‘This Is Us’ and the Pearson family’s sentimental objects

This Is Us brings viewers into the beautiful, heart-wrenching, and (let’s be honest) tear-jerking life of the Pearson family. As their story unfolds throughout the show, it’s not only the people and the places that connect the Pearson family to one another, it’s also their things: the items, keepsakes, and objects that serve as reminders of love and family across time and place. The Pearson’s stuff, like everyone’s stuff, is more than just stuff; it reminds us of the people and places that are most important.

Behind every keepsake is a story. A first home where the possibility of an independent life first blooms. An old book of poems that expresses the thoughts, heartache, and hope of a young father. A necklace that carries memories of love and love lost. The artifacts that make up our lives are more than just useful objects. Over a lifetime they fill up with memories and meaning, carrying in them the stories that make up our lives.

The Pearsons, like most families, have things that carry a lifetime of meaning; worth protecting, cherishing, and passing down generation to generation. In This Is Us (Tuesdays at 9/8c on NBC), the audience gets glimpses during different timelines into familial bonds, heartache, and complex relationships through the Pearson family’s stuff.

The life and love of Jack and Rebecca Pearson is symbolized through jewelry — notably, Rebecca’s lunar pendant. Throughout the first season, the pendant reveals larger stories of love, heartbreak, commitment, and honor: Viewers saw Jack give Rebecca the pendant in Season 1, Episode 2 (“The Big Three”) as Jack promises to be a better husband and father in sobriety. But it isn’t until Season 1, Episode 17 (“What Now?”) that the full story of the necklace comes into focus.

The moon on pendant contains a symbolic memory, Rebecca singing “Moonshadow” at Ray’s open mic night where Jack happened to be, plotting to rob the bar. After seeing Rebecca sing (who wouldn’t be moved by Mandy Moore singing a Cat Stevens song?), neither of their lives were ever the same. The time, the place, the song, and the new love of Jack and Rebecca are all stored in a small necklace that Rebecca continues to wear even after Jack’s death.

In Season 2, Episode 8 (“Number One”) the story of Jack’s own necklace becomes a piece of the bigger Pearson story, bringing a father and son’s trials together. When teenage Kevin gets injured in a football game, it’s Jack who delivers the news, encouraging Kevin that he will eventually find his purpose. Jack reveals that the necklace he wears every day is from his time fighting in Vietnam, and is the Buddhist sign for purpose. He tells Kevin that he found his purpose the first time he held him, his “Number One.”

As Kevin grows up, struggling with his own insignificance and spiraling through a series of bad choices, he still wears Jack’s necklace. Until the night that he loses it, in a series of missteps leading to his (near) rock bottom. Kevin’s devastation is palpable — losing his last memento of his late father because of his choices pushes him over the edge, waking him from his own malaise and self-destruction. The grief of loss is present in that scene. It’s as if Jack died again when the necklace was lost. Memory, legacy, and the bond between a father and son were carried through this little necklace.

Places — homes, restaurants, coffee shops, grandparents’ houses — are literally memory boxes. The spaces where life is lived become inseparable from the experiences that happen in them. And no place contains and preserves memories quite like a home.

From Jack and Rebecca reciting their vows in their first apartment to the Pearson home that (spoiler alert if you haven’t seen Season 2 yet) burned down on the night of Jack’s death, the home is a catalyst of Pearson memories; haunted by the love and hardship of their life together. The home in which they brought the Big Three home to, raised their family, fought, reconciled, laughed, cried, and played in, was gone in a split second. The fire is heart wrenching not just because of the items within it — the carpet, ceiling fans, pillows, and beds — but because of the memories. The viewer’s empathy towards this fire alludes to something universally understood: Stuff is much more than just stuff, it contains our memories.

The story of the Pearson family is a powerful, multi-generational family story told, often, through items. It’s through these physical things that their story moves forward, where characters remember what’s truly important and, as necessary, reorient their life. Beth’s “memory box” of her father (season one, episode 14) isn’t full of things that are inherently more valuable than everything else she owns, but the objects in there are possessed with memories, sometimes through simply their proximity with a memory, of a life lived.

And again in the season two premiere, it’s the collection of William’s poems, written for Randall, that inspires Randall and Beth to become parents once again through foster parenting. It proves once again that in This Is Us — and in real life — that time plus relationships plus stuff equals life.