Adam’s Mother:
And here’s a spoon. It’s all very melancholy, all these little remnants.
Adam Beckman:
Why is it melancholy?
Adam’s Mother:
The abandonment. The abandonment is melancholy. In a way, it’s worse than throwing away, much worse. I can understand one family being obliged to flee or run or abandon, but that nobody else cared. That it was so overwhelmingly abandoned by everybody, that nobody had cared to solve something, to resolve something. That was very offensive to me. It was like leaving a corpse. You don’t leave a corpse. And that’s a little bit the feeling that I had. That here was a carcass, the carcass of a house, of a life, of a private, and nobody cared to pick it up and give it a proper burial.
I thought that it was important that somebody should care. That somehow, somebody was leaning over these words, reading them, unfolding these letters that somebody had bothered to write. It really didn’t matter that it was an eleven-year-old boy who cared. Objects have lives. They are witness to things. And these objects were like that. So I was, in a way, glad that you were listening.
- From ‘This American Life’, episode 199: The House on Loon Lake.
This is one of the most haunting stories...I wonder about hospital records, birth and death records...that desperate young mother and her newborn child, lost in time....
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