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One of the toughest jobs people have to face when someone dies comes long after the wakes and the funerals and burials.
There are the leftovers, all of the possessions that are left behind.
It’s called an estate, a fancy word that brings forth visions of valuable paintings and stocks and landholdings and other valuables.
In fact, the remnants are often a large collection of broken flashlights and watches, old books, outdated knickknacks and drawers of silly things that for some reason never got thrown away.
Then, there are the clothes, closets full of the shirts and pants and shoes and coats and old ties that the deceased wore day in and day out.
For some people, figuring what to do with all this is easy. They pack it into bags or boxes and haul it to Goodwill or the Salvation Army.
For many people, it’s not that easy. The clothes remain in closets for months, and actually doing something with the clothes is hard.
It was that way for Mary Carrier. Her husband, Byron, had been a teacher for 53 years, teaching in Veedersburg and South Bend before coming to Elmhurst, where he taught chemistry and physics. After he retired from the Fort Wayne schools he taught at Ivy Tech.
He died of cancer last July, and his clothes remain as they were when he died and might for some time.
Then Carrier got an idea from a woman who had shown some of her handiwork to her daughter – bears made from her late mother’s clothes.
“I’d never heard of such a thing,” Carrier said, but it sounded like a good sewing project, so she set to work – making bears out of her late husband’s clothes and giving one to each of her children and grandchildren for Christmas as mementos of their father and grandfather.
The project was something Carrier knew how to do. She has sewn all her life.
She remembered as a child that flour came in cloth sacks with designs on them, and her mother used that cloth to make summer dresses for her and her sisters.
As an adult, Carrier continued to sew clothes for her children and her husband.
“Back when we were struggling – we had seven kids and a teacher didn’t make all that much – I even sewed his sports jackets,” Carrier said. “You didn’t go out and buy a dress. You sewed them.”
But making bears out of her late husband’s clothes?
It was worth a try.
“I didn’t know if I could cut his clothes,” Carrier said. “The first time, it kind of shook me up.” But her husband had a sense of humor, she said, and had he been there, he probably would have considered it a grand idea.
So she sewed, making every bear individual. Some had a slogan sewed to them, “A Teacher Touches A Life Forever.” They had mementos sewn to them – Purdue symbols, little hearts.
She took a red and gray tie that a student had once made for her husband and made three ties out of it for three of the bears.
In all, she sewed 32 bears, each 18 to 20 inches tall, even though she had only 29 children and grandchildren. She wanted people to have a choice.
And for Christmas each child and grandchild got one of the little remembrances.
The bears certainly didn’t consume all of Carrier’s late husband’s clothes. “I haven’t touched most of his clothes,” she said. His wallet is where he left it. It still hasn’t been moved.
The bears, though, will carry on his memory, in the family, at least.
