My mother-in-law and father-in-law passed away last year within 3 weeks of each other. We inherited their house, along with everything in it. Cleaning out 80+ years’ worth of someone else’s things is daunting, especially when the people who lived there are people you love. Everywhere you look, you see something they loved enough to keep, and you want to keep it too, because it meant something to them.
We started with the obvious things like donating their clothes to charity, sorting through their medicine cabinet, tossing old magazines. I almost said “easy” instead of “obvious,” but nothing about this process is easy. At first, it felt wrong, like an invasion of their privacy. You don’t really know someone until you go through their things. Everyone has things they put on display for everyone to see, but this sorting process requires you to also go through things that were meant to be private. The love letters. The junk drawer. Yes, even the underwear drawer.
All their things. You see, my in-laws were collectors. If they had one of something, they had ten of them, at least. It has been over a year, and we are still not finished sorting through the things. The process doesn’t get easier, but I learned something pretty quickly that has helped me with letting go: Just because something meant a lot to my in-laws, doesn’t mean I need to keep it.
I first realized this when I was sorting through the shelves of lanterns my mother-in-law had collected over the years. There must have been 50 or so. I had never seen her use any of them, and didn’t know if she had a favorite, because they were all kept on display. I struggled to choose which ones to let go, petrified into inaction over giving away something she might have really loved. It was as if I heard her voice in my head, telling me it truly wouldn’t matter if I kept any of them if I didn’t love them too. It would be better to give them to someone who would truly enjoy them, than to put them on another shelf somewhere just to gather dust. From that day on, letting go of the things became a little easier. I realized letting go of the “things” doesn’t mean I am letting go of the memories we shared together.
Each person has a lifetime of moments they get to live. The memories they collect in each of those moments are theirs, and theirs alone. They don’t live their parent’s life, their grandparent’s life, or their child’s life; they live their own life. Most of a person’s memories are lost when they die, no matter how much “stuff” they collect to represent those memories. It is only the few shared memories in a person’s life that can be passed on. The truth is, we each have to live our own lives. The things I love are not the things my children love, and that’s ok. One day they will have to go through my things. I hope they are able to hold onto the memories and let go of the things.