I have spent every free moment I’ve had in the past week reading old letters and sorting through jewelry. You can call it downsizing, or decluttering, or Swedish Death Cleaning — or anything you want to call it — I am sorting through my possessions and deciding what to do with them.
There are lots of reasons for doing this, of course, but the main one is that I do not want to do to my daughter what my parents did to me: leave their children with a house full of possessions to deal with.
I am not sure whether my parents intended to do that, but it played out that way.
We never sat down as a family and discussed my father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. My mother hid that my father was failing as long as she possibly could. Then, when it could no longer be hidden, the last gift my father gave us was to arrange an auction of the last of his vast collection of antique toys and trains.
My sister Liz took the news of the auction especially hard. She called me, clearly weepy, and I said the only thing I could think of to say: “It’s the last thing he can to do help, Mom, Liz. She wouldn’t know how to arrange this. It’s his last hurrrah. I’m thinking of it as a gift.”
And it was. My father went to the auction: the last one he ever attended.
That cleared a lot of things from my parents’ house, but after my father died, my mother continued to live there. Then she had a serious car accident and we moved her into assisted living. We kids were in charge of clearing the house and getting it ready to sell.
It took a long time. There were many rounds of clearing and cleaning. We sold some things, we gave some things away, and we kept some things. In the end, we had two guys and a truck come to the house and voila! The house was empty and ready to sell.
My mother coped with it far better than I thought she would. She didn’t ask about specifics: we all knew the things that she truly loved and made sure they went with her to her apartment. But a lot of the rest of it ended up in my house and in my siblings’ houses. And because I lived the closest and had a big house, a lot of things simply ended up here, whether I really wanted them or not.
I did not really worry about it until one day, when Lucy said, “You’re not going to do to me what Ring and Pop did to you, are you?”
“What is that?”
“Leave me to get rid of everything after you die?”
“Of course not.”
But I took that to heart.
My parents acted as if they were immortal, and that had consequences. Not dire ones, but ones that shifted a lot of decisions onto their children. As I was wading through my parents’ possessions, I spent far too much time feeling guilty about disposing of things that my parents should have taken care of years before. I thought, “Why did they not take five minutes to label these pictures? I would love to know who these people are.”
I promised Lucy that I would not do that to her, so I am starting now. I’m not dying (as far as I know), but I will probably be moving, and one of the mixed blessings of owning a big, old house is that you can stash a lot of stuff in them.
I am regretting stashing so much, because I am now sorting through the stash. I have found more lost earrings than I ever knew I was missing. I also discovered two expanding files full of letters.
Reading through these letters has flooded my brain with memories: some good, some bad, but all of them poignant. Letters from friends in the ’80s always apologize for writing, not phoning, because of the tremendous cost of long-distance phone calls. There is a postcard from the Bishop of Western Massachusetts, who I worked for in the summer of ’78, teaching Vacation Bible School. Reading that made me laugh, especially as he referred to the bishops convened at Canterbury as ‘the purple people eaters’ and praised English railways and complained about the lack of ice cubes. (And then he said not to ask why.) One set of letters from a friend who died last year describing the joy of her new puppy and his interactions with her two little boys made me miss her more than ever.
A lot of history here, but not for long. After I read them, I will do something with them. A lot of them will be used to start my brush fires as I clean up the yeard; but a few will be kept.
But not many, because I am not leaving them for Lucy to deal with, no matter what.
