Mothers & the Archives

Having just typed the last edits into my last project of the semester, I am suddenly  free of obligations for the moment. Of course, the apartment needs to be cleaned, and I have meetings to plan for...but I feel like completing my first year of graduate school merits a few minutes of unrepentant reflection. I thought I would share a story from work earlier this week. It was one of those moments that reminded my why I'm in graduate school, why I want to be an archivist, and how sometimes it only takes a little effort to make a stranger's day brighter.

On Monday morning, I was on the reference desk, as I typically am. It was a slightly busy, but not overwhelming morning. I was beginning to feel the cold that hit me later in the week, but the sun was shining and it definitely felt like spring. A woman, who I might estimate to be in her 60s (though I am notoriously bad at estimating age), approached the desk in the tentative manner of a first-time visitor. She started to tell me what records she was interested in seeing, and while she was talking, her eyes began to tear. I opened my mouth to ask if she was okay, and she said she was sorry-- her mother had been a member of the group whose records she was requesting....and her mother had died last month. I know how this lady felt. I have stood in her shoes many times-- trying to complete a routine task, being reminded of my mother, and turning into a quivering mess of tears in front of a stranger. 

I told her it was okay and that I understood because I too had lost a mother a long time ago. This is a personal detail I would never usually share behind the reference desk, and am sure that I have not even told my colleagues at work. I think sometimes, though, we have to be generous with our grief if it will allow us to connect with another person. I managed to determine which records she wanted to see, she was hoping to find traces of her mothers name in the group's activities. A few minutes after she started reviewing the first carton, she came out of the reading room to get me. What she showed me were minutes taken at a group meeting in the 1950s-- they were written in her mother's handwriting. It was such an unexpected find, and she was both excited and teary. I made a photocopy of the minutes for her to take to her mother's memorial service. She told me that her mother had Alzheimer's for the last ten years of her life. Now that her mother was gone, she was hoping to become re-acquainted with the brilliant woman she knew that her mother once was. She will be back during the summer to look for more evidence of her mother in the records.

I thoroughly enjoy my job, and it is rewarding to be able to help researchers on a daily basis. But the experience I had on Monday morning was different. It was a reminder that the records archivists so carefully arrange and preserve are not just historical documents, but they are records of individual lives. Maybe I am overly sentimental, but there was something magical about this lady finding her mother's handwriting in a carton at the archives. Traces of our loved ones are everywhere, even at the archives.

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, a day I will studiously avoid by going to meetings, cleaning the apartment, and grocery shopping. But, when the strands of my heart begin to tighten, as they inevitably will, I can remember that my mother is much closer than she seems. I can also remember the lady I met on Monday morning, who will celebrate her first Mother's Day without her mother. But, perhaps her pain will be tempered by reading the words her mother wrote a lifetime ago.