"I told her that I didn’t want any of it"
March 13, 2021 11:09 AM   Subscribe

How to Practice | The New Yorker's Ann Patchett writes about the decision she and her husband made to purge their lives life of possessions, after the death of her best friend's father.

Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through... Karl said that he was game for a deep excavation. He was working from home. I had stopped travelling. If we were ever going to do this, now was the time.
posted by I_Love_Bananas (59 comments total) 72 users marked this as a favorite
 
my mother did that. she called it the Swedish purge. why should i have to sort through her father's papers? if i walk out with a whimper then i'll do the same.
posted by wmo at 11:23 AM on March 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


I’ve been doing a version of this through my local Buy Nothing group since August. It feels very soothing to me to clear out objects that no longer have a purpose, or that no longer reflect what is important to me now.

I always enjoy Ann Patchett’s writing. Thanks for sharing.
posted by bookmammal at 11:44 AM on March 13, 2021 [6 favorites]


When I moved across country twelve years ago, all I could afford was one of those moving pods that was maybe the size of a 5x10' storage unit. I had to do a massive purge of just about everything that was fragile or that I could easily and cheaply replace once I was re-established in my new city - furniture (all second-hand or bought at Goodwill anyway), mismatched dishes/glasses/flatware (ditto), bookshelves, lawnmower and gardening equipment, patio furniture, exercise machine, on and on. I even gave my car to my son. About all I had left were my clothes, mattress, musical instruments, computer, a folding table, a couple boxes of books I didn't want to let go of, and a few small personal or necessary and not-easily-replaced items.

After moving and getting a new job, I started accumulating again. Necessary items first naturally - furniture, kitchen and dining stuff, lamps and the like. Then over the next few years I expanded into things I wanted, plus more musical instruments and other toys. And once I was eventually earning more I started buying nicer versions of the cheap stuff I'd started out with. At this point I've got quite a bit more than can comfortably fit in my 2-bedroom apartment (much of it has been in boxes for 5 years), and I'm entering my 6th decade. I guess it's time to take inspiration from this article and do some of my own purging. If I'm honest with myself I could probably lose 1/3 to 1/2 of my stuff and be just fine.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:07 PM on March 13, 2021 [6 favorites]


I can't tell you how often I get calls from people burdened with their father's record collections (I buy and sell them for a living). Desperate people overwhelmed with so much... crap, really. It saddens me when I have to tell them it's worthless and I can't help them. One in 100 have things worth value -- the other 99 have been lugging around or holding onto things that mean nothing to anyone. More often than not the houses haven't had a functioning turntable since the 80s. More than once I've been sent to storage units people have been paying monthly fees for for decades to store record collections so large they couldn't listen to them in their lifetime.

I have multiple customers who have me in their wills or instructions in their wills for their loved ones to call me when they've passed.

There is just so, so much crap in this world it is hard to believe, really. Or fathom. The vast majority of anything being manufactured is pointless, useless, ugly, or all three, and the unexplainable need to possess is a mystery to me. I feel guilty contributing to the problem by being a vendor of tangible items, but I have no other skills.
posted by dobbs at 12:13 PM on March 13, 2021 [88 favorites]


What a wonderful piece.

I've been through all my things in the past five years, and sometimes it was extraordinarily painful. But now I feel more mobile than I did before, not that I want to move anywhere because the place is so peaceful.
posted by Peach at 12:21 PM on March 13, 2021 [6 favorites]


concur with peach. I've been working the swedish death cleaning off and on for about 18 months.

when i moved from my last 4br rental to this 1br tiny apartment, i filled a construction dumpster. such a relief to let go of all that.

now, everything that's left has some sort of emotional weight.
posted by j_curiouser at 12:30 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


We purged hugely 6 years ago to move into a much smaller house (except art supplies but that's my living). Then 3 years later had to move my father out of his house and I'm still sorting through his stuff. Slowly making headway but it's a tedious process and right now lots of the usual options for purging aren't available thanks to the pandemic.
posted by leslies at 12:32 PM on March 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


Recently my Dad ended up in the hospital twice suffering from non-covid pneumonia. It turns out that as scary as covid is regular pneumonia can be plenty scary. There were days I thought it was likely he was simply not coming home. I played support for my mom as she accompanied my Dad in the hospital and then decided to stay overnight. She asked me to bring a list of personal items down to them.

There was something about going through the list and selecting the items they asked for. Some of it was pure utility (deodorant). Some of it was tenderly personal: a particular blanket, a meditation book, the pillowcase with the drawings of cats on it. Even some mundane-ish things like *their* specific hair-care items seemed to have an aura of something about them. Picking these things out of their house among the other things that were theirs felt like a moment of reverent regard for them. I ended up taking picture

He did come home, and after two months he was even more or less himself again. If he hadn't, I imagine that stuff with and without that layer of meaning would have become a burden too, prompting the question that I've learned to ask myself "given that you *will* have to let go of this at some point, is there a better time than now?" But I'd guess that for at least some of it, the answer would be "yes, later will be better than now."

There's a line. On one side of it is something like the items in The Littlest Angel, on the other side is an episode of hoarders. The line can be blurred in some cases, the sentiment that makes the former side shine can drive dynamics that create the uglier side. But still there are two sides, and an art to learning to balance them well, to sort stuff that's landed nearby in temporary necessity from items which are more connected.

Appreciate Patchett's thoughts on that art.
posted by weston at 12:46 PM on March 13, 2021 [12 favorites]


I call it the hunter-gatherer urge. It's hard not to acquire.

Once I had a tag sale to get rid of everything so we could move from state to state, because I couldn't even afford to hire someone to haul it away. I was horrified to find that people will buy anything from a tag sale, including used makeup, if they think they're getting a bargain.

Also, in the process of this last final purge, I posted some "free to good home" things on Nextdoor. Once again, I was horrified. People who have no room in their cars for anything else came to take my peculiar possessions and they gave every indication that they wanted the things for themselves, not to sell. A manual sewing machine in a battered wooden cabinet. A slew of decorative swords I had received as prizes. They wanted my things so badly and they were so grateful, and then I had to help them shoehorn the stuff into their crammed, messy cars. I felt as if I was contributing to someone else's downfall.

I switched to hauling things to a local charity where they will probably sell my things as insulation or for spare parts.
posted by Peach at 12:49 PM on March 13, 2021 [11 favorites]


oof, I have a lot of feelings about this.

