The Sad Scraps

I think I’m beginning to see daylight on the great family paperwork reduction project. Yesterday I went through another box of paperwork I’d discovered at my mom’s place, saving the few scraps that had enduring interest or value, throwing away old gas bills and manuals to appliances that had been installed in houses we haven’t owned for 40 years, and shredding documents from my dad’s legal practice and sensitive documents that didn’t bear retaining.

Some of the things I found were interesting and some were very sad.

In the interesting category were notes and cards from relatives of my dad’s from whom we haven’t heard in forty years or that I didn’t even know existed. That gives me more information to use in tracking down their children or grandchildren, if any.

There was also substantial information on something my dad had worked on for more than twenty years without pay but with a signed contract that he’d be paid such-and-such an amount at the end of twenty-five years, a sum amounting to six figures in today’s dollars. He (meaning my mother, my siblings, and me) were stiffed after he died.

The saddest thing I found was a handwritten note from my dad’s uncle. He killed himself just a month or two before my dad died and the note, written just a month or so before he took his own life, is quite evidently a suicide note, seen in the light of hindsight. I’ll retain that and the check he wrote to my dad for $100, uncashed by my dad, in the family archives I’m assembling and organizing.