Stuff.
Every family needs a "keeper" and a "thrower." I am the family "thrower," but I am bad at it.
My wife and I are "empty-nesters." We have a house that is theoretically far too big. In fact, it is not big enough. We have stuff and aren't ready to give it up yet.
I got a priceless lesson when I helped my 95-year-old friend die with a clear conscience. "I don't want to leave a mess for you to clean up," he said. He lived in a 500 square foot unit in an assisted-living facility. "No problem," I told him. I said there wasn't much to deal with and I could easily find a good home for everything.
I brought his clothes to St.Vincent dePaul and to Goodwill. He had some stuff he was sure was valuable. The motorized power chair that he bought 20 years ago works fine and it cost him $6,000 when new. He said I should be sure to sell it back to the place he bought it, and to get a good price.
The vast majority of the stuff my friend owned consisted of things of value to him, but had no practical value to anyone else, and certainly no monetary value. He had artistic wood carvings he picked up in gift shops on vacations over the years. He had old glitchy kitchen appliances, with broken lids and sticky buttons. There is no real market for 20-year-old electronic equipment. He had keepsakes. His veteran discharge paperwork was useful for documenting his veteran status, but most of his photos were images of pets he loved 40 years ago.
My job was to empty out his apartment so that the assisted-living place would not keep charging him $250/day. I am trying to sell the piano. I brought most of the rest of his stuff to the dump. I kept some things. That was the two-part lesson for me. One is that most of what we accumulate is junk to anyone else. I am trying to get that through my head. The second is that, even knowing that, we continue to accumulate stuff. I took some of his keepsakes. Some of his old photos. A mirror he had. A hundred copies of the sheet music he made for a Christmas song he wrote but could not get published. "Be sure to keep the rights to the song, Peter. Store that copyright notice someplace safe." So now I have added his accumulated stuff to my accumulated stuff.
In the burst of clarity from this experience, I bundled up the hundred or so vinyl record albums that I accumulated during my college years. It was a trial run. I gave them to a friend who said he would try to sell them on line. He said that if they wouldn't sell he would toss them. I looked fondly at the cover of the Beatles' White Album and the one from the first Chicago album, from back when they called themselves Chicago Transit Authority. "What goes up, must go down, spinning wheel. . . ." The song went through my head. I know that if and when I wanted to listen to the song I would click on a streaming version of it. I would never fuss with acquiring a turntable and setting up speakers. Worse, the emotion I felt looking at the album covers was more sadness than joy. The girlfriend I listened to records with in my dorm room died from colon cancer a few years ago.
I have lots of melon-themed art. No one wants that but me. I have life-size portraits of myself and my wife. More stuff. They are too big to hang anywhere but in a house this size, and nobody in their right mind wants huge paintings of me in a business suit in any house. More future junk.
15 comments:
For this topic of hoarding and shedding, everyone should read E. B. White's essay "Goodbye to Forty-eighth Street" where he writes: "For some weeks now I have been engaged in dispersing the contents of this apartment, trying to persuade hundreds of inanimate objects to scatter and leave me alone. It is not a simple matter. I am impressed by the reluctance of one’s worldly goods to go out again into the world." It's a charming and hilarious masterpiece.
You need to start unburdening yourself today, while you still can. Don't leave it for someone else to deal with, what a headache and heartache.
Material possessions, except for necessities and "a few" treasures, are not important. But definitely keep the photos.
It can be psychological, such as hoarding. It can be another addiction. Do some research.
Time to donate, gift, sell (FB marketplace or E-bay, for example), put on consignment or trash. You can do it and you will be glad that you did, I guarantee.
Before our first big move leaving Alaska I made 40 trips to the dump in our Ford explorer and 40 trips to good will. Then we filled a 20 foot container to ship down to Washington. We later realized we didn’t need 4/5 of what we brought down. I have made 4 separate purges of my clothes since then, but noticed just the other day, the closet is refilling and needs another emptying. How many old but comfortable sweaters do I need? 2 not 5? But I love that comfortable perfectly nice piece of clothing that I never wear.
A good reminder that sooner or later, we’ll all be giving up everything. When we go, none of our stuff goes with us, with the possible exception of the good or harm we’ve done to others.
“And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.”
When my brother died a couple of years ago, I was tasked with cleaning out his studio apartment in an assisted living facility. He had moved in to the apartment after years of homelessness , and immediately began gathering stuff, like over 1100 VHS cassette tape movies, enough cooking pits, pans and utensils to stock a fairsized coffee shop and the list goes on. Your post today reminds me I need to start now, today, placing all the "stuff" I've accumulated, because when I go, I definitely don't want to trouble someone I didn't know to clean up behind me.
Well done, Peter.
One man's junk is another man's treasure.
Great topic. Huge issue.
We are all hoarders to some degree. I think it's instinctive, and exacerbated by our materialistic, consumerist society.
But it's also psychological and physiological in that we experience the passing of time. Our ability to remember events attaches meaning to the past, and then we associate that meaning to objects acquired at that time. In fact, the word "memorabilia" is from the latin meaning "worthy to be remembered".
The past, history, has value. I don't think humans would have advanced without the ability to remember, and learn.
Have a big yard sale or give a bunch of stuff to a church to sell at a rummage sale.
I am the family “keeper,” and I am very good at it! My wife is great at getting rid of things, but she only ever gets to get rid of her own stuff.
I still have around 100 LPs that I never play. I bought a turntable a few years ago so that I could digitize them, but I haven’t gotten around to it. So now I have the LPs and the turntable.
I know what I should do, but c’est la vie… 😀
Not everyone. Some people are minimalists by choice. Others are too poor to accumulate a bunch of junk. Nomads, refugees and itinerant, under-housed and homeless people typically don't have this issue.
Not talking about the mentally ill people who collect and hoard scraps and trash.
Wonderful piece.
Us, too.
I've never seen a u haul pulled by a hearse.
Thanks for these columns. I am in the process of simplifying. Once I realized that this thing meant something to my long deceased father but not to me, it got easier. Consolidating and cleaning up financial accounts is another big step but will making it much easier for my executor.
From my 2020 Christmas letter:
My sister-in-law died recently. Not from Covid, but in this time of Covid, I’ve discovered a way to manage my grief, and I’ll share it:
What you do is, you spend 3 days a week driving 150 miles, round-trip, for 5 months, to claw through the dust-covered detritus of a shopaholic hoarder with 3 hairy dogs crammed into an impassably small house whose only clean space was inside the oven…because it had never been used.
Grief is replaced with simmering resentment that such mind-numbing tasks were implicitly assigned to you by the dearly departed because (quite rationally) they didn’t want to do it themselves.
In this way, grief absolutely evaporates. You’re welcome.
Peter, we all should consider how much money we spend to store that stuff. A good portion of your rent/mortgage is to store things that you don't want to part with.
Having a minimalist attitude saves money on housing.
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