I come from a family with a very strong Collecting Impulse, though it tends to skip a generation. My great-great-grandfather owned an antique store; my grandmother filled her basement with boxes and passed custody of half-a-dozen sets of ancestral dishes to my mother, and my great-aunt succumbed to full-blown hoarding. I own a vintage shop, and my apartment is full of books and odd trinkets and craft supplies for as-yet-unplanned projects.

When my great-aunt passed, clearing out her apartment was not a very happy experience. She had been piling up mail and newspapers for ten years, and one whole wall of her living room was stacked chest-high with tomato boxes filled with, mostly, things she should have thrown away. But mixed in with that were family photos, jewelry, a box of dolls she and my grandmother had played with as children. We spent three weeks hauling things down to the dumpster. I took home three sets of dishes, most of her jewelry, a manual typewriter and a bookshelf.

In the last few years of my grandmother’s life, I went over to her apartment a few times a year specifically to help her sort through her things and figure out what she wanted to get rid of. Her apartment didn’t look like a hoarder’s, but the same impulses were there in a milder form: years of cooking magazines she was still planning to go through one day, to clip recipes from; drawers full of financial documents and mail she didn’t need to keep, a closet full of purses she had hardly used. I found the sterling silver dollhouse furniture her grandfather gave her when she was small, that she had misplaced when she moved into that apartment — it was carefully packed into a box on the very top shelf of her closet, and I only spotted it because I’m eight inches taller. We polished it up and arranged it in one of the big glass vitrines in her living room. Every time I admired something out loud, she tried to convince me to take it home with me. Later, before she went to the hospital for cancer treatment, she sat down with my mom and went through her good jewelry, so we would know what she wanted us to have if things went badly.

Things went badly. So we had to pack up her apartment, too, and uncovered more things: a jewelry box she had forgotten about, antique silver spoons tucked into a lingerie drawer, the business cards of, it seemed, every restaurant manager she had ever met. But I’m glad she didn’t purge everything unnecessary in advance. It felt like spending a little bit more time with her. Every time I admired something out loud, my mom tried to convince me to take it home. And I did take things, most of which I use: sweaters, purses, some of her jewelry, a pair of powder blue velvet chairs. I was the only one who wanted the silver dollhouse furniture, somehow. I have it on display at home.
posted by nonasuch at 12:55 PM on March 13, 2021 [50 favorites]


I marvel about the fact that ten years ago, I came to Japan with a big suitcase, a carry-on suitcase, and a backpack. My possessions in this world had shrunk down to that. (Ok, that's not exactly true; I had left a few big suitcases full of "stuff I don't want to throw away but don't need to take with me" in my parents' garage). Now I've got a family and a house full of...well, all the stuff that comes with it. I couldn't even get one tenth of it in those bags that I initially came here with.
posted by zardoz at 1:02 PM on March 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


This is timely to read, because I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I don't have kids, and (at least so far) no nieces or nephews; realistically, there is no one who would want any of the specifically sentimental items I have. Anything of value could be sold at a yard sale or donated, but much, maybe most, would end up in a landfill.

Thoughtfully going through and reducing the quantity of possessions like she describes would be a kindness to whomever gets the job of cleaning things out when you are departed.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:15 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


After my dad’s cancer diagnosis and surgery, my sister and I each took on separate responsibilities on visits home. I did more of the “keep the house running” tasks, fixing things, updating computers, throwing out expired food, and so on. My sister took on the monumental task of getting our mom to start getting rid of stuff. Every time she visits she still dedicates time to it, and there is still so much stuff. Much of it has no value. I don’t know how we’re going to get rid of it all.
posted by fedward at 1:17 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


When I was 24, I moved house (well, apartment, really). It was my sixth move in the five years since I moved out on my own. The same day, my coworker Lisa moved. She was the same age as me to within a few weeks, and it was the second move of her life.

My dad turned up with his passenger van at my place at noon when he had an appointment an hour away at 4:00 pm. The two of us loaded up everything I owned in about three or four trips up and down the stairs (the bed and the desk were a trip each), relocated me to my new digs, unloaded everything, and he was on time for his duties elsewhere at four. Lisa needed five people and two full days with a rented cube van.

I see the virtues in getting rid of Stuff, but at the same time the virtue of the celebrated Swedish death cleaning is that you are the one doing it. When it is a wholesale third-party attack on decades’ worth of accumulated belongings by someone else, the approach may be less nuanced. A year ago the last family member of my grandparents’ generation died at 100. He was by no means a hoarder, and had lived in a bachelor apartment in a retirement home for his final five or six years. Apart from what was visible and immediately apparent (a bed, a television, a desk, a laptop) I think everything he owned was in two closets and a dresser. His daughter redirected the electronics and tossed everything else in the dumpster. My mom went by and retrieved his wedding ring, his watches, and his war medals from the dumpster before these went to the landfill.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 1:35 PM on March 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


One of the reasons I am glad to have cut off my mother is she's always been...not quite a hoarder, but a saver of crap. I would draw the line because "hoarder" implies garbage and rotting food and such and she's not that bad, but there's a lot of stuff. It's just stuff.

I went to get a Band Aid for me once and she triumphantly dug up a GI Joe Band Aid from 1986 or so. It had basically dry rotted (or whatever latex does).

When my grandmother died, she tried to give me her mattress. As in the one my grandmother literally died on. "What?! She didn't use it much! I mean she only laid on it for like 3 months and then she died!" She thought I was a lunatic for being kind of squicked out (and also I had a perfectly good mattress I didn't want to replace with one my grandmother literally died on). She has towels from the 1970s that have all the comfort of sandpaper but are "still good!"

But she was/is convinced my sister and I would be engaged in this epic battle for all her crap and would have these solemn conversations with us about how we really needed to work out who got what in advance and it would be so much easier.

Like, lady, neither of us are going to fight over the bedsheets from 1974 you have saved in the closet.

It's not just her stuff, either.

When I moved close enough she could drive for visits she would regularly pack up her car with crap I'd left when I moved up and arrive triumphantly, like I was supposed to be excited she'd turned up with the South Park tchotchke I hung from my rearview mirror when I was 16 or the composition book I used for middle school English assignments.

To be fair, that's better than my sister. My sister literally has her own house. Like, she lives in a house by herself. But the closets and underbed storage space at my mother's house are also full of my sister's crap. And of course it's all treated like the Crown Jewels. I found a laptop buried in there once that was still pretty nice and asked if I could have it and she about had a meltdown because "But THAT'S the laptop your GRANDFATHER waited in LINE for during a Black Friday sale and then when they were out he asked for the MANAGER and it's VERY SPECIAL to YOUR SISTER." I mean, obviously, how could I not know that given it was buried in the closet in my old bedroom and not in her house that she lives in and where she would presumably use a laptop. But sentimental value, got it.

