-egg hunts of yore (“Remember?”) and thanked me again for the time I drove ten hours to visit (“I’ll never forget”)—I found the actual card in which those last words were written. “Think of you all the time, and I am counting the days with you.”

She didn’t make it. She died on April 10, 2002, fifteen days before my child—her first great-grandchild—was born. It's the sorrow of my life that they never met.

Even as a little girl, I understood that Pauline had the sharpest of tongues and the hardest of edges. Extremely competent and sensible herself (whether cleaning, baking, gardening, driving, playing cards, telling a story or talking Phillies), she suffered neither incompetence nor nonsense in others, and everything had to be her way. But she was a lunatic with love for her grandkids; in the above photo the residual crazy gleam in her eyes is because whoever took the picture—probably my grandfather—had just caught her in the act of devouring my little toddler cousin. (She always laughed that she couldn't take a good picture to save her life, but to me she looks perfect here.)

I was too pregnant to go to her funeral. Still, part of me is thankful I never had to see her in a casket. What I wanted, what I’ll forever want, is to open her front door—“Anybody home?”—and hear the joy ring out from her kitchen: “Just us chickens!”

So, now, who are you missing today?

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When I was growing up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, my family frequently visited my grandmother Deedee and my grandfather Papa at their house. He would cook dinner, and she would make dessert. Her most revered dessert was Deedee Cake. It was a German chocolate cake with holes poked in it. She drizzled caramel sauce and sweetened condensed milk into the holes and left the cake to soak, then topped it with whipped cream and crushed toffee. Deedee made this cake sparingly to make sure it stayed special. Eventually she made it by request only. We requested it a lot.

I was planning to ask for a Deedee Cake when I finished Marine Corps boot camp. Deedee had been at my father’s and my older brother’s boot-camp graduations, and I was next in line. But early in September 2019, a week before boot camp even started, Deedee was taken to the hospital because of a problem with her heart. Later that day she was flown via LifeFlight to a larger hospital in Pittsburgh.

It was unusual for Deedee to be the one in need of care. As a nurse, she’d chosen a career caring for others. She fed the songbirds that came to her yard and watched our pets when we were away. Her family felt her care the most, though. She had four kids and ten—no, eleven grandkids; she was always adamant that my stillborn sister be counted. On our birthdays she took us grandkids out individually; she’d pick us up and take us to eat at whatever restaurant we chose, and then to a store to buy a present. She often had a glass of water with her when she drove; it shocked me to think she’d willingly break the law by drinking and driving.

Deedee was the first to be called if there was a problem and my parents weren't able to be on the scene. About a year before she got sick, I accidentally swallowed a plastic water-bottle cap, and it got stuck in my esophagus. I could breathe, but I didn't have a way to get to the emergency room, so I called Deedee. She could tell I was scared. As we drove she just casually talked about her day to calm me down.

My mother and I visited Deedee in the hospital on the fifth of September. Papa was there, too. We all thought she was getting better. She was in good spirits and had every intention of going home as soon as possible. I sat beside her on her hospital bed while she rested her hand on my back. We talked about all the people who’d come to see her and how good that made her feel.

“Maybe we can have lunch tomorrow,” she said as we were leaving. I told her I’d be there. I knew she wanted every chance to see me before my ship date. But the next day, my father and I didn’t make it to the hospital until early evening. When we got there, her room was empty. A staff member told us she had been moved. Later we learned she’d gone into cardiac arrest. Had we come for lunch like I promised her, I would have been able to see her again.

My shipment to Parris Island was delayed so I could attend her funeral. A few days later, everyone gathered at Papa’s house, and I brought Deedee Cake, the first one I ever made. Since then, I’ve made countless more, including one for my girlfriend early in our relationship. (Knowing its importance to me, she has baked one for me too.) But that first one is when I discovered that the recipe was taken off the back of a box of Betty Crocker cake mix; Deedee had cut it off and kept it in her recipe collection. It was officially called Better-than-Almost-Anything Cake. That’s how I’d describe Deedee too.

—Carson Landolina

A Marine Corps veteran, Carson Landolina lives in San Antonio, TX, and is studying education at San Antonio College.

For a different reading experience, The Keepthings’ stories can also be read in their entirety on Instagram @TheKeepthings.

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