A CONCEPTUAL WORK OF ART by Robert Brunk
Mrs. Sondquist had called to ask if I would come to her home and look at her “things;” she lived alone and was moving to assisted living. She said she had a house full of furniture, carpets, figurines, glassware, linens – a lifetime accumulation she was not planning to take with her. She hoped something might be suitable for one of our auctions of fine antiques.
The basement, where we now stood, smelled of mold, and housed the usual tools, garden detritus, and unwise purchases. A treadmill spotted with mildew sat in a corner. One group of boxes with separating corrugations had faint Xmas markings, and a pair of folding wooden chairs, lacking seats, leaned against a wall. I had been in the auction business for six years, and no matter how commonplace the prospects appeared to be in a phone call, I always went to look, hopeful of finding some remarkable object in an array of familiar household furnishings.
She lived in a large complex of condominiums just south of Asheville, one of many in the area designed for retirees. The names of these developments evoked halcyon, pastoral landscapes – Briar Cliff, Heather Ridge, Clear Brook – but I had never seen any cliffs, brooks, heather, or even briars in these retirement communities. Their topography more often featured cul de sacs, eruptions of crepe myrtle, and white plastic fences from Home Depot.
When driving through these complexes, I often felt I was driving across a large blueprint. Planners and architects of these neighborhoods had created designs and structures that would circumscribe peoples’ lives: roads, parking places, planted trees, flower beds, the arrangement of rooms. Though their drawings only defined physical space, these patterns often gave rise to the fear that if I lived here, my life would become a predictable, uneventful decline, planned by others. It smelled of confinement to me: the loss of choices, the expectation of conformity, the pulse of embedded routines.
I had parked where Mrs. Sondquist had instructed, the cracked asphalt curb with a stenciled yellow sign: “3604 Visitor.”
She met me at the front door, well dressed for our appointment: a white blouse with a carved-shell cameo at the collar, a gray wool skirt, large gold earrings. My khaki pants and blue shirt reflected expectations of a more modest occasion. “I really don’t think there is anything here for you,” she began. “I know you sell fine antiques, but I wanted you to look around and see the things in the basement,” she continued, closing the door behind me. She was polite and composed, but her face, tight and unsmiling, suggested resignation, several fingers touching her lips as we spoke.
She led me into the living room and adjoining dining area, both orderly, brightly lit, decorated without visible passion. On these occasions, many of my clients would praise the beauty and value of their possessions, but Mrs. Sondquist expressed no enthusiasm as she pointed at upholstered furniture, Waterford vases, a shelf of books, and a tall reproduction case clock. She did not pick up anything to ask about its value, or to confirm authenticity or provenance.
I shared her lack of excitement: her china a common Limoges pattern with pink apple blossoms, service for eight, but lacking three cups; her “paintings” were framed prints, her “silver” all silver plate, perhaps wedding gifts from the 1950s. The carpets, modern handmade Persian rugs, had been expensive when purchased, but now worth only a fraction of the thousands originally paid. She moved quickly through the rooms, including the upstairs guest bedrooms, her hand waving across the modern beds, Victorian rockers, and brass-plated lamps. I reluctantly agreed with her; nothing suitable for our auctions.
We quickly ended up in the kitchen where she pointed at the basement door and announced that we would now look at what was stored in the basement. We were working through her agenda. I had been there fifteen minutes.
In the basement, I saw only one small room that suggested order and use. The walls had exposed studs on the outside and shiny gray paneling in the interior, a color that collided with the orange carpet and the fluorescent lighting. Neatly arranged shelves lined all the walls.
The straight, clean rows of vertically boxed video cassette tapes were labeled in neat script: “New Zealand,” “China,” “Tuscany,” “The Isle of Harris,” “Belgium,” “The Ukraine.” There were dozens, if not a hundred of them, most with accompanying maps and brochures stacked alongside. “Travel was our life,” Mrs. Sondquist said quietly. I imagined photos of smiling middle-aged tourists in sunglasses, posing before stone walls framed by pleasant churches or mountain peaks in the distance. Much of her adult life, now memories of itself, rested in this small, musty crypt.