My wife had nightmares every time we visited about my mother willing the house to me and us having to deal with all this stuff. I'd straight up tell my mother "I'm calling the Salvation Army and saying 'Back up the truck and take it all, boys!'" and she'd about have a heart attack at all the things I wouldn't be carefully sorting through.

Like, sorry, no one wants the racist mammy figurines and such you inherited from my grandparents. Christ knows I don't want that in my house and I can't even think who I'd donate the racist figurines to were I inclined to donate them.

Even the stuff other people would get sentimental about, there's just so much of it. Like pictures, right, everyone likes pictures. But she literally has a 7 foot bookcase stacked full of photo albums to the point the whole damn thing is sagging. She's convinced my sister and I are going to literally go through them one by one and, like, look at all the pictures and have all this nostalgia and all these memories and, like, where the fuck would I put a giant bookcase of photo albums? I don't even have the space for a giant bookcase for my books, the ones that I want.

The irony is she made a big deal about getting all my grandfather's home movies digitized and we were all going to sit down and watch them AS A FAMILY and then the one time we tried that she got up and wandered away to talk to my grandmother and I'm like, great, I sure do love sitting here watching movies of dead people I don't even know by myself, this is a fucking blast.

Anyway I've cut her off so hopefully I don't have to deal with it. If she doesn't have the decency to cut me out of her will, I may see if I can give it to the fire department to burn down for practice. Or just hire the junk removal guys to clear it out and sell the house as-is, just get rid of this thing, please.

Maybe it's because I moved a ton but I have no real sentimental attachment to stuff except the stuff that would actually be hard to replace, like I have an anthology signed by all 20 writers that contributed and it'd be nice to hang onto that just because that's a one-of-a-kind thing but I tell my wife if I go, just take whatever you want, sell whatever's worth selling, and give the rest to Goodwill or whoever wants it. One day sale in the house, come in and take it, it's yours.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 2:57 PM on March 13, 2021 [31 favorites]


Currently going through a version of this in extreme slow motion.

In 2002 my grandfather died, and for "reasons" my mother, who was (subconsciously) angry at him, hired a dumpster service and then told me the night before that if I wanted anything, I needed to get it before they came.

Nearly 20 years later, I still have a few boxes of things that have not been opened since that day, where I was furiously taking boxes of books and photo albums and various ephemera, and putting them into my car as the clock wound down.

In 2011, my father died, and as an only child, everything in the house he had lived in for 20 years was mine to deal with. That was 10 years ago and same thing: there are still sealed boxes from the day I moved everything out.

My family and I have lived in the same (small) house for 15 years and about 6 months ago I made a concerted effort to start going through things and getting rid of them. We literally had no space left.

Why didn't I do this earlier? Because of fuckin' life that's why. It's very overwhelming to have to make decisions and try to decide what might be important to somebody down the road.

Literally 6 hours ago, I was unwrapping a 40 gallon container of framed photos that were obviously important to my grandfather. He had a lot of them and as I was going through the collection and removing the photos in order to consolidate, I would find things that made me stop everything and weep, for example, this photo of my impossibly beautiful aunt who died of cancer 10 years before my grandfather, holding my newborn cousin who has been estranged from our family since 1988. The tears began to flow.

Being faced with the choice of keeping something, versus throwing it away forever, is an existential choice, which is why so many of us decide to put it off until we die.
posted by jeremias at 2:57 PM on March 13, 2021 [51 favorites]


This hit hard. I've posted comments before about the tyranny of *stuff* and will likely continue to do so for some time.

My father was a boy in Holland when the Nazi's invaded and turned the world to shit. My mother was an Australian war baby in a family of 5 to an alcoholic father with PTSD from the trenches of WW1. Neither of them could bear to throw away anything good because they'd need it at some point. I understand why they were like they were.

But it has been heartbreaking to realise how much of their lives occurred in the cramped and dusty spaces between what is essentially rubbish. Most recently I hired two men and a big truck to clean out a shed and some of the house. Three loads was what I could afford. I could easily have made it four. Five would not be out of the question. And this was just the rubbish - broken furniture, broken appliances, old bits of building material and so on. I've only just started making space inside - half of mums yarn stash (8 large tubs, two big bags, and a box of half finished projects) went to a charity, and I can start to see space appearing that will allow me to sort through the rest of it. I haven't even started to think about the antiques that do exist somewhere under this mess.

It's been emotionally exhausting to deal with on a level I could not have comprehended a year ago. I joke to my friends that I became a minimalist when I had to dust knicknacks, but the reality is that I've been thinking far too long and hard on ALL the meanings of the word possession.

There seems to be quite a few of us in the same situation. Should we form a support group?
posted by ninazer0 at 3:33 PM on March 13, 2021 [12 favorites]


It's called "everybody", and it meets at the bar...
;)
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:12 PM on March 13, 2021 [18 favorites]


I feel guilty contributing to the problem by being a vendor of tangible items, but I have no other skills.

I know the feeling, as Hunter Thompson so succinctly summarized: "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me."

Beginning in 2012, in a cascading array of tragic human frailty and bodily betrayals, I lost my entire remaining family - three brothers and my mother in a span of six years, leaving me, the youngest, now an orphan of sorts - certainly as emotional - with the collective ephemera of all their lives as it had been so suddenly sorted and dispersed among us, now in my hands and with no one, as we were all childless, with any connection to a bit of it. A century and a half of photos, antiques, art, music, books, cookware, letters, deeds, records. So how much energy does one commit to trying to connect so many items to organizations for whom they might find appreciation and generational enlightenment or just release it all into the wild? All the stories, memories, traditions and lessons ... it's a load physically and emotionally.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 4:15 PM on March 13, 2021 [20 favorites]


Very good article.

I've been paring down books, which is hard. Easier now that I have my library back and enough shelves (for now!).

The most difficult thing, though, is papers. I have 10 boxes of the stuff which definitely contains useless stuff *and* useful items. It's going to be awful clawing through them.
posted by doctornemo at 4:15 PM on March 13, 2021


My wife's mom died in October. She was a magnificent lady and the family matriarch. She was not a hoarder, and her house and items are clean and in good shape. But there is a huge amount of stuff. The (very large) family has this idea that they will be able to sell a bunch of her furniture and clothing. I am not an expert on selling stuff, but... no one is going to want to buy middle of the road suburban furniture and a bunch of nicely kept lady clothing. No one. Sure, maybe a piece here and there will sell. But FFS, it's a four bedroom house full of STUFFFF. How many person-hours are gonna go into photographing and trying to sell all this middle-of-the-road stuff? What possible monetary return could be made from any of it?

