My family and I are trying to gear up for small estate sale in early March to hopefully recoup a little money back into my dad’s estate.
Breaking even would be a nice scenario.
There is so much involved when someone passes away. I guess it’s only natural since we spend our entire lives acquiring stuff and building and maintaining a place to keep that stuff.
It’s like when you decide to move thinking you don’t have that much stuff. It doesn’t seem like much until you start trying to move it around.
In the late 2000s, my parents rented a huge dumpster and they threw away a large percentage of the stuff they’d accrued over their lifetimes and together.
After my mother passed away in October of 2021, she had a collection of about 40 pairs of reading glasses, so the mentality that allowed her to throw away large amounts into that dumpster, hadn’t remained. She just decided to be more selective about which stuff got to stick around.
My parents liked bulk stores like Costco. Why two senior citizens needed enough vitamins, ziplock bags, Windex, and Palmolive to support a small country is beyond me. It has been kind of nice to loot their stash the last few months, but I get no satisfaction from it.
On several occasions, I’ve come home with a haul and just cried because I’d rather them be here to have their stuff than for me to get any of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish them back…I wish they didn’t have to leave just yet.
Now as that stash wanes and we are preparing to sell what we aren’t keeping ourselves, I am trying to steel my heart. The place that was their home for 27 years won’t be there.
There won’t be any reason to pass that way anymore.
No more family gatherings.
No more homecooked meals.
No more squeaking as we shift in Dad’s beloved Windsor chairs.
No more too full coffee cups and calling Mom the “Full Lady”.
No more inside family jokes.
No more phone calls.
No more needing computer help.
Just a broken heart still trying to figure out what to do now.
We started the dismantling…unpacking dressers and closets of all their contents so clean and carefully put away. I feel like I’m taking apart my own roots, pulling them naked and raw from the Earth because the tree has fallen.
On this particular wrinkle in time is a scar. It’s not the only one by far, but it’s the one I’m most acquainted with. It’s a scar of these two people who were, and so much in me is the result of their blessing, however undeserved and at times, underappreciated.
As we disassemble each piece of what they left behind and my heart bleeds afresh, I am so proud of who they were and I will miss them as long as my life endures.
Dismantling a Life...
So many of the things we have gone through have sparked memories, some happy and some sad, but all precious as they tell the story of two people I have known well over half my life. What a void they have left with their passing. We never know when we have heard those we love speak for the last time until it is too late.
I alternate between delight and guilt, often feeling them together, as I haul load after load of things I need or want home from mom and dad's place. They can't use them now and it's better than things going to the hands of strangers, but it still feels wrong, like pillaging sacred memories.
I keep returning to the thought of finding a way to mitigate these feelings for my sons when I pass, but I know that's not possible. Where there is love there is always pain with loss but if there was just some way to make it less. People tell you, they try to warn you, but you can never know until you feel it. I look in their eyes and feel such a dread for that day for them. I keep my silence.