Cleaning out the Old, Day 12 - Formation

High school friends and I visiting during college in my parent's house. The chair we are all resting on, Grandmother's painting on the wall and the piano all ended up with me.

In my parent’s home, I was conceived. 
After birth, I was cared for, loved beyond measure. That, I never doubted.

Who I became, what I valued, my ethical code, the way “life worked” – all of these things I learned at my mother’s knee. Directly, yes, sometimes. Indirectly, perhaps even more. 

My family kept things. We reused many things. My mother never had a scrap of fabric or yarn that she didn’t keep for a craft project, or the quilt she was going to make someday. We kept bread twist ties and rubber bands. Paper grocery bags. Frugality reigned in our home; it needed to. 

From birth to age 22, when I left that home for good, I learned to save all the things. Letters, school projects, embroidery yarn, whatever. Mementos from childhood. Vinyl record albums, that traveled back and forth to college with me.
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As a young person on my own, I acquired what I needed to live in a small apartment. It wasn’t much – my first sleeper sofa I came to hate.  A coffee table that now lives in Anne’s house. Lots of hand me down furniture made up the rest.

At 25, I got married. It was an idyllic time, looking back on it all. It crashed to an end soon afterward, when I was 27. From then on, I had to learn to clean out other people’s things. 

First was my mother’s house, and I was so young and emotionally devasted that I let my grandmother take the lead and keep far more than she should have. We got rid of some things that my father wasn’t going to use. I furnished my kitchen from her gourmet baking tools and my house with Aunt Grace’s antiques.

I learned then to only take things I thought I would use. No knickknacks. No art other than my father’s mothers’ paintings. My own boxes from my closet. Pared down, but packed into the little house Ed and I bought a year later. I didn’t know how much my father had stuffed into the attic over the years until he sold that house upon remarriage, when we had to do it again. 

When my grandmother died of a broken heart 7 years after my mother, I helped my grandfather pare down. We started by removing the plastic covers from the living room furniture that had driven us both nuts for years. There may have been a high five involved when we were finished. 

From the sublime to the ridiculously packed cupboards and closets, we pared down a lot. My grandfather wanted to keep most of the things on display in the house, so I knew I’d face those again someday. 

My grandfather survived another 15 years without her and, hid away a lot of things we thought we’d gotten rid of after my dad and I left. 

In the middle of that was my divorce.
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At 45 years old, just before my grandfather died, I’d finally moved into my own house as a single adult, with the things I wanted to take there. And no more. I knew what I had to face, one more time.

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Lessons learned in a life of death cleaning for others:

• Only keep things you will use. Throw out the scraps. 
• If you’re still acquiring at my age, you’ve got a problem.
• If you haven’t worn it for a year, get rid of it by swapping it, selling it, donating it.
• Move often. For a while it was once every five years. It helped me pare down every time.
• Have a few items you value and are attached to. Let the rest go.
• Loss sucks. Grief doesn't stop when you want it to. Try to keep your wits about you when death cleaning for someone else.
• All of this is easier said than done.

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