The family is mourning (I am too) and I get that some of this is just mental processing. But me? I'd keep all the photos, let all the nieces, nephews, grandkids, great grandkids etc, etc, etc have ONE PASS through the house and take what they want, then call every donation company who's willing to haul stuff away and get rid of it all as quickly as possible.
....
My own folks are aging. Their house is much smaller. But they also have a metric ton of stuff. It's gonna be trickier with my mom's stuff, as she is a pretty canny antiques and art collector. I'm sure there's a bunch of things that possibly could fetch some serious money. I'll take some of it! My two brothers will as well!

But we live much simpler, stripped down lives. None of us have kids. It's honestly going to have to be some kind of estate sale at some point and perhaps some meagre monetary returns will come in. But I'm not gonna go through her stuff and try to make big bucks off of each item!

Bigger problem is my older brother is mentally ill and has hoarder tendencies. At one point, he was making good money, and he spent every penny on shit. Boxed sets of every TV show in VHS, DVD, etc. Books. Elaborate toys and puzzles. Records, So many CDs it's dizzying. He had a serious breakdown and 15 years have gone by and he now lives with his wife who he's keep him in control. He's on disability so he cannot buy piles of shit constantly anymore. But guess where a vast amount of his old shit is? My folk's house. So on top of my mom's huge collection of (some) expensive stuff, my folks' house is full of my brother's wild spending escapades STILL. I helped my folks move some furniture recently. There are boxes and boxes and boxes of old DVDs, VHS tapes, etc etc etc etc under beds, and all over the house. My parents will NOT put their feet down and demand he get rid of his old shit. So at some point, all his crap is gonna have to go somehow, too.

I'm no Mr. Minimalist. But I'm not a hoarder or collector at all. Sure I some crap that could go. But nothing like the other members of my family. I'm the "sensible" one—always have been— who didn't go into debt so I'm sure a lot of these decisions will be up for ME to make.

Not looking forward to it.
posted by SoberHighland at 4:39 PM on March 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


The part that resonated with me was the recognition of items that a mature Ann Patchett identified as the property of a young Ann Patchett who thought she would definitely need those items in adulthood, ie; fancy champagne goblets. Nothing like figuring out who we thought we would become by examining the items we collected when young and realizing, for better or worse, we did not become the adults we imagined.
posted by pjsky at 4:41 PM on March 13, 2021 [43 favorites]


My wife likes to buy books and I like to buy records (hi, dobbs!), but I feel like we both have our respective habits under control because we both have allotted space within our apartment for both collections and if it fills up and we want to buy anything else something has to go out the front door. Outside of that we really don't have a lot of non-practical/necessary possessions outside of photos and other nostalgic tchotchkes (which serve a bit of a practical purpose in that they bring memories forth).

My issue with physical possessions is more professional in nature; I'm a librarian in the special collections department of a public branch, and recently took over the duties of a guy who had been in charge of his corner of the collection for decades. I'll never be fully privy to his decision-making process, but he left shelves and shelves and shelves of badly-needed storage space clogged up with what I would, professionally-speaking, call "junk." Things that are not covered by our collection statements and never were, things that are reproductions or duplicates of things the library or other, nearby, institutions already have, things that are in such terrible condition that nothing can be done with them, things that just are not historically- or otherwise significant...librarians, like anyone else, exist on an acquisition/curation spectrum, and I guess I'm at the other end of the scale from my predecessor (who, I should say, was better at other aspects of the job than I'll probably ever be). Since I took over I bet I've filled at least 12 of those large recycling bins (the ones on wheels) with garbage (mostly old newspapers that are available online and/or on microfilm), sent a car trunk's worth of things to the library's book and ephemera sale (for when it starts up again, of course), and mailed a bunch of other stuff to institutions which might actually want it, and while I find this sort of decluttering very satisfying it's also a bit stressful at times and sometimes I resent having been forced to make these decisions because nobody else would or did.
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:52 PM on March 13, 2021 [9 favorites]


So how much energy does one commit to trying to connect so many items to organizations for whom they might find appreciation and generational enlightenment

That's a fascinating question, that's hard to answer.

I have a slim notebook that my grandfather, who had a significant hand in raising my sister and me, wrote after his 4th or 5th major heart attack and subsequent quintuple bypass surgery. As he was recovering he seriously pondered his mortality and realized that he had all these stories he'd never told his larger family that were in clear danger of being lost forever. So he wrote them out in pencil on a legal pad as he laid in his hospital bed. My sister diligently transcribed his scribble into a typed document, added a few old photos of him over the years, made umpteen copies, mounted them in slim binders, and distributed those to other family members. It was a significant labor of love. I cherish that notebook, I re-read it every so often and think about how much of my grandfather I see in myself.*

But to my son - who met my grandfather only once when he was a literal infant, and who has pretty much no personal connection to any of my or my ex-wife's extended families - that notebook is just one more bit of crap he'll probably toss out after I'm gone. On one hand it's heartbreaking to consider, but on the other hand I completely understand, since I have little connection to that larger family myself. Still, I occasionally wonder whether we, as modern individuals often more or less detached from our family history, will mourn the loss of continuity after it's long-gone? Or will we even care? Are any of those personal small stories, more likely than not to be lost forever, even worth saving?

Nevertheless I'm hanging onto that notebook, regardless of what my son eventually decides to do with it.

*Any such stories of my own life I've inadvertently collected here on Metafilter; cosmos only knows what their eventual fate will be but I haven't yet decided it's worth compiling them in any coherent form. Sic transit gloria digital mundi.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:08 PM on March 13, 2021 [19 favorites]


I guess I'm a hoarder, but at least you can move through my house without knocking over stacks of newspaper.
My parents lived through the (1929) depression and never discarded anything with potential use, and I continued that- string, rubber bands, 2x4's...
Now often, a lot of this comes in handy- I have not bought a lot of new lumber, but I worry about what happens if I die suddenly, and someone else has to throw out all my shit.
Twenty-some years ago, we moved out of DC, and my wife made me get rid of most of my books- I filled up a minivan and drove it to a local library. Most of that was not important to me, but I really, really regret one bunch of books that, as far as I can tell, are irreplaceable. They would mean nothing to almost anyone else, but I am so bereft at that thought of not having that reference material. It was so much a part of me.
I have been trying (and succeeding, in some cases) to throw useless things out, but the volume does not seem to decrease, and since I live in a barn, there's always space to stuff something.
One issue I've had was that I had the Family Bible- 1732 Luther translation, in Fraktur, with wooden covers and births and inscribed deaths throughout the 1800's. What do you do with something like that? Fortunately, I got my sister to take it, so that's her problem. I also have an 11th edition Encyclopædia Britannica that I discovered as a teenager in our basement, but who wants that kind of thing these days? That's still looking for a home.
Guess I'll have to live forever.
posted by MtDewd at 5:32 PM on March 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


