“WHERE WILL THE Judaica go?” a friend asks Judith Helfand, in reference to the material objects of her faith. Helfand is an Ashkenazi Jewish documentarian who turns the camera on herself and her family to tell larger stories. Here, she’s telling a story of becoming a “new old mother” the year after her own mother dies. She takes a deep breath of her newborn daughter’s hair and turns to her friend, who is trying to help her store and organize the too many things in her New York apartment. “That is such a good question,” replies Helfand, who embraced motherhood by adopting at age 50. “It’s the age-old Jewish question,” she continues. “Once we left the desert we were like, s---, now we have to find places for our stuff!” She breaks into laughter, that special laugh of the sleep-deprived and overwhelmed new parent, and never answers her friend’s question directly.
Love & Stuff, a POV documentary available on PBS, based on Helfand’s shorter New York Times Op-Doc with the same name, is full of age-old questions about holding on and letting go. Love & Stuff doesn’t offer easy answers or quick fixes, instead revealing the struggles and choices we make in curating our living spaces.
“Do yourself a favor,” Helfand recalls her mother urging her, her only daughter, “don’t get too attached to stuff; it accumulates.” But when her mother died of cancer, Helfand squeezed more than 50 boxes, one dry sink, a love seat, her mother’s mahjong set, and a piano into her “already cramped” living space. Two of those boxes were labeled “elephants.” “Helfand” means elephant in Yiddish, and her mother had acquired a sizable assortment of figurines in honor of the family name.
With humor and vulnerability, Love & Stuff looks at the real and metaphorical elephants in the room. One of those elephants is the natural tendency to cling to objects as a stand-in for the person who is gone. Helfand’s mother isn’t in her old lipstick, shoes, or dental bridge, yet Helfand can’t bear to throw them away. “She is not in the skirt!” the bereaved daughter reminds herself, burying her face into the folds of her mother’s garment. The items have taken on an almost sacramental quality.
“This is not an archaeological dig,” one friend gently reminds her. “It’s your life.” As someone who has let my own home swell with furniture, dishes, books, and too many beautiful and useless things after loved ones move or die, I find Love & Stuff highly therapeutic.
Love & Stuff is as much about grief and healing as it is about clutter. As Helfand looks at the way she inhabits not just her home, but her body, Love & Stuff becomes a meditation on all that we treasure. In the end, it is the real-life people in Helfand’s world who help her to whittle down the piles and make room for her new daughter, Theo. As our planet swells with the production of more and more things, it may behoove us all to see how we can use the leftovers from the generations that came before us — and what we can do without.
Josina Guess is a Sojourners associate editor and a contributor to Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic.
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