Weighing the Ice Cream

This is the sixth part of an eight-part series.

One of the central difficulties of the task was how to decide who gets what.

When my father and his sister were kids, they were so anxious that neither should get more than the other that they used to weigh their helpings of ice cream. My brother and I congratulated ourselves that we had never had this problem.

But the division of property is notorious for bringing out one’s inner weigher of ice cream. And notorious for causing family rifts.

Our original plan was to follow a technique that our father had once described. First, every object is assigned a dollar value. Then, we take turns picking the objects we want. Once it’s been decided who gets what, the values are added up, and any imbalance in the totals is made up with cash from the sale of the house. It sounded good. It sounded fair.

But putting a value on every object turned out to be difficult. As one example of the problem, consider the books. These days, most books have a resale value close to zero. Yet to buy books anew to replace my father’s library would be expensive. So which number to use, the resale value or the replacement value? We disagreed. Politely but uneasily; we’re not used to disagreeing.

Or consider the paintings. Among the more unusual objects at home were a set of watercolors painted by my great-great-grandfather — the father of my mother’s mother’s mother, referred to by us as G.P. — in the second half of the 19th century. He was a soldier, and when he was 23 he was sent to fight in what is now Iran. (The Anglo-Persian war of 1856-57 was one of the more obscure military episodes of Queen Victoria’s reign.) While he was there, he painted. Here’s the bazaar and customs house of the (then) small port town of Bushehr (now a big city, and the site of the Iranian nuclear reactor), the stone walls of the town pinkish in the light, a wooden sailing ship anchored in the background. Here’s the Shiraz gate of the city, with soldiers lounging in front of fancy crenelated walls. Here’s where the British forces bivouacked before a battle in February 1857, the cannons they had dragged there in the foreground, mountains rising up behind. And here’s the Karun River, the banks lined with date palms, the tranquil water reflecting the colors of the sky.

Later, G.P. traveled in British India, painting as he went. Here’s a railway line running through a dramatic mountain pass. Here’s a view across a river to the Ajanta caves — a series of ancient Buddhist monuments carved into a cliff. Here’s a deserted road, shaded with trees, at Murree, a hill station in what is now Pakistan and the erstwhile summer capital of the British government of the Punjab.

I love these fragments of history — of my family, of the world — that have drifted across more than 150 years to the walls of our house. I sometimes dream of going to the places in the paintings to see what they look like now (though perhaps Bushehr would not be the smartest choice); and I often wonder about the man who painted them, who he was, what he was like. No matter that he was not a world-class painter: to me, his pictures are beyond price.

As I pondered all this, I realized two things. First, that our original plan was — frankly — a weighing of ice cream. Even if we could agree on how to do it, totting up the value of every item would be absurd. It’s not as if we had a house full of Rembrandts — in which case, attention to dollars and fairness would be more merited.

Second, I realized that how much I valued a given object had little to do with its worth in dollars however calculated, and lots to do with sentiment, memory and grief. Indeed, the whole process was putting two fundamental aspects of my character at war: on one hand, a strong tendency to minimalism, on the other, a deep sentimentality.

Minimalism: Up to this point, the only furniture I owned were three bookcases, two chairs, two long mirrors and a stereo.

Sentimentality: Why else would I want to keep our old sofa? It’s battered and stained — it needs new upholstery and new springs — and it’s useless as a formal sofa as it’s too deep for people to sit on with any dignity. Far better to throw it out. But I found myself unable to. It was one of the first pieces of furniture my parents bought together. Besides, it’s superbly comfortable for lying on with a book, or for sleeping on. And it reminds me of so much. The time a blizzard swept in when a friend had come to dinner and she ended up staying for a week, and in the afternoons we lay on opposite ends of it, reading novels before going out for a tramp in the snow and, in the evenings, feasting on meals cooked by my father. The time my father, up all night cooking something fancy for Christmas, fell asleep on the sofa in the small hours, his snores reverberating through the house. And, and, and.

So we jettisoned the scales. Instead of niggling around with dollars and cents and trying to put numbers on priceless things, each of us just said what we liked and would like to keep. Happily, it turned out that we don’t have the same taste, and there were few objects we both wanted. All the same, we both hated doing it. Up to this point, we had shared these things; as they became “mine” or “yours,” it felt as though the fabric of our home, of our lives together, of our past, was being ripped apart.

Olivia Judson is an evolutionary biologist and writer based at Imperial College London. The author of “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation” and a former online columnist for The New York Times, she is working on her next book.