My mom has some centuries-old family Bibles, too, MtDewd, and family photos dating from to the Civil War all the way up to the 1950s. I'm sure they're valuable to the right person but who is that person? I'm going to have to deal with them eventually and have no idea what I'll do with them.
posted by The corpse in the library at 5:53 PM on March 13, 2021 [3 favorites]


I liked reading this. I found myself thinking, "You're just going to GIVE that away? That's WORTH something!" Which is exactly the problem I have with getting rid of a lot of my own stuff. I don't want it or feel attached to it specifically, but I'm attached to the idea of its supposed value.
posted by daisyace at 6:05 PM on March 13, 2021 [8 favorites]


Greg_Ace I cannot favorite your comment often enough! Count me in - my shout.
posted by speug at 6:05 PM on March 13, 2021


But to my son - who met my grandfather only once when he was a literal infant, and who has pretty much no personal connection to any of my or my ex-wife's extended families - that notebook is just one more bit of crap he'll probably toss out after I'm gone.

I don't know. I never met any of my great-grandparents, but I'd have been interested at almost any age to have read personal reminiscences. Right now, I don't even know if my grandmother's father could read English or not (he was an immigrant from Poland prior to WWI with no formal education at all who came to Pennsylvania to work in the coal mines).
posted by praemunire at 7:11 PM on March 13, 2021 [10 favorites]


My dad's family passed stuff down generation to generation since the early 18th century. Dad has some interesting stuff, though he's not much of a collector. My favorite things are some of the papers. I found a collection of handwritten receipts from my greatx6 grandparents' shopping trips to Baltimore in 1785, which are pretty fun. Sugar and coffee and rum, to be sure, but also evidently 6 pairs of silk stockings, 7 yards of black velvet ribbon, 10 yards or pink and white striped silk, green leather and "fancy buckles."

I framed a few of them and hung them on the dining room wall.
posted by thivaia at 7:48 PM on March 13, 2021 [16 favorites]


I live in a different country from my parents. When they downsized, they threw everything out that wasn't theirs. I was angry when I first heard this, but came to realize if it had really been important to me, I should have taken it. On ms scruss's side though, not so lucky. Her mum lives in a huge antebellum wooden house on the state historic registry. Her family were kind of big shots, and so it's full to the rafters with dark wood furniture from the late 19th century. We're expected to get it when she passes. We don't want it. ms scruss's brother doesn't want it. “But it's been in the family for 150 years!”, says ms scruss's mum. The beds in the house are all antiques, and are just disastrously uncomfortable. There isn't room for anything new.
posted by scruss at 7:57 PM on March 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


Incidentally, Fancy Buckles is my stripper name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:49 PM on March 13, 2021 [11 favorites]


As I get older, and as a boardgame collector/thrifter, it's been a weird year. I haven't been to the Goodwill in over a year, and so, my purchases have mostly disappeared. And I've sold so much this last year. And it has felt really good to reduce my inventory. But, I'm getting my second shot in 10 days, and I will likely return to the Goodwill soon. And I still have a couple thousand games in my house/garage/storage unit. And I don't want my family to have to deal with it. But I have so much cool, old, stuff, that I think has historical value, I have a hard time getting rid of it for $1 +shipping. Ugh.

Let alone all my personal stuff that only has value to me...
posted by Windopaene at 9:08 PM on March 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


I really enjoyed this, especially the bit about typewriters at the end. However, it does make me feel a bit panicky thinking about the amount of stuff my older relatives have.
posted by ghharr at 9:12 PM on March 13, 2021


For me, I had to stop reading at this line "I had miscalculated the tools of adulthood when I was young, or I had miscalculated the kind of adult I would be." How much this resonates with me I can't even put in words.
posted by zenon at 10:43 PM on March 13, 2021 [14 favorites]


I have to say, though: it really sounds like Kent had a very deliberately-constructed, if, uh, maximalist home environment. Getting rid of cruft is not the same as getting rid of things you find beautiful and meaningful. If you're happy in the little shell you've built, why would you destroy it before death just to have...empty space?

(Also, I've been feeling a little crowded in my modest one-bedroom apartment, what with the work and pandemic supplies, and have been on a mini-discarding crusade lately as I reorganize, but you people with houses. Wow. The sheer quantity.)
posted by praemunire at 11:10 PM on March 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


I had a pretty bad conversation with my mother recently when she began showing me things she wanted me to take. Part of the problem is that while she has a massive double garage and loft where the rubbish is neatly stored and troubles no-one, I have a small house which is already full. It is literally the case that if we buy anything new we have to think carefully about where it will go.

But the worst thing is that over the years she has consistently thrown out the good stuff, or the stuff I valued, and kept the crap. The few things I would have wanted went in the bin or a skip long ago; now she demands I get excited about broken things I never liked or don’t even recognise. I tried to be gentle, but she was hurt by the obvious truth that when she dies this stuff is all going with her.
posted by Phanx at 3:05 AM on March 14, 2021 [2 favorites]


MtDewd: I guess I'm a hoarder, but at least you can move through my house without knocking over stacks of newspaper.

Same same, except that I strongly prefer the term 'hamster'. It sounds so much friendlier and more cuddly.
We just like stuff, okay? And very often, especially now that we can't always go out and buy stuff, that comes in handy. We can just fish something out of the pile and make it into the thing we need or want.
posted by Too-Ticky at 5:22 AM on March 14, 2021 [4 favorites]


One of the hardest things about getting rid of things from my family is that if I got rid of it all, they somehow would actually be dead because there would be no evidence in my life that they ever existed.

Many years after my mom died, I had a dream about her. She was mobile again, though using her walking cart, and in an assisted living apartment. I said to her, "Mom, you're alive!" and she looked annoyed and said, "I can't chat right now. I'm busy."

I woke up and somehow my mourning had changed flavors; it turns out that even though she's dead, it was her life to live, not mine.
posted by Peach at 7:34 AM on March 14, 2021 [23 favorites]


"I made the decision to wait until we’d finished with the entire house before trying to find a place for the things we were getting rid of. This was a lesson I’d picked up from my work: writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both at the same time nothing will get done. I would not stop the work at hand in order to imagine who might want the square green serving dish I’d bought fifteen years before and never put on the table."

