The Things They Carried, or Taking Up Space

So I'm clearing things out of my parents' house, part the ten thousandth, and as I'm walking out I'm thinking about how the space around you gets filled up by who you are (this is not going to be a very original post). Which reminded me of when my daughter was very small and completely helpless, and this tiny human who weighed less than ten pounds generated all this Stuff--prostheses for the functions she couldn't fulfill on her own. A carriage to move her, a bottle to feed her, toys to amuse her. So there was all this matter to take up the space around her--she was swaddled in that Stuff, which was making me think about all the things that had filled up the house, like a cast in plaster of Paris of my family.

There's an English artist, isn't there, who makes molds of space, uses entire rooms as molds?

I looked around very carefully: mark well. There is little I haven't seen or that I will forget. It's hard, isn't it, that need to pay absolute attention when you know you have to? When there's a fear that you'll miss something? Mixed with the desire for the particular moment to be over, finally, so you can relax your attention and vigilance? I remember this feeling very well from when my parents were dying.