When A Car Is Someone's History And A Name Is More Than A Word

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The Division of Motor Vehicles, or DMV, is one of the most beloved places in America. If you don’t live here in the U.S., please know I’m being facetious. Nobody likes going to the DMV. It’s tedious and drawn-out — not a place where folks expect to have a heart-rending epiphany like I had there the other day.

My husband bought a used car recently from an out-of-state seller and had it transported to our home. It was a low-mileage car in great condition owned by an elderly couple who barely drove it. We had to register it in our state and transfer the title, and I was the lucky duck who got to do this.

When it was my turn at the DMV, I walked up to the counter and put a stack of paperwork down in front of me. While the customer service rep did her thing, I peeked at some of the documents in my big pile. I noticed a copy of a Certification of Vital Statistics for the previous owner of the car. What’s this? I started to read through.

As soon as I realized it was the owner’s death certificate, my antsy demeanor — the norm for the DMV — shifted to stillness. There I was holding evidence of someone’s life — a 9.5" x 11" paper window into the person who used to sit in the driver’s seat my husband and I will now occupy.

From this piece of paper, a woman emerged from an ever-morphing cloud of anonymity, poking her head out from all the human life I will never imagine or know. That life, those people — they’re just a concept, a low-hum idea of breath and body to me, never anything more.

Through objects we can access others we’ll never meet, but only if we know something about the person. An object is part of a story if we know its history. If we don’t, then it’s just an object.

When you buy something of significance from someone, it isn’t only a purchase but an adoption. You’re the next caretaker of something that served an important purpose for them, and which you intend it to serve for you. If you opt to, you can adopt a bit of that person, too.

My husband and I bought our house from a fellow named Cos twenty-four years ago. He was loved by his neighbors who’ve now lived next to me all these years. After we signed the documents with him to transfer ownership, I thought I’d get to know Cos over time — maybe we’d have him to a neighborhood party — but he died unexpectedly right after we moved into his home.

I’ve lived here longer than he did, done renovation to his home, raised kids in his home, and lived here longer than any other place in my life — and still, I think of parts of this house as his.

He was unique. As the story goes, his son was learning about the American Civil War in school, so together they built a Civil War bunker on his property — my property. It still exists, a recess dug into the ground to mimic the types of manmade channels folks died in back then. Over these twenty-four years, my bunker has temporarily housed the bazillion branches that fall from the trees throughout the year. It’s a bunker branch holder.

My husband’s new used car came to us with stories told on its paper records.

The woman who owned my husband’s new car died at home last year at the age of ninety-six from complications of an acute stroke — as the document tells me. It also tells me she’d had cerebrovascular disease for years, so I imagine maybe her car sat idle for as long.

A feeling of apology welled in me when I thought about how my husband wanted to find a quality, barely used car. There can be all kinds of reasons your pre-owned car wasn’t used. We usually never learn what they were, but with this car, I maybe knew.

I’m not a snoop but as I started to imagine this woman, I became curious and later located her obituary online. I learned she was an avid bridge player, like the generation before me in my own family. Now when I drive our new car, I imagine its life with her.

I see back in time when it used to take this woman to her bridge group and wait for her on the curb like a good car. Maybe she’d had a jolly time, played her hands competitively, and helped the host with small tasks while the car waited. After bridge group, when she drove the car home, she was in a happy mood, and this rubbed off on our car. Now it takes me to the grocery store with the same cheerful intent. All because of that woman.

I stood there at the DMV counter and looked around. I could see a hallway that led to offices and a big corkboard on the wall. It was a Happy Birthday display of construction paper balloons with employee’s names on them. Here were the two bookends in front of me — birthday and deathday — one on a balloon, the other on a death certificate.

From the ceiling, the automated speaker rang out on a consistent beat — Now serving 131 at window number two. The here and now was ticking along between the bookends.

I scanned the cavernous room with its rows of chairs. There were all kinds of people with heads bent over paperwork or phones, some chatting with others. I didn’t know them any more than I knew the woman whose life was imprinted on the document in my hand.

It’s like that — we go through life with a massive cloud of humanity hovering over our heads — both living and passed. It’s too much. We’re not meant to consider the span of this much life. But when one of them drops from the sky and lands in your hand, you’re jolted out of your fog of not knowing. You are stunned to see a real person drop from those clouds. You had no sense those clouds represented specific lives like your own. Conceiving this is one thing, but holding one of those lives in your hand is another.

It’s odd to have your used car purchase teach you that it’s more than a car, as a house is more than a house, as names and statistics are more than words and numbers. But I’m so glad it did.

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Have a good week, friends.