Ancestry Magazine

Maria, a favorite hospice patient of mine, died recently at age ninety-six. I would visit her weekly in the brown-shingled home she shared with her son and daughter.

From her bed in what was once the dining room, Maria could look past a table filled with plants and childhood pictures of her four sons and three daughters to her backyard. On the wall hung a poster of the small, northern Italian fishing village of her youth. Even now with her body spent, as Maria spoke of the past, her gestures still sparked with the strength of a woman who in an earlier life had labored daily mending fishing nets for her father and carrying heavy jugs of well water on her head.

My job as a hospice social worker was to track Maria’s needs, to make palpable the thoughts that worried her and her family, and to render peace with these thoughts whenever I could. When I first began working with Maria, her eyes would abruptly shut in pain, her suffering arising less from her body than from her memories of World War II, of bombs exploding outside the door of her home, of shrapnel tearing away the sight of one child’s eye and of the loss of another child to disease.

Initially, I worried whether my protected Midwestern childhood would be a barrier for Maria and me. But Maria dispensed with my uncertainty; she lightly stroked my hands as she assured me that she trusted me. Still, I wondered if we might have a chance to find some kinder, gentler paths of memory to travel together, much like the roads I traveled on in a search for my family’s history—roots that continue to speak to me through the voices of a few discovered mementos.

The opportunity to travel that path arose quite accidentally on the next visit when, caught up in the midst of shared memories of mothering, I giddily announced I was a new grandmother and confessed my befuddlement with the renewed popularity of swaddling babies.

Maria’s eyes lit up and her head nodded approvingly as soon as I mentioned swaddling.

She quickly directed her son up the narrow steps to the family’s attic to retrieve a certain package.

On my next visit, Maria pointe d to me to sit next to her as she lifted from that package the swaddling cloth she used for her own children. Its thick, white peasant cotton was slightly yellowed after seventy years but otherwise it was in perfect condition.

Maria explained the proper way to lay a diaper within the cloth and then swaddle a baby securely within. As I listened to Maria’s advice and held the swaddling cloth, I felt the base of my neck, that place where a baby nuzzles, warm. Watching Maria’s face soften, I believe the same spot on her neck warmed, too.

From that day on, Maria’s hold on painful memories slackened and the sounds of war quieted. Over time, she joined her children and me on different sensory adventures as we planted imaginary gardens and envisioned perfect feasts of fresh fish and sun-sweetened fruit.

It seems to me we can be enriched by the treasures of our attics in four ways. We may discover a valuable heirloom that reaps a financial reward. We might find items that stretch our sense of self by connecting us to a historic event. Perhaps we could stumble upon something that enables us to picture ourselves living in the past. But, sometimes our discoveries enable us to identify with transcendent universal human aspirations that make life, under any circumstances, meaningful.

Maria’s swaddling cloth, I believe, falls into this last category. Through it I learned that life need not be confined by memories of loss any more than Maria’s life had been confined by geographic boundaries. Holding the cloth, Maria forgave me my innocence of war and bonded with me instead in the very human instinct to nurture. The swaddling cloth, then, was both a memento of a particular life and an emblem of continuity and reason in time of chaos.

In her last days of consciousness, Maria recalled the feel of coarse, gravelly sand weaving between her toes as she slid into the sea. When, after her death, her son told me about this recollection, I, with Maria, c ould also taste the salty air above the waves.

Lynn Dennis is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker currently working for a Boston-area hospice. She also holds a masters degree in Jewish Studies.