Screwdriver photo by Paul Stansbury
Saved Objects
A participatory project led by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman
Saved Objects invites you to share photos of and memories about objects you’ve saved from deceased loved ones. This ongoing, participatory project honors the dead and builds community around death and dying for the living. Saved Objects was created by Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman as an expansion of their collaborative photography and prose work Saved: Objects of the Dead.
To participate: share a photo of an object you’ve saved from a deceased loved one along with a description of why that person and item is special to you. Submit your photo and text to the Saved Object project pages on Instagram, Facebook or email them to savedobjects@gmail.com.
Click on the photos below to reveal the contributed text about each item. Also visit Facebook and Instagram to see the growing collection of contributions in memoriam.
Things That Make Me Happy
×We found this in Aric's bookshelf along with his three page Bucket List when our 22-year old son and brother died in his sleep August 4, 2016. It is an incredible, if unintended, gift from him to all of us. You can tell he had added to the lists over time - a testament to his perseverance, hopes, kindness and belief of the evolution and opportunities his life held. It's proof of his positivity and forward-thinking ways and has now become an item on our own list of Things That Make Us Happy. So many simple things were important to him - like smiling - but even more - smiling with purpose. He could have simply written smiling, but it was not the act itself that was important or what made him happy, it was the genuine intent and love behind it that mattered. You can almost hear his voice through his bullet point of 'Memories man - nothing more special'. Aric had overcome some tremendous challenges to arrive at this point, which perhaps gave him wisdom beyond his years. You can see his lessons for us all in his list: his desire to cultivate deep meaning in his relationships, to truly treasure the gifts we have in even the small things, to take the time to enjoy nature, to take ownership for his own happiness, and to make whatever changes needed to achieve his life's goals. —shared by Kacee Chandler
Uncle Mark's Wallet and Name Tag
×This is my Uncle Mark's wallet and name tag (with it's police collection baggie), which was on him when he committed suicide in the office of our family business, Joe's Junkyard, in Chester, Penna. Among the items inside were his license to carry a firearm. —shared by Lisa Kereszi
Military Flag
×My dad was a veteran of the Korean War. After the war, he spent 30 years in the Army Reserves. Eventually he became a Command Sergeant Major, the highest noncommissioned officer grade one can attain. During my teen years in the 60’s and 70’s, we did not see eye to eye. He was traditional, conservative, and pro-military. I was long-haired, liberal, and a 70’s stoner. During that time, I barely spoke to him. I viewed him as strict, rigid, and living in a world from the distant past. In turn, he viewed me as a lost cause whose only hope was to enlist in the military and have them “straighten me out.” As often happens with men and their dads, after I moved away from home and became older my view of him changed. I realized that he was nothing like I had imagined. In fact, he was a sensitive, caring man who performed many secret acts of charity over the years. We finally reconnected and established a good relationship. He died at age 81. At the funeral, the local military honor guard handed us the flag that had lain over his coffin. When I hold his flag in my arms today, it not only reminds me of his absence, but it reminds me how we change over our lifetimes and it reminds me how we should give each other the benefit of the doubt. The glow of hope and redemption permeates that flag. He knows that I feel it. —shared by John Wesley Mullennix
Chapstick
×I took this Chapstick from the bedside table of my dead ex-boyfriend in October, 2000. He was a junior in college when he was diagnosed with an osteosarcoma. I was two years older and had graduated already. I was trying to start a life in New York, while he suffered through chemo and surgeries in Houston. We'd broken up a few months before the cancer but we were still in close contact during the course of his treatments. He sent me a lot of emails. He couldn't believe what was happening to him. The pain, the fear. It was monstrous. When I arrived at his parent's house, where he'd been in hospice before his death, his older brother showed me to his bedroom, which was unrecognizable with medical equipment. The Chapstick was in my hand before I really had a chance to think about it and when I was alone, I put it on my own lips and felt close to him. I can't imagine throwing it out, though I don't think about it much anymore. I move around a lot and every couple of years I bump into the Chapstick and it makes me feel like he's everywhere around me, just for a second. For me, it's a talisman. It kind of collapses time and space. —shared by Susan McCarty
Key
×This key gives me two doors. It let me into the house where my friend Diana Cavalier lived. After she was no longer able to descend the stairs, my visits would begin as I unlocked her front door and called up to her. Diana sat in the middle of her front room in a wheelchair. A small table had been pulled close for books, paper and pens, a glass of water and phone. After a kiss hello I’d pull a chair over and we’d talk through the afternoon, something we’d been able to do since we first met. By the time I’d leave, there was always more to say, thoughts and questions for each other which we had held aside or not considered enough. So many things were left to say, in fact, that for both of us the experience of sitting together on a following visit offered the feeling of having hardly been out of each other’s company. We’d say we took up just where we left off. Diana died on March 12 of this year. She was 87 years old. At the hospital, her son Simon generously welcomed me into her room. Here’s the second door, then. I was with Diana when she died, for which I am deeply grateful. Perhaps this experience offers a third doorway, one of which I am reminded whenever I hold the key or open the drawer where I keep it and see it waiting for me in the morning. “Hello, Lawrence,” she’d say, whenever I walked in. Even now I can hear her voice within me. —shared by Lawrence Wray
Charlie's Hat
×The ocean was like glass and Charlie and I didn’t have a care in the world. He was hunched over his wave-runner racing through the water, bare back gleaming in the sunlight, hat firmly on his head. I was holding on to him for dear life, hoping that my arms wouldn’t break loose from around his waist, that I wouldn’t slide off the back of the contraption, and hit the water with such force that my bathing suit would rip from my body. It’s astounding what an aging woman will do when she finally finds the love of her life, and Charlie was the love of my life. Three days after the California stay-at-home order was issued, my husband died from Parkinson’s. Next to him on the bedside table was his hat – the one he had worn almost every day since he was 25 years old. It had become a symbol of everything that was good about Charlie. His gentle kindness, low-key sense of humor, and the way he traveled through life with a love for all things great and small. I clutched that hat to my breast with the same desperation when I held onto him in the ocean. I thought somehow that would keep his spirit with me. Perhaps it has. —shared by Judy Eberhardt
Commemorative NYC Subway token, made into a necklace
×This necklace was given to me in 2010 by my beloved late mentor Jan Van Dyke. It was hers from when she lived as a modern dancer and choreographer in New York, and she gave it to me as I embarked on a journey to do the same. The clasp has since broken, but I wear it often anyway, empowered by her memory and her support. Since she passed last summer, a day rarely goes by that I don't wish I could talk to her. She is so missed. —shared by Justin Tornow
Plate
×Around 1956 or 1957, my father, mother, three brothers, my mother’s brother, my grandmother and grandfather, and I traveled to Canada to see my grandmother’s family. We drove in two cars. My mother and grandparents were Italian immigrants. The relatives we were going to visit immigrated to Toronto, Canada. (My mother, grandmother, and grandfather immigrated to Pennsylvania.) On our way to Toronto, we drove through New York City. My father who was an engineer and had an interest in architecture took us to see the Guggenheim Museum, which was under construction. On our way back from Toronto, we visited Niagara Falls. My grandmother bought this plate as a souvenir. She kept it in her house. When my grandmother died, my mother kept the plate in her house. When my mother died, my brothers gave the plate to me. —shared by Cynthia Bickley-Green
Participate in Saved Objects
Share your photos of and memories about objects you’ve saved from deceased loved ones by email to savedobjects@gmail.com or directly to the project pages on Instagram, Facebook.