We’re on the way to visit one of my aunts while we continue to clear out the remaining storage locker that has contained my mother’s belongings since she was admitted to long-term care with dementia ages ago and still is today.
The cleaning out of these storage units has taken an embarrassingly long time to get to, what with the monthly cost of small town storage being very reasonable and with of course having ups and downs and success and setbacks of my own to contend with.
As Allen Saunders said (though it’s usually misattributed to John Lennon), life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.
The task of actually getting into the storage lockers and contending with the mountain of her belongings has been unsavoury enough for it to have been put off again and again. In part because it nearly is a literal mountain in there, with furniture and shelving packed wall to wall in the storage unit and stacked very nearly to its ten-foot ceiling height. That’s all behind a daunting amount of banker’s boxes and large rubber containers to open and sort through. My mother was a notorious pack rat, and for decades would keep the likes of random notes mixed in with newspaper clippings, old receipts, various mail, empty pads of paper, old photos and letters between previous generations of family, and old banking information in random piles, along with knickknacks, candles of every kind, CDs, VHS tapes, Betamax(!) tapes, outdated computer and video equipment, and enough books to rival the town library (which unfortunately is under strict guidelines to not accept any donations, though in this case it saves them from building a whole new wing).
My mother was never a hoarder in the mentally unbalanced sense of precarious piles and stacks of collected things badly altering her life or health. But it was far from a reasonable amount of… just… stuff.
But it was long overdue and we made ourselves carve out the time this summer, so we rolled up our sleeves and dove in.
Finally getting to all of this cleaning out work a month back was causing some unpleasant flashbacks to our home reno a few years ago, when we had to empty our entire house for its gutting and then rebuilding. While nowhere nearly as bad as my mother for saving every little thing, J and I do have a terrible habit of letting things gather, mixed with a shared procrastination for getting to such stuff to square it away for good. All that resulted in weeks upon exhausting weeks of going through our own old paperwork and boxes and generally dealing with nearly twenty years of collected stuff we had never properly, fully whittled down.
It was pretty eye-opening, and I didn’t like what it revealed about myself.
In the case of clearing for our reno, I literally used our sifting and sorting and junking and repacking situation as a life lesson for our now teen/then 11-year-old: For the love of god, don’t do this to yourself. Keep your belongings way fewer and way more organized so you never have to do this yourself some day.
We still, now back in the house for a few years, have work to do on that front.
And now we’re having to deal with that all over again on behalf of my mother.
This all is reminding me about two related things:
- A comedian whose name I don’t recall was on an interview podcast I heard years back and said that she had recently had to do all of this entire house cleaning-out of her dad’s place after he had just passed away. She mentioned what a tedious pain it was to go through and concluded that at the end of one’s life, the best anyone could do for their offspring was to have everything pared down to one banker’s box that could be picked up and walked away with. At the time I thought that was overstated, but our experience emptying our house of all contents — and now effectively having to contend with my mother’s house contents — has made me realize the real wisdom of that comedian’s conclusion. I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to get it down to just a box, but it’s a goal to shoot for.
- The Swedish Death Cleaning book I recommended a few years ago loop. Not only a quick and entertaining read, but it speaks to exactly this kind of situation. The thrust of it is that as they approach their twilight years, parents should actively try to pass down, give away, or throw out as much as they possibly can of their belongings, so as to deal with it before one’s own death, so that no surviving member of the family has to deal with it instead.
I implore you to read that book and try to get an objective grasp of just how much you have in your house and how very little of it, if any at all, will actually have any chance of being meaningful enough to your kids (or other survivors) that they’ll want to keep it. And that’s your most precious items, wholly ignoring the decades of collected bits and bobs and gadgets and notes and books and artwork and just general stuff that no one — no one — in your family will ever be interested in keeping.
We of course want to give our kids as much as we can to prepare them for life, but having them need to take time and effort and financial cost to deal with our bad habit of collecting and never clearing out isn’t a gift, it’s a penalty.
Death cleaning is truly the gift that keeps on giving.