What to Save
When you lose someone you love, especially in a terrible tragedy like 9/11, you may feel a strong connection with all kinds of objects you associate with that person—photographs, letters, small objects, even whole rooms. Some may bring back happy memories of the person’s life, others will recall the awful circumstances of the person’s passing, and all will remind you of your love and your loss.
Over time you may gradually realize that some of these mementos are very important to you, and you want to keep them; others may lose their power for you, and you may find you are ready to let them go.
Sometimes when for emotional reasons or practical ones, such as space, it is important to select some things to keep and others to let go of, making those decisions can feel overwhelming and be very difficult.
In the following video, join Margie Miller as she learns about saving and caring for her 9/11 mementos.
What to Save and How: An Introduction
Geri Solomon, Archivist, Hofstra University
Margie Miller, Widow of Joel Miller, World Trade Center 9/11/2001
Running Time: 10 minutes
File Size: 23 MB
In this section, you will find some tools to help you with this process.
What matters most?
Tips to help you sort out which things are most important to you, or to others, and why.
What can you take care of?
Practical questions of space, time, and resources.
Emotional Challenges and Support
Resources to help you understand and meet the emotional challenges you may face as you decide what to save and what to let go.
For More Information
Save Your Family Treasures, a website of the Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, the state’s public television station, offers practical and effective methods to preserve artifacts, photographs, and documents into the future. It includes a useful video called “Deciding What to Keep.”
Simon Mayo’s Bar of Soap The British Museum, in partnership with the BBC, is building a digital museum to tell a history of our world in objects. When asked to contribute something meaningful to the virtual collection, Simon Mayo, a BBC radio broadcaster, added a bar of soap from the World Trade Center. In this video Mayo speaks movingly about the significance of this seemingly mundane object, and shows how everyday things can evoke strong emotions and become mementos of world-changing events.
The following articles provide a moving and unusual perspective on the community dimensions of grieving that might be helpful to people thinking about what to save.
9/11: Commemorative Art, Ritual, and Story by Steven Zeitlin and Ilana Harlow from Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, Fall-Winter 2001.
Hallowed Ground with photographs by Martha Cooper from Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore, Fall-Winter 2001.