What To Do With a Betel Box

In the last decade of my mom’s life, she firmly decided that she was done traveling. While her jet-setting friends were taking Caribbean cruises and planning jaunts through Europe, she sat it out, without one ounce of FOMO. She was perfectly happy here at home: spending time with her family, working in a job she (mostly) loved, having meals with friends, or just reading a good book in her recliner. I think at a certain point, she just felt too old to live out of a suitcase and share a hotel room and deal with jet lag and long flights.

Also, over the course of her long and happy life, she had seen a good chunk of the world, or at least the parts she cared about. Her parents had been travel agents, eager explorers who had come just shy of their goal of visiting 100 countries. And for a short time, my mom was a travel agent too, although I believe reluctantly. It was their thing, not hers.

When my grandmother died in 2015, she left behind a home filled with her travel treasures: African masks and colorful Hungarian artwork, Italian tiles and Latin American tapestries, Russian samovars and a balalaika. Every shelf, every surface, every inch of wall space was full of international objets d’art, each with their own story, which my Grandma recounted in great detail—how she bargained in Morocco, where in Mexico she got the alebrije deer, the mermaid design of her favorite hotel in Positano (Le Sireneuse, which my husband and I went to on our honeymoon). We all took things to remember her by, and I filled my home with ornamental objects from countries I had never been to.

And then, ten years later, my mother died, and here we were again, tasked with clearing a home of its life. Except this time, there wasn’t so much stuff. Instead of travel treasures, every shelf, every surface was covered in framed photos. At least a hundred. Photos of her kids and her grandkids, her brothers and her parents and her cousins, her friends who were like family. She had her plants that she tended to religiously, colorful paintings of flower markets and seaside balconies, her crafts fair finds.

She had spent three decades in this house—after her divorce, after her kids were grown—and she had made it her own. Josie’s home. All hers. You could feel her there, even when she was no longer there, no longer here. The warm glow of her was in the bright sunlight that streamed through the many windows, it was in the cheery yellow walls, in that faint smell of unscented lotion, in the plush sofas that cradled you body and soul.

When we looked around at her stuff, there were no stories, not really. Her decorative objects were just things she liked, that had either come from a crafts fair or from her mother’s home. Things, just things, that held someone else’s history, or were fresh and new with no history at all.

It made it easier to clear out her home because very few things told a story. I saved the things that reminded me of her. A Chagall lithograph, once vibrant, and now faded. A green glass jar painted with small pink flowers. A samovar passed down from my grandma to Mom and now me. I took a couple of her large outdoor plants, promising myself (and her) that I would keep the damn things alive and blooming. And I took all of her photos, filling four large plastic bins with loose prints, proof of a life well-lived and well-loved.

And then, there was the betel box, a heavy hunk of brass, tarnished and old, that sat on her living room coffee table, and had sat on that living room coffee table for as long as I could remember. It was there in our childhood home, as we gathered around on the massive coral-colored sectional before Thanksgiving dinner. It was there in this home, as we ate cheese and crackers and Mom’s not-so-signature guacamole while the grandkids unwrapped holiday gifts.

On a whim, I brought it home. And then, it became a whole thing. What was this thing anyway? I had to Google it. Essentially it’s an intricate dip box from India or the Philippines, with compartments meant to facilitate the chewing of the betel leaves or the betel nuts or some other nut. Unclear. Had Mom ever been to India or the Philippines? I didn’t think so. Why did she have this? No one seemed to know. And I asked. I asked my dad, who thought maybe they had purchased it on a trip to Morocco but wasn’t totally sure. I asked her best friends, who said she had never been to a country where they chewed betel. And she wasn’t the kind of person who would have gone antiquing. The most likely answer was that my grandparents had brought it back for her from one of their travels.

But I couldn’t ask them. Because they were gone. And now my mom was gone. And I had so many questions still. What else don’t I know? Are there things I should have asked? How will I know what I don’t know? I should have, I wish I had…how will I do this?

The future, without my mom, seemed infinite. She had been so sick that I had been prepared to lose her. But I wasn’t ready to lose her. I was never going to be ready to lose her.

I stared at that betel box every day for two weeks, wondering if I should just get rid of it. It was really beautiful, with intricate metalwork on brass, an octagonal compartment nestled alongside imperfect squares. But it was heavy and solid, dark and tarnished. It wasn’t light and bright like my mom, it didn’t feel like her. It sat like a stone in my home, like a weight.

And yet, I didn’t want to part with it. I didn’t want to lose it to some random stranger on Ebay who wouldn’t care what story it told and maybe just thought it would look good on their living room table.

No, this betel box was my Mom’s and somehow it had found a place at her table, and so I was going to find a place for it on mine. And so I did. Now it sits next to her green glass jar with painted flowers, and I look at them both every day. The light and the dark. And if anyone wants to know the story, it’s this:

Betel box, origins unknown. It holds the grief of a daughter, holds it in the empty spaces of its many-shaped compartments, a reminder of all that she’s lost and all that she still holds.