This is a valuable lesson. Thank you, I_Love_Bananas.

"...and, strangest of all, my anthropomorphism of inanimate objects—how would those plastic plates with pictures of chickadees on them feel when they realized they were on their way to the basement?"

She's a crouton petter!
posted by MonkeyToes at 7:58 AM on March 14, 2021 [16 favorites]


After his daughters were grown and gone, Kent amassed an enormous collection of Tibetan singing bowls, which crowded into what had once been Therese’s room, each on its own riser, each riser topped with a pouf made of Indian silk. He played them daily, turning sideways to move among them.
The "he played them daily" bit seems quite important. That's a fine use for a grown child's bedroom.

But, the rest of the essay is very thoughtful. My spouse has a lot of old family stuff that neither of us particularly like. I have a lot of "this might possibly be useful some day" stuff. They're struggling to remember that most of the family stuff was never as important to anyone as its volume suggests. I'm struggling to remember that I'm no longer poor and can buy another $4 spatula if the one I actually use turns out not to be enough, without a second thought.
posted by eotvos at 8:45 AM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]


I love things. LOVE things. I only love my own stuff, not other people's crap, but my things, which I largely find on eBay, are things I treasure and either display or use. I want to believe they'll hold their value but I'm probably wrong. I've spent the last year about to post an AskMe about where to get some antique items repaired that may cost more to restore than they would to buy new, and the only thing that's stopped me from posting the question so far is we're too financially strapped to actually make the repairs right now regardless.

I do think part of the discussion that we're not having when we talk about peoples' inability to declutter, is the overall weight of human garbage. We all know how large the landfills are. We all know that all the plastic out there is destroying our ecosystem. We all know that reusing things is better than disposing of them. So it really, truly is better if someone would take our old furniture or dishes or clothes - which really are perfectly good. It's hard to add something you know to be useful or still think to be attractive to the trash pile. The world would genuinely be a better place if we could just find a way to want other peoples' (hideous) things.

I don't know what the answer is. I'm in a neighborhood buy-nothing group, and it's always interesting to see what things people will actually take when they're free. My mom still talks about the shiva house she went to where the family told every visitor to take something from the living room with them, and people actually did because hey, free stuff, even though a lot of it was clearly tchotchkes that they must have been thrilled to get rid of (and the good stuff would certainly have been put away ahead of time). Maybe Free Stores will finally start to take off as part of Gay Space Communism. It's worth a shot.

Anyway, the ending of this piece about the typewriter is especially moving in light of Patchett's other recent piece, These Precious Days, about her relationship with Hanks's assistant Sooki. It's a sad and lovely read. Patchett is a treasure.
posted by Mchelly at 11:38 AM on March 14, 2021 [7 favorites]


The best thing about this essay, by the way, is that the Kindle version of this issue changed all the uses of "time" to "The New Yorker," so you got sentences like:

Tavia’s father died when she and I were fifty-six years old. At any other The New Yorker, we might have been able to enjoy a few more years of ignoring the fact that we, too, were going to die, but thanks to the pandemic such blithe disregard was out of the question.

and

This was a lesson I’d picked up from my work: writing must be separate from editing, and if you try to do both at the same The New Yorker nothing will get done.

and

It’s a big house, and over time the closets and drawers had filled with things we never touched and, in many cases, had completely forgotten we owned. Karl said that he was game for a deep excavation. He was working from home. I had stopped travelling. If we were ever going to do this, now was the The New Yorker.

The whole issue was like this, but it was at its best in this piece.
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:14 PM on March 14, 2021 [17 favorites]


We're actively trying to keep my grandmother from that cleaning right now - she has a tendency to burn documents especially, to the point I still have no idea about my grandfather's terminal diagnosis because she burned all his medical papers after his death. Um, hello, my genes and medical history?

But I have very fond memories of how much it helped us all mourn to go through his stuff and take souvenirs. I have ornaments from his desk up in my bedroom right now, and pictures painted by his mother. I guess it helps that there's a real emotional connection and my own memories bundled up with these objects.

Getting rid of bought/collected stuff is a pain, yeah, but I can't imagine getting rid of family history - photos, documents, family Bibles etc. Maybe it's coming from a country with a regular tradition of war destruction, but stuff like that is precious, and doesn't everyone wonder at some point where they came from? Especially now that you can digitise things.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 3:03 PM on March 14, 2021 [5 favorites]


hmn. Her buddy's dad Kent seemed more like curator than a hoarder? The difference between art and garbage and historical archive is just a question of value that someone assigns to it.

I'm a pack-rat. (I'm not a hoarder in the TV-sense, but..). Moving around over the years I've lost/given away some things that are now kinda valuable (odd old electronic devices that some people think are cool now). Currently I'm saving old plastic bags and various packaging materials to turn into recycled sculptures and puppets. It's a work in progress. Let me know if you'd like some old New Yorkers. My parents grew up in the war.
posted by ovvl at 6:27 PM on March 14, 2021 [3 favorites]


Sometime in 1986 my grandmother had to go to a nursing home where she would die a few months later. Meanwhile she left behind an apartment full of stuff and it was up to my mother to clean it out. Alas, my mom always felt like the daughter-in-law that didn't measure up and their relationship was frosty-- at best. So when it fell to her to deal with the apartment she had me carry armfuls of stuff to the dumpster just to be done with it. At the time it bugged me because of my sentimentality thinking how all of that crap represented her life and the life she had built with my grandfather (who had died in 1971) but today it bugs me because a lot of it could have found use in someone else's hands. In fact, a lot of it would probably actually be valuable today.

But another part of me wonders why people end up hoarding stuff the way they do. For example, she had a bookshelf full of trashy romance novels from the 40s/50s/60s. They were cheap paperbacks, probably read once and then put on a shelf because she had lived through the Depression and wasn't about to throw something away that could be read again.
posted by drstrangelove at 5:55 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


This article kind of hits on a similar theme. The step son of astronaut (and moonwalker) Pete Conrad ended up having to deal with many of Conrad's possessions after his mom died, none of which held any particular value (there weren't any Apollo artifacts at least.)

https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/neil-armstrongs-closet-what-i-found-when-i-went-through-the-belongings-of-the-astronaut-in-my-family.html
posted by drstrangelove at 5:58 AM on March 15, 2021


On a whim I looked up Pratchett's other recent work.

A long form biography of Sookie.