“Mr. Brunk,” she began, her face now anxious and deeply lined. This was the moment she had planned, the sentence she had rehearsed, the reason for my visit. “I am going to be moving and I need help with this room.” She explained that she had called the Center For Creative Retirement, the public library, several public schools, and program directors at three retirement centers to see if there would be any interest in her donation of their homemade videos, hundreds of photographs, with audio accompaniment arranged by her late husband, each illustrating their visit to a different region or country. For her, this would create an ongoing memorial of sorts to their life together: a way to continue it, or prolong its end. She explained, with a tone of surprise, that all the organizations she had contacted had politely declined her offer.
Did I know anyone who would be interested in this collection? Surely their travels would be of interest to someone. “The pictures are very sharp, and the background music for each video is by composers from the country we were visiting.” She paused, as if to condense her sorrow into the fewest possible words. “I have no family,” she said, her arms folded, fingers again pressed against her lips. The decline of her ability to travel, and the loss of companionship, had slowly closed in. The contents of these boxes, symbolic and tangible evidence that she and her husband had lived, were now the most difficult to part with.
She asked if she could call me when she got ready to move, “to take care of this for me.” Instinctively, I said, “Yes, I will help,” unable to imagine any other response to her grieving, but not knowing what I could possibly do that she had not already done. Her voice rose in relief and she finalized our arrangement by squeezing both my hands, her face now hopeful.
Many of my clients are elderly, and as I have helped them make decisions about what to keep and what to sell, I have often wondered what would be in my small room, the last place in which I would seek continuity in my life, when, due to age and frailty, I could no longer push back the shrinking edges of my world. Would it be boxes of perfectly shaped stones I had collected on the shingle beaches of Unst; or a folder of music, the pieces I had most enjoyed singing; or a collection of maps with thin green lines, marking places I had explored? Maybe in the end it would be a box or two of family photos. Perhaps my eyes would be the best window to memories of my life.
But why would I want to remember at all? Perhaps, as I neared the end of my life, I should close my eyes and enjoy the voids, the airy, quiet caverns now available to me. Maybe I could slide into death more cleanly if my small room was empty, me no longer reaching for the fragments of my life I could no longer connect. I imagined not having a small room at all, shutting my eyes and finally letting go of everything: all my possessions; all the relationships, sustaining and fractured; all the unfinished tasks; all the anxious worry over whether I had been truthful and kind; the urgent, the incomplete, the unexplained, and finally, even the need to remember.
My work had often taken me to a closet or attic where I encountered a box of family photos. These pictures were presumed to be a resource to family members who might later want to know where they came from, and what people and events had shaped their lives. As they sifted through these collections, I often heard an heir or descendant comment, “I have no idea who these people are.” These accumulations are often passed along to the next and following generations, a picture or two occasionally retrieved and framed, its path to obscurity slowed for a generation or two; a hedge of sorts against certain namelessness.
When my father died several years ago, I had experienced the complex tangle of feelings created by old family photos. He had lived ninety-seven years. After his death, as my brother Stan and I sorted his remaining possessions, I agreed to inherit my father’s 1,400 color slides, photos he had taken from the early 1930s to about 1970. He had left no instructions about the future of this collection: what should be kept and why. At family gatherings, he would often darken a room and “show his slides,” and in so doing, some became favorites; my mother wearing an odd hat and wrapped in an American Indian-style afghan; Stan and I, as boys, waving from the windows of our black 1938 Ford.
In my first run through the slides, I set aside duplicates and badly blurred images. Several months later, Stan came to visit, and for two long evenings, with the help of a large light box, we examined each color slide, watching for forgotten details. We sorted, chose, and condensed the collection into about 300 images: houses my father had lived in as a boy, family reunions, vacations, weddings, cute children, scenic views of mountains and oceans. Many photos pictured Stan and me, picking blackberries, playing in the snow, posing with our grandparents. We found very few spontaneous photos of individuals or groups; most had been arranged by my father, poses for which he had instructed people as to where they should stand, or sit, and what to hold in their hand or point to.
