The Ceramic Camel: A Symbol of What We Keep

What Is the Ceramic Camel?

The ceramic camel is a small, artistically crafted figurine that once belonged to Lois’s late husband, a Coptic Christian Egyptian man. In the epilogue of It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway, Elizabeth Passarella describes the camel as a seated animal about a foot long and eight to ten inches high, glazed a soft caramel color. It sits among a few knickknacks on a hutch in the cluttered apartment that Elizabeth and Michael are buying from Lois. For most of the story, it is just another piece of memorabilia buried under decades of accumulated belongings.

Where Does the Camel Appear?

The camel appears only once in the narrative, during the epilogue. Lois visits the apartment one last time before the closing. After initially considering hurricane lamps, she changes her mind and works her way to the entry-hall hutch. She picks up the ceramic camel and says, “He was from Egypt, you know.” Then she declares, “I want this camel. This is all I’m taking. Just to remember him by.” Elizabeth helps Lois tuck the camel into her two-wheeled grocery cart, and Lois leaves. The camel never reappears in a scene, but its significance echoes through Elizabeth’s closing reflections on what we hold on to after loss.

How Does Its Meaning Change?

Initially, the camel is an anonymous decorative object, indistinguishable from the other clutter—old lamps, prescription bottles, broken medical equipment, and hundreds of tiny religious icons. Lois’s decision to take only the camel transforms it into a concentrated symbol of deliberate memory. She does not claim the hurricane lamps, the furniture, or any of the hoarded household goods. By selecting this single, portable figurine, she redefines the camel from a random trinket to the sole vessel of her husband’s presence.

The change in meaning is not gradual but instantaneous: the moment Lois says “I want this camel,” it becomes a personal relic. Passarella then extends the symbolic weight by comparing Lois’s choice to her own decision to keep only the fabric scraps from her father’s ugly plaid couch. The narrative suggests that both women arrived at the same conclusion: you cannot carry everything, so you choose one small object that contains the essence of the person you loved.

Character and Theme Connections

Lois

Lois is presented as an eccentric, stylish eighty-something widow. She arrives at the apartment in a black jumpsuit, corset, long duster jacket, and a hat with a glittery brooch. Her appearance is “slightly disheveled and fragile and eccentric and luminous.” Her choice of the camel reveals that beneath her theatrical exterior is a woman capable of fierce, unsentimental grief. She does not need the apartment’s walls or furniture to remember her husband. She needs only the camel. This aligns with what she later tells Elizabeth about the apartment: its “haywire state represented someone she didn’t recognize” in her husband. The camel, presumably a memento from an earlier, happier time, lets her reclaim the man she married rather than the hoarder he became.

Elizabeth Passarella

Elizabeth serves as the narrative filter through which we understand the camel’s significance. She confesses, “I’m not sure why Lois kept only the camel in the end, but I can speak from my own experience.” She then parallels Lois’s action with her own hoarding of the velour fabric from her father’s couch, which she keeps in a plastic bag in her closet. Both women, under pressure to clear out a space, discovered they could let go of large objects as long as they preserved a small, tangible fragment. Elizabeth’s struggle with the couch (detailed in Chapter 1) primes the reader to understand the discipline of selective preservation.

Michael Passarella

Michael appears only peripherally in the camel scene, but his presence is felt through the closing table: Lois hands Elizabeth a gift bag after the signing, cementing the friendship that formed around the transaction. Michael and Elizabeth had been “both consumed with her, reading into every move she made for months.” The camel becomes a focal point of that fascination—proof that Lois was not the hoarder Elizabeth feared but a woman with a clear-eyed strategy for moving forward.

Theme: Letting Go and Grief

The memoir’s central theme is the difficulty of releasing objects saturated with memory. In Chapter 1, Elizabeth clings to her father’s couch because she fears losing him entirely. The epilogue shows that Lois has already mastered this lesson. She does not need the apartment’s contents—the ninety-year-old furniture, the stained lamp shades, the mountains of prescription pill bottles—to feel connected to her husband. One small camel is enough. This contrast reinforces Passarella’s thesis that “you hang on to something small. You tuck a camel in a rolling cart, some fabric scraps in a garbage bag, and you promise to find a place for it. You keep what you can carry, and you make it enough.”