I wept.
posted by zenon at 7:35 AM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


The thing about "valuable" is, well, everyone thinks/is hoping for an Antiques Roadshow-style "Oh actually that tchotchke is a Rare Tchotchke owned by George Washington himself and worth $2 million." But lots of things that might be valuable aren't because they were used and not kept in a "collectible" condition; toys that were played with or aren't in great shape, furniture that was sat on, etc. And even if they are, there's the matter of actually getting that value.

When my grandparents died, they had a chair that was some kind of extremely rare antique chair that was "for looking at, not sitting on," and it was extremely rare, and the executor even got it appraised for a few thousand dollars...but even if you get an appraisal value, you still have to find someone who wants to buy something like a chair that's too old and fragile to sit on, and that's the hard part. If you put it on consignment, you're waiting months or years (the "unsittable chair" market moves quite slowly) to get your cut (and the owner takes theirs). You can sell it to a dealer but you're only getting a portion of that value (and have to find a dealer that wants it). You can always try something like Craigslist or eBay and DIY but you're still dealing with the whole process, probably won't get that whole value, and there's still the issue of getting it to the buyer (and shipping antiques and whatnot can be a nightmare of its own).

My grandfather had some original artwork from an obscure but not that obscure painter with a small audience and, again, maybe a few thousand in value if you got it to a gallery that would be interested in selling it for you and most of those were in a few coastal cities because that's where the market for semi-obscure art basically is. I think they wound up donating them to a local museum for the tax writeoff rather than deal with trying to ship large oil paintings to coastal galleries to maybe get some money in a few years.

And there's the matter of changing tastes and lifestyles. My mother has some very nice, very heavy real wood furniture that's "been in the family for ages!" in storage and kept insisting I would want it some day. And I know buying it would be reasonably expensive. I've seen similar things in antique stores and seen the price tags. But I live in a 1 bedroom apartment, I have no room or use for a giant, real wood dining table of the sort 14 people might gather around on holidays. I have clothes that are sized for me, a behemoth, not a 17th century Englishman a giant like me would devour, so the dressers and whatnot aren't much use. I move a lot and don't want to deal with what it would take to move heavy wooden furniture. And there's the simple matter of the amount of time I want to devote to furniture upkeep is close to 0. So it's perfectly nice, but I don't want it.

(And the irony is while she insisted I would want it, she kept it in storage because she didn't want to use it for similar reasons).
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 7:42 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


My relationship to my things is evolving every few years, generally towards the realm of "keep less," but not always. I spent some of the time I had in the first wave of the pandemic tossing stuff. My youngest spent his time cruising the neighbourhood on garbage day, acquiring two rocking chairs, a lawn set we painted up nicely, and several storage systems as well as some bowls. I'm not sure where we ended up net. :)

I was saying to my husband this weekend that I never used to understand why my grandparents had these old threadbare towels or ancient appliances when they could easily have afforded to replace them...and now a lot of our stuff is moving into the "old" category and I'm like, no, I prefer the one I've been using for years. Like we have a Henckels carving knife we got for our wedding that somehow got a chip in the blade but that knife suits me, it can still be kept sharp and honed (you just have to know how to handle the divot) and it's "perfectly good."

Thus the voice of my ancestors rises up.
posted by warriorqueen at 8:41 AM on March 15, 2021 [8 favorites]


I have dealt with my parent's stuff (which included stuff from previous generations) after their death and had the help of an organizing team when I closed up the family home while preparing it for sale. My brother and his wife were only mildly interested in a few things. I moved to a smallish (1100 sq ft) home with a fairly small collection of family memorabilia and have continued to downsize. For instance, my Mother's china about which she was extraordinarily proud, came with me and has since been donated. I wanted to honor her, but keeping a full set of fancy china that I would never used turned out not to be the best way. I am gradually clearing out photos, boxes of ephemera, etc. that seemed important, but when I really had time to examine it, was not.

There is a series of police procedural novels set in the future that I read (Nora Roberts writing as J.D. Robb "In Death" series) that offhandedly describes a kind of recycling machine that breaks down objects into base elements--I keep hoping someone invents that so we can all dispose of our junk without increasing land fills. Also, would decrease the collection of raw materials from the world. Similar to a Star Trek Replicator that both builds needed objects and recycles ones you are finished with.
posted by agatha_magatha at 10:58 AM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


My mom was just talking about how her in-laws' china and silver from two generations is unwanted by any of the grandchildren. (I hate to tell her what is going to happen to her 6 storage tubs of Christmas decorations.) She has been going through things and getting rid of them ever since. Thanks, mom!

My husband David cannot throw a thing away. We have been over capacity for furniture for at least 10 years, he's gotten five new large pieces of furniture since we agreed there was no more room for any more furniture. I have to go behind him and throw out receipts and junk mail. I'm over capacity on clothes and yarn and I have 5 looms, so you know, I'm one to talk. I'm really starting to feel like I can't turn around in the house without running into something.

We had to go through his mom's stuff after her death in 2010. Let's just say the acorn didn't fall far from the tree. I did spend a few hours going through all her photographs and found the two (2!) photos of David as a child, and the one of his dad. If David goes before me, I'll need a dumpster just for the papers. If I go, he won't be able to get rid of anything because of sentimentality.
posted by corvikate at 11:35 AM on March 15, 2021 [1 favorite]


I can't even think about china. We've got a set my mom sent us after we bought a house (I helped her pick it when I was in high school, but she stopped using it). My wife's aunt sent us HER mother's china, which none of her own children wanted, without waiting to find out if we even wanted it. She confessed she didn't care what we did with it, even if we threw it away, she just couldn't be the one to do it. Aside from a piece we pulled out to see the pattern and show it to other people, the full set is still in the two boxes she paid somebody to pack and ship it in. Her aunt is a lovely person but it seems less a gift and more her shifting the burden to us.
posted by fedward at 2:38 PM on March 15, 2021 [3 favorites]


I separated from my husband nearly two years ago and loved out. I've had to rebuild my stuff, almost all of it. I took a large armchair, and that was it for furniture. I lived in my best friends spare room for the first nearly-year, so acquired a small desk and chair. But now I live in a two bedroom flat and I'm slowly turning it into a home.

My ex was very anti-crouton-petter. And while he had the ADHD visual thesaurus thing, was also of the "nothing on benches" in the kitchen kind of person. We fought, comedically, for years about my mugs. After I left he bought me a new one for my birthday; I've since broken it and repaired it with gold and it's a pen and brush cup on my art desk.