Many of these pictures triggered familiar stories, bits of family lore, gossip and semi-legends, Stan and I recalling who had done what. Identifying the people in the photos became a friendly contest; “You can tell that is Uncle Joe because his car’s license plate is from California,” Stan would say.
I had the 300 remaining slides reproduced on CDs, copies for Stan and me, and others distributed to my father’s five grandchildren, including my two adult children. This created the distinct possibility that one of those five grandchildren, or one of their thirteen children, would one day browse through those images and say, “I have no idea who those people are.”
At one point, deep into a pile of similar photos of the same people, I asked Stan for whom we were doing this? He said, “Ourselves.” I realized he was right; our time with the slides may have been their best moment. We had been the curators of my father’s visual record of our family’s history and folklore. We had created our own version of Mrs. Sondquist’s basement archive.
Years later, as I write this account, I realize that Mrs. Sondquist and I shared a similar wish, that something be carried forward, perhaps grounding evidence of who we were, and what had defined the contours of our lives. But the reasons for this wish, and expectations for any future outcomes of this preservation, were less clear. What did Mrs. Sondquist and I envision? Some sort of colloquium where people would gather to commemorate our lives? Perhaps we simply did not want to be forgotten.
She called about three months after my initial visit, and introduced herself as the lady “with the room in the basement.” I had hoped that she wouldn’t call, that some change in circumstance had left her basement empty; perhaps one of the agencies had reconsidered and called her back to happily accept her offer. How foolish of me. “Could you come tomorrow morning?” she asked. “The movers are almost finished and the only thing left is the room in the basement. It was so kind of you to offer to help.” I told her I would be there around nine the next morning. I wondered what she thought “help” really meant.It probably didn’t matter; she no longer had to struggle with it. Mr. Brunk was dealing with it.
I quickly pictured possible ways I could donate her neatly labeled videos, even a few of them, to someone. Couldn’t they be used as an enrichment series in an after-school program? Or in a survey course in world geography? Could someone use the audio portions in a music class? I wondered if I should I look at a few videos myself, or with my family, to pay at least minimal homage to this vast expenditure of time and energy. I imagined challenging, relentless, boredom. How could anyone be interested in someone else’s vacations: the hotel in which they stayed when they visited Copenhagen thirty years ago, the ship they took from Athens to Istanbul, photos of Chinese billboards? Others whom she had contacted may have imagined a similar tedium, the minutiae of someone else’s life.
Perhaps the videos could be combined into a continuous loop and be used in a work of conceptual art, an installation in which the photographs would be projected on the wall of a gallery, while the music played in a parallel, endless cycle. Mrs. Sondquist’s collection would then become a statement, an unforgiving satire of our modern, often transient preoccupation with visual images, and the ever present, concurrent layer of mindless noise in which we often live. The videos’ ordinariness, their insular purpose, their lack of appeal, would now be their greatest attributes.
When I arrived in my Dodge van the next morning, Mrs. Sondquist met me at her front porch, and led me to the basement door, which she had propped open. She explained that she had some last bit of packing to do upstairs, and slowly retreated up the carpeted steps. I packed all the videos into six large boxes and lugged them, one at a time, bulky and heavy, up the basement stairs. Then, using a hand truck, I moved them down the sidewalk, past several clumps of crepe myrtle, and into the back of the van.
When I finished, I looked back toward the front door where Mrs. Sondquist stood on the small, concrete porch. From this distance, standing outside her now empty condominium, she looked especially old and frail. She had not mentioned the room in the basement, nor asked what I would do with the boxes in my truck. I wondered if her grief had shifted some, perhaps realigned, so she could feel the slight wave of relief offered by this moment. I walked back to her and asked if I could help with anything else. She replied that the people from assisted living would pick her up in a little while, and that she had saved one chair to sit on while she waited. I wished her well in her move. She said, “I’ll just do the best I can.” I was relieved that she asked no questions about the boxes, for I had no good answers.
