Today, the topic of discussion is the stuff we leave behind. Last Thursday, I had the dubious honor of taking my Aunt Rose’s last remaining possessions out of her apartment. It took more than a month to go through all her belongings, papers, etc., and to clean out the apartment. Rose had a habit of squirreling away money in strange places, so we didn’t want to simply throw things away without going through them first. It was a little like a treasure hunt. I found one earring which may or may not have a diamond in it. Finder’s keepers. The process left my mother-in-law and Shauna emotionally exhausted, and when it came time to take out that final load, I volunteered to do it alone. I’ve done this before, that is, I’ve helped clean out the dwelling of a deceased person, and it is a strange experience. We all hold on to possessions, because they are mementos, or we think it’s valuable, or we simply forget we have it. Over time those things adds up. You never think about the person who will be charged with disposing of your belongings. That inflatable party doll way in the back of the top shelf of your closet may come back to tarnish your reputation long after you are no longer around to explain that it was just a souvenir from a college prank. Rose was not a hoarder, but she had a lot of stuff in an apartment that was less than 1500 square feet in size. We took somewhere around fifteen garbage bags full of clothes to the charity; there was china, and silverware, and old vacuum cleaners, liniment bottles, from the 1940’s. I found an old bottle of iodine that still had the price sticker on it: 29 cents. The furniture was by far the hardest to dispose of. One of her couches was so big we were going to have to cut it in half to get it in the elevator. I imagine that Rose either inherited it with the apartment, or some poor schmucks schlepped it up eight flights of stairs when she bought it. We were lucky enough to find someone moving into the building who needed a couch, and conveniently, he moved in one floor below Rose’s place. We helped him move this monstrosity down to his place, and it must have weighed a ton. There were three of us, and we were each of us somehow injured in the process of moving it down the stairs. At one point, I was pinned against the wall of the landing. The guy who was taking the couch cut his finger and dripped blood all over his clothes, and our other mover slipped on the stairs and injured his leg. We also knocked out a fluorescent light fixture, scratched the paint in the stairwell, and tore some wallpaper in the hallway. Other than that the move went quite smoothly. Rose had a lot of strange “tshaktshkes” or knick knacks she’d acquired in her almost 95 years. There was some hideous ceramic wear, some Pre-WWII Japanese souvenirs, and the piece de resistance: a 2’x5’ enamel-mosaic-mounted-on-wood depiction of a chariot race, that NOBODY in the family wanted. Mysteriously, on one of our last trips down to the car, when we forgot to lock the apartment, it was taken. Who knew that thievery could be good karma?
This move was a wake up call to all of us who let our possessions build up. I have been through this exercise many times, moving to and from boarding school, college, my parent’s house and my own house in Buffalo, and finally, into two apartments in Toronto. A lot of possessions didn’t make the cut along the way, and at the time it was hard to part with them. I still wish I had kept my bright yellow Rock ‘n Roll Babylon tee shirt, with the tongue-wagging demon on the front. I think Shauna must have made that disappear. It was my mother-in-law who learned the most from this exercise. She has for a long time denied the need to cull her basement collection of “acquisitions”, and she is now determined to spare her children the aggravation of sorting through it all after her demise. In the final analysis, what do all these things mean anyway? Of course, only we can decide what is valuable to us. The trick is to find one or two things that have meaning to you, and get rid of all the rest. Easier said than done. My mother has a big house full of lovely antiques, acquired over fifty years of marriage. Some of them were probably good investments. But I don’t really care that much about their monetary worth, and most of it will likely be disposed of in an estate sale. All I really care about, the things I’d really miss if they were destroyed, are the things that remind me of my life with my family. There is a very noisy steeple clock in our den that dates back to my earliest memories from our first house in Kenmore, N.Y., and a kitchen table that was our first dining room table. A few weeks ago, in a moment of bittersweet lucidity, Mom grumbled about the uselessness of all these possessions. It was as if she suddenly realized that “you can’t take it with you” so what’s the point. I had to remind her that the point is that, for my father, my sister, and I, these things we collected over time adorned a home, which was and still is, a lovely place to live. Alone they are just possessions, but in that house, they were each of them a valuable piece of a memory. You can’t buy or sell memories, and who is to say whether your favorite memento is a valuable Edwardian dining room buffet or a not-so-valuable,circa 1950 alligator ash tray from Florida. Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2010 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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