Creative Writing Exercise – Forgotten Suitcases

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The second of the two exercises set for us yesterday by Leanne Dempsey involved a series of photographs taken by Matt Van Der Velde in abandoned nursing homes and US asylums, including the ruins of buildings unused and often unvisited since the 1920’s and 1960’s. Several such institutions had rooms and cupboards filled with suitcases brought in by patients who probably hoped to leave the centres or have access to their keepsakes during their stay. The patients died or got transferred away and their cases were just left in indefinite storage as a very sad memento of the people who once owned them. Our exercise was to consider the suitcases or what the contents of any one of them might be saying to us about who once owned it. This was the rather bleak thinking it inspired for me. The Marie Celeste Chamber of lost lives, hopes and dreams, mementos and keepsakes stands in silent accusation before me. I feel like I’m raiding a pharaoh’s final resting place just looking at this scene. Everything here looks lost forever, like the hope jettisoned just before stepping into Dante’s Inferno. Nothing is marked or labelled. No one is returning for any of this. Each memory cell swallowed by the ever-encroaching Alzheimer’s has its companion keepsake moulding away, pining away in a case here, gathering dust, absorbing the neglect, meaning nothing to many who might find the luggage. Those eager to open a case hoping to find money, gold or jewellery will find only bitter disappointment, in the form of old clothes, and family photos, pinning hopes on sons and daughters who probably never even visited once the patient was secured in bed, ward or cell. There are bus and train tickets to and from places visited with no clue as to why the journeys were made. As the incarcerated mind struggles to feel loved and stave off the creeping Matmos of forgetfulness the cases grow heavy with mildew, dust, cobweb, damp and sorrow, cast into the cupboard chamber by those who make no room in their own strong minds for remembering one case from another. Someone who came through here might have survived the sinking of the Titanic, witnessed the Coronation of Edward 8th, shook hands with Woodrow Wilson, but their lives, their stories, their legacy from the past to present and future dies in these suitcases. This is where living history comes to die. The truth lies only in the cryptic forensic clues no one cares to solve, in cases no one cares to open – cases destined for landfill, as buried deep in the ground as the bodies of the men and women who lived these rich lives. Lost, abandoned, forgotten, neglected, unloved – one day my case might be joining such a heap, and these notes will be inside – an unopened time capsule, or if opened, just torn up and disposed of unread detritus of no worth, value or meaning to anyone but me. Arthur Chappell