Very consciously choosing my things, not having the weight of decades, has been interesting. My best friend sighs happily when she comes over because "it's all just so you!" (And she greatly enabled that). I have definite collector and hoarder tendencies, that I sit with in the Buddhist tradition of attachment, desire, and fleeting time. I adore my green ceramic Buddha, whose plinth I repaired with epoxy and gold paint - he was a feature of my mother's hoarding and she had him sitting in a box to be repaired for years. When she, and her mother, gathered around to make sure I had the necessary things for my new house, we found him. He sits on my altar, with photos of folk who have died, and he makes me happy. If he no longer existed, I would be sad and that's okay. I still have the memory of his smiling face and round belly.

Same with all the things. I have tiny jade horses and an intricate mother's Day paper art my daughter made, and a plush Godzilla, and it is all in the same open shelves (sorted by colour) because looking at them makes me happy. I have art on my walls, again a fairly odd eclectic vision, for the same reason. But it took 18 months for me to realise I could buy myself an espresso machine and leave it on the counter and nobody would be unhappy in my house.

That said I visited a friend who is much more on my mother's side of hoarding and collections. They apologised frequently at first, because it is cluttered and I knocked a few things over with my butt, and we needed to tidy before making dinner. But it also felt homely to me - my house now is still at a transition phase. I don't think I'll ever be like my mother with her walls of double shelved books and piles of kids toys and three drawers of folded pillow cases; for one thing my ex and I share custody and that environment would cause tension. But I am also not a pristine IKEA catalogue person. Half my table is taken up with a puzzle and a canvas, my DVDs are double shelved on the breakfast bar, I made an art desk from a cabinet door and bookcases so I can provide the visual thesaurus of art things my kid needs.

But I also file my paperwork in big black boxes, and my notebooks and sketchbooks similarly. Books I've written or written in go in a different place too. I don't want my kid or those who survive me to have to go through my nude portraits to find my insurance details.

Rebuilding the ephemera of life makes ever choice to acquire meaningful in a complicated way.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:47 PM on March 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


We recently moved from a huge home where we had lived for over thirty years to a house that’s a better size for two people. I so wanted to take just what we really needed and yearned for the simplicity and sense of lightness I imagined it would bring to finally be free of all. That. Stuff.

However my partner feels the opposite and we ended up moving things we will never take out of boxes. When I realized how much it mattered to him, I gave in, and that brought its own lightness. It’s okay. We can stuff it in closets and in the storeroom. And we did.

I plan to outlive him, though, so our kids don’t have to deal with it.
posted by zenzenobia at 8:17 PM on March 15, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've read Ann Patchett's wonderful essay.

I've read everyone's stories here, each one of which seems relevant to me.

I think about the fact that my year and counting of "working from home" seems to have morphed into "living at my job," next to empty mail-order boxes that I seem to have trouble finding the will to put into recycling even though the bin is 10 feet from my outside door.

I think about the fact that my father will be 84 on Friday and my mother will be 86 in September and my sister, her husband, and I among us have agreed that the ship has sailed vis-a-vis their moving somewhere less unwieldy than the drafty, eccentric, several-hundred-year-old pile where they've lived for over 50 years. (In their 70s, they took a stab at checking out other smaller local places; each blamed the other for that effort's not going anywhere.)

But how to make sure they're safe and happy there over the coming years where they are? How to even start that conversation?

And I can see why, when cartoonist and only child (CW: infant death) Roz Chast went to her 95-year-old parents' small Flatbush apartment to clean it out after they went into assisted living, she wound up fleeing and paying the building superintendent to do it:
CHAST: when I moved them out of their apartment in which they'd lived for - from 1959 to I guess 2007, 2007...

TERRY GROSS: Four rooms.

CHAST: Four small rooms. Yeah. They never threw anything away, and it was not like there was anything quote valuable unquote. It was mostly just, you know, old beat up luggage and typewriters and my father's old, you know, French textbooks. He was a French and Spanish teacher [Chast's mother had been an assistant principal in the Brooklyn Public Schools for 42 years], and an old Rexograph machine [an early version of the photocopier] and, you know, bajillions of old bed slippers and umbrellas and shoes and towels, you know, where the nap was completely gone. Just detritus of decades. And when I was going through the stuff I would be in the apartment and I would think, well, OK, I want to keep this, and I want to keep that. It was very surreal, very bizarre.

And then at a certain point it was like, I don't want anything. I want like the photo albums and a few things off the wall. And I started like putting stuff in garbage bags because I thought maybe I could do this myself, and I filled up a few of them and it was like I had not even like done one percent. And I just finally, I wound up paying the super to empty it, and it was horrible in some ways because I just couldn't make any more trips out to Brooklyn to go through their (bleep). It was just I could not do it. I just had it.
posted by virago at 11:23 PM on March 15, 2021 [5 favorites]


I don't know if geek anachronism intended it but getting divorced "and loved out" is a vivid turn of phrase.
posted by zenon at 8:00 AM on March 16, 2021 [6 favorites]


That was absolutely a typo but also precisely what it was. My ex and I get along well and we carefully and consciously separated, and he helped me move my things and put together my new bed, in my best friends house. We still share tools and leftovers, and have dinner together with our kid regularly. I was loved the whole time, from his travel mug gift to the wrapped in tea towel mismatched kitchen knives from my grandmother to the beautiful 70s glasses sets from my mother to the kitchen mixer from my sister to the IKEA trips with my best friend and the collection of tiny Daiso mugs she bought me to the art on my walls my kid drew. I was loved out, in a multitude of ways.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:36 PM on March 16, 2021 [9 favorites]


In 2007 at age 21, I was driving back to college (I was a passenger) after winter break, and we got into a terrible accident and my best friend and her boyfriend died. Incidentally, I lost all of the physical things I valued as well - everything I simply “couldn’t live without” for a monthlong winter break - my brand new phone, my camera, my favorite shirt, my favorite purse, my favorite book, my favorite bra, my beloved wallet, my makeup... my things. I had previously been kind of a stuff-lover, but after that, I threw out most of my remaining clothes and many of the things that had decorated and littered my room. The stuff just seemed like nothing. I don’t recommend this method of breaking the stuff habit, but it did work for me.

My MIL has a beautiful 2400sf home with a 2-car garage that is so full only one car can park indoors, AND a storage unit, and complains that her things don’t fit. The woman has more than 80 wine glasses. (She is a normal person otherwise, not throwing galas, and only drinks on occasion.) I asked if we could have a few glasses, as our set had had a few casualties, and she told me she needed them but that we could borrow some. I do not look forward to the effort involved in the eventual purge, but I simultaneously also know it will be our gift to her - something she cannot do for herself.
posted by samthemander at 11:12 PM on March 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


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