I unloaded them at our small office and warehouse on Carolina Lane, and stacked them in the corner beside the big metal roll‑up door. I didn’t label them.
I stared at the pile and considered again that Mrs. Sondquist had “no family.” I came from a large family with forty-four first cousins, and it is difficult for me to imagine fading to total obscurity, being known to no one. Surely some of my descendants will be able to recognize me in a photo, know my name, that I lived, and perhaps that I built stone walls or made furniture. “I have no family” increases the chances that one would be utterly forgotten, that no memories will live on.
Three hundred years from now, I may be the unknown 10th-generation ancestor of someone, or does the internet, and other not yet imagined conduits of information and memory, suggest that after death, we will all float in a semi-eternal state of being both remembered and forgotten?
About two years after stacking her boxes in our warehouse, I saw Mrs. Sondquist’s obituary in the newspaper. She had lived in Cleveland and her husband had grown up in Pennsylvania. He’d been an engineer and she had enjoyed volunteering in service clubs – standard, unremarkable lives. The Sondquists had “traveled widely.” No survivors were mentioned, but I had many survivors stored in my warehouse, all resting in dusty, sagging boxes.
I walked by them every day, and occasionally considered their contents. Mrs. Sondquist’s videos bore witness to the most essential elements of the life she shared with her husband: their joy in exploring new cultures, their shared curiosity, their vitality, perhaps even their affection for each other. Perhaps that joy and affection was what she most wanted to preserve, not the boxes themselves. It lightened my concern about the boxes to think of them in this way. But other days I felt as though I had become the guardian of her very life. In her own words, travel was Mrs. Sondquist’s “life.”
But even without the videos, she could arrange all her memories of their travels in her mind: sheep blocking a road in Scotland, a brilliant glacial lake in British Columbia, the smiling street vender in Kyoto. She was free to retrieve and hold these vestiges of their shared lives, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, and bring them into focus as she wished, and perhaps smile at their remembrance.
But death came to her with no regard for the videos, or for any memories she may have carried in her heart.
I wonder if in the writing of this story, I have satisfied Mrs. Sondquist’s request that I take care of the room in her basement.
I am always a bit puzzled when I hear of someone who apparently had no desire to be remembered, one who specifies “no service,” no gathering of friends and family to celebrate a life, no poems, no humorous anecdotes, no online registry, no granite obelisks, their ashes thrown to the wind. This would be the clean void of anonymity, an emptiness for which I am apparently unprepared. It is difficult for me to imagine not existing, and to accept the absolute end of my life: finite, mortal extinction.
Do I fear a death that will not be noticed, my body unclaimed, a life without the slightest ripple of meaning or consequence? I need to accept that eventually I will be forgotten.
I have instructed that my body be placed deep in the ground, unembalmed, wrapped only in a shroud. I am not so clear though, about anonymity. Shouldn’t there be a small marker somewhere, with my name and maybe a date, saying that I lived? I have, after all, put a lot of effort into my days. Something over 100 billion people have lived on this planet, however, and it is not clear to me why I would require a marker.
Recently, I read a summary of discoveries made by the powerful telescopes at The Swinburne University of Technology in Australia. They are able to detect 110,000 galaxies within two billion light years of the planet earth, the most distant being over thirteen billion light years away. As the universe expands, this remote galaxy moves 800 miles farther away from the planet Earth every second. It is estimated that only 1.6 percent of the entire universe will ever be observed from our planet.
Mrs. Sondquist’s life, her husband’s life, my father’s life, my brother’s life, and my life, will all have occupied immeasurably minuscule specks of time and space.
I was the only witness one still winter day, as I carefully dropped Mrs. Sondquist’s six heavy boxes into the dumpster outside the warehouse door.
Robert Brunk’s essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Witness.