Each house is a museum curated by its owner. More often than not the curator will be a woman – still the homemaker, even after the revolution. Most men require a working fridge and are then happy to sit at a card table with an enamel mug and a flat screen. But she is an aesthete and a historian and her aesthetic ideal and the history in each ornament blend to furnish and decorate the rooms and when you enter her house you enter the gallery of her/their life.
The lady of the house is gone. And with her dies the logic and truth of this home, this museum. She was its curator – as well as its audience. What does a tribe’s art mean after it has been massacred? Not nothing. We will turn a weeping idol in our hand and marvel at its strange elucidation of grief. But the thing is now holy only in the abstract. Its true meaning dies with the tribe. It has archeological fascination, but is no longer connected to the heart.
Lesser treasures, those of questionable sentimental value and no discernable beauty, will take a ride to the op shop, or, though one feels guilty, to the dumpster. Each of these disjecta membra played its own small role in the full picture of a family life, like dots in a pointillist painting. But they are dispersed by her going and will never come together again as that picture. Worlds crash, realities fade and reassemble elsewhere as elements of other realities.