Theme: Community and Interdependence

Although the camel is a solitary object, its transfer occurs within a nascent community. Elizabeth and Lois, initially strangers, become allies. Elizabeth helps Lois physically reach the camel on the hutch and packs it into the cart. Later, Elizabeth returns the husband’s passports to Lois, threads woven through the building’s network. The camel becomes a gift not just to Lois but to Elizabeth, who receives permission to let go when she sees Lois do it. As described in the themes of community and interdependence, the act of giving away the camel—and later distributing items through neighbors—creates a living memory.

Theme: Authenticity and Identity

Lois’s decision to keep the camel instead of the hurricane lamps or furniture reflects her authentic self. She does not perform nostalgia. She chooses the object that genuinely evokes her husband’s identity (he was from Egypt, and the camel likely references their shared heritage or his early life) and discards the rest—including the cluttered apartment that represents a person she no longer recognizes. The camel aligns with the memoir’s exploration of authenticity and identity: we are not the sum of our possessions; we are what we choose to carry.

Theme: Faith and Uncertainty

Lois’s husband was Coptic Christian, and the apartment was filled with tiny religious charms—crosses, prayer cards, gold and silver icons of Jesus and Mary. Elizabeth finds them “everywhere,” even after the cleanout. Despite this abundance of faith symbolism, Lois chooses a secular camel, not a religious icon. This might suggest that her grief is more personal than institutional—or that the camel, as a foreign artifact, represents the couple’s shared story rather than doctrine. The epilogue connects to the book’s broader meditation on faith and uncertainty: Lois cannot be certain her husband is with her, but she can be certain the camel was his.

Theme: Change and Adaptation

The camel scene is the climax of the apartment saga, which represents Elizabeth and Michael’s fight to stay in their beloved building. For Lois, the apartment was part of a life that had changed radically—her husband had retired, his health declined, and hoarding took over. By taking only the camel, Lois adapts to her new life as a widow without being burdened by the past. The epilogue concludes with Elizabeth declaring she will never move again, a sentiment that echoes Lois’s finality. Both women learn that change and adaptation do not require demolishing memory; they require curating it.

Four Study Questions with Answers

1. Why does Lois choose the ceramic camel over the hurricane lamps she initially wanted?

Lois first expresses interest in the hurricane lamps, but when she sees them in person, she waves her hand and says, “I changed my mind.” Later, she picks up the camel without hesitation. The change suggests that the lamps held only aesthetic or practical value, while the camel carried emotional significance tied to her husband’s Egyptian heritage. The act of physically confronting the objects clarified what truly mattered.

2. How does the ceramic camel mirror Elizabeth’s decision about her father’s couch?

Elizabeth preserves the velour fabric from the couch in a plastic bag, just as Lois preserves the camel. Both women reduce a large, unwieldy object (a nine-foot couch, a hoarded apartment) to a single, portable token. The narrator explicitly draws the parallel in the epilogue: “You hang on to something small. You tuck a camel in a rolling cart, some fabric scraps in a garbage bag.” The token becomes a sufficient container for memory.

3. What does the camel reveal about Lois’s relationship with her husband’s hoarding?

Before selecting the camel, Lois tells Elizabeth that the apartment was not cluttered until her husband stopped practicing medicine and began ordering items online at night. She says, “That’s how it got this way,” implying the hoarding did not define their marriage. By taking only the camel, Lois rejects the later, disordered phase of his life and reclaims an earlier, more recognizable image of him—one symbolized by an object from Egypt, likely from their shared past.

4. Why might the camel be a more fitting symbol than the many religious charms found in the apartment?

Religious charms—crosses, crucifixes, icons of Jesus and Mary—were abundant, suggesting the husband’s Coptic Christian background. Yet Lois does not take any of them. The camel, being a secular object with cultural and possibly personal significance, may represent her husband’s identity beyond religion: his birthplace, their travels, or a private joke. It is a tangible connection to him, not to the faith he nominally practiced. The narrator notes that the husband was “not particularly devout,” making the camel a more authentic memento of the person rather than the creed.

Conclusion

The ceramic camel in It Was an Ugly Couch Anyway serves as a master class in symbolic economy. It appears only once, yet it crystallizes the memoir’s deepest arguments about grief, memory, and the wisdom of minimalism. Lois’s choice to carry a single, portable figurine—and Elizabeth’s decision to later distribute the apartment’s contents like dandelion seeds—teaches that we do not need to drag the past with us. We need only a small, well-chosen piece.