Because of their physiological fragility, among other things, the very old often see their activities reduced to small spaces, sometimes even to their only private space, their room in an institution or their only home. This situation creates isolation, which also leads to social fragility. In addition to this confinement, their advanced age is often accompanied by a high, or even very high, rate of disappearance of people their own age, further increasing their isolation. In this context, all they are often left with are objects whose main function is to remind them of their past. These may be photographs, or sometimes furniture, clothes, crockery or anything else that might be considered relics. After recalling the models that translate the possession of these objects, we will show that their hexis, that is, their way of being, is all the more operative because they are merely the result of specifications that reduce them to a simple mythical form. They are objects of affection, which have lost their materiality, i.e. their complexity, which is what determines their social effectiveness. We will draw on hypotheses developed elsewhere (Tsala, Semiotica, 2017) concerning what we propose to define as a minor-mode semiotics. In this mode, meaning results insofar as the relevant elements that determine it operate by minoration (in minus, but they can also operate in slight surplus), i.e. outside its actual execution.