Generations of stuff

A unexpected life lesson learned from emptying my parents' house

Hello, friends!

Saying “thank you” doesn’t come close to conveying the gratitude I feel for each of you joining me in Sandwich Season.

Last week I shared a story of reconciliation, “Connecting with Mom at the end of life.” This week I’m introducing another Sandwich Season theme: Stuff.

I’ve seen a lot of stories and even books lately with titles featuring some variation on the theme of “Your Kids Don’t Want Your Stuff.”

Generation X (my people) and even more so the Millennials and Generation Z are living differently from the Silent Generation and Baby Boomers, who apparently thought Hummel figurines and blue Danish plates would be lucrative investments. Spoiler alert: They weren’t.

Still. After spending much of 2023 figuring out what to do with my parents’ (and grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ …) stuff, I feel gratitude for what I have learned from it all.

Below is a short essay I wrote about my “stuff” experience for the August Camphor Press newsletter. And—bonus!—a stuff-related book recommendation.

All my best to you and yours,

Sarah

A journey through the generations

This summer, I watched all of you on social media, you vacationers, you world travelers, you people posting videos of kids bathing with humanely housed elephants and showing off your flashy new dance steps. I drooled over your pictures of strawberry-topped shaved ice from a Tokyo kissaten, and oohed and aahed over your images of the sun sinking gloriously behind mountains and over lakes. I clicked on heart and thumbs-up emojis, over and over and over.

But I also wondered where to find a green-faced emoji with a big smile—“happy-for-you-but-envious”—because that would be more truthful.

While everyone on my feeds was sucking the marrow out of summer, I was on a tether that kept me pinned within a several-kilometer radius of my western Minnesota home. I ping-ponged between my house, the retirement home apartment where my parents moved in March, and the house where they had spent the previous thirty-two years.

Mom was once an interior designer, and Dad is a retired college English professor and writer. During the three decades they dwelt and entertained in that house, they merrily filled it with furnishings, art, books, clothing, table settings, serving-ware and hobbies.

Within the same period, their parents, siblings and most of their aunts and uncles died—some leaving no descendants. Guess where many of our extended family’s treasures, documents and photos ended up.

That’s right. My parents’ house, which I have been emptying and getting ready for sale.

Tins, Spode china and 1960s shoes

Once we moved Mom and Dad and their very favorite things into their one-bedroom apartment, I embarked on what felt like a personal archaeological dig. I gathered unopened and unfiled mail from the past couple of years off counters and out of magazine racks, and worked my way downward through mail and notes and menu plans from the 2010s, the 2000s and the 1990s, and into photos, family records, journals, letters and books from the 1980s, 1970s, 1960s, 1950s, 1940s, all the way back into the 1800s.

I burrowed through closet after closet, mined drawer after drawer and unpacked box after box, finding family treasures of all varieties, multiple sets of china and silver, quilts made by my great-great-grandmother, the “It’s a boy!” cigar tin that in 1974 contained the cigars Dad passed out when my brother was born, my grandfather’s baby shoes, the baby clothes my grandmother had crocheted and knitted for me, Dad’s high school band medals, my parents’ love letters, an exquisite pink sari, hundreds of free greeting cards sent by charities, and a dusty bottle of Crème de Menthe, so old that its contents had turned a sapphire blue.

Mom's notes, Franciscan serving dishes, tea cups from past generations

We filled a Dumpster with things that could not be saved or no one would want, delivered trailer-loads of finery and furniture and housewares and art to consignment and antique shops, donation and recycling centers, and the landfill.

My own house is now awash with the flotsam of my parents’ home, paintings awaiting hanging, teacups owned by multiple generations of women, my granddad’s wood sculptures from Africa, and bins containing family heirlooms, slides and papers I have yet to find a place for or the heart to part with.

As I near the end of this monumental task, I can see that like you travelers catching flights and trains and taking to the wide-open road, I too have been on a journey. Mine took me back in time through generations of my family of origin. I have touched nearly everything my parents—and a portion of what my grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents—owned, and I have had to decide what to do with every single thing.

At one point, surrounded by thousands of books and a flurry of papers, I sat down with the journal my mom kept in 1963. She and two friends boarded a ship and sailed from Canada to Europe to explore and dance and experience the summer of their lives. Of course at the time there was nowhere for them to instantly post their musings, but now, sixty years later, I began to read my mom’s younger self’s thoughts, her awe at walking in places she had only read about or seen on the big screen, and the silliness of being twenty-one and beautiful and far from home. In her writings, I witnessed observations, syntax and doodles—a mind, actually—that reminded me of my own.

Mom, center, fresh back from Europe, with her Aunt Daisy(?) & my Aunt Lynda

Thanks to this unwanted excursion through my parents’ stuff, at age fifty-four I am emerging with a better understanding of my family, our accomplishments and our foibles, our strengths and our weaknesses, the way we have loved and struggled with each other, and what we’ve regarded as important. Most significantly, I have recognized that I am less the individual I’ve always assumed myself to be and more a part of a larger “us.” Family.

Many times during this process I’ve melted down in frustration that the job of clearing out the family house, downsizing generations’ worth of clutter and treasure, has fallen to me. But every time I’ve complained that “I just want my life back,” something in me has gently answered, “It was never just your life to begin with.”

So I kept scrolling through your social media posts, imagining sand between my toes and sake in my cup, recalling times when I too was footloose, exploring the world with friends and on my own. And although I still long for that green-faced, smiling emoji, I wouldn’t trade my close-to-home journey this year for anything.

Share the wealth

I invite you to hit the comment button and share your experiences and stuff-related strategies!

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Worth reading

I just finished reading The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson. (Talk about too little too late, for some of us …)

This little book is full of wisdom as well as practical ideas. What I love most is how unthreatening it is—just a suggestion for this and an idea for that … Plus the author acknowledges where, despite being the queen of death cleaning, she continues to struggle with letting go of certain things.

If you’re at all like me, looking around your—or your loved one’s—house and seeing clutter, potential clutter and future clutter, The Gentle Art might be an excellent holiday gift-giving option. Along with an enjoyable read, you get a gentle conversation starter for everyone living with … stuff.

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