When my mother died, I had to go through a house full of a lifetime of stuff. I remember thinking about certain items: What was my mother's relationship to this? What would she want me to do with it? What is my responsibility toward this thing?
Some things are obvious. Treasures, like my grandmother's sapphire earrings or her rosebush; or the cutting boards my father made; or both grandmothers' sewing machines, were clear-cut keepers.
It was all the other stuff that left me indecisive and muddled.
Decluttering now, through my own lifetime collection of this and that and doodads and gizmos and whatnot, has me reflecting on this. It's hard to lose a parent; who wants to make it harder by burdening loved ones with unanswerable questions, not only about what to keep and what to toss, but more to the point, about what to treasure?
My thinking on this has been influenced in part by Australian-American author Peter Walsh's book, Let It Go: Downsizing Your Way To A Richer, Happier Life. The book is compassionate and encouraging, and definitely not prescriptive in a do-this-then-do-that way. It offers good recommendations about how to reframe one's thinking about one's stuff.
And that's what I've been trying to do: reframe my thinking about my stuff.
But reviewing the accumulated paraphernalia of a lifetime raises other questions, including, What do I want to be remembered for? What do I want my legacy to be?
Because I'm a list maker and a generator of personal documents, I'm beginning to address those questions by writing some things down that I hope will make the process of traversing my (remaining) stuff way, way easier for my progeny after I die. When my mother died, I kept looking for a letter of some sort that would resolve all my unanswered questions. I think there will always be unanswereds when a parent dies—they lived a whole lifetime before you were a gleam in God’s eye—but I’m attracted to the idea of trying to offer a little bit of clarity around certain issues with a select group of tailored documents.
Here's an important organizing idea from Walsh that undergirds this initiative: Only a few things should enjoy the status of treasures. If you have many, many treasures, the value of them all is diluted and cheapened.
Here are the documents I'm considering:
*A document that chronicles the history behind each treasured item. For example, my paternal grandmother's sewing machine was the tool that allowed her to support her many children after her husband died unexpectedly when his youngest child, my father, was one year old. Many years later, my father designed my mother's white velvet wedding gown and he used that machine to sew it together.
*A document about the beliefs and ideas that are the real legacy I want to pass on. What are the ideas that have been life-changing and formative for me and that I'd like my heirs to be aware of if not embrace for themselves? Off the top of my head—and of course, this is something I'd want to give thought to—I'd include Dorothy Day's idea of radical love, with its ability to heal society and individuals; Hildegard von Bingen's understanding of viriditas, the green life energy that results in the formation of flowers, foliage, and fruit (like Dylan Thomas's "the force that through the green fuse pushes the flower") and the analogous life energy that makes possible healing, growth, and evolution in humans; Carl Jung's circumambulation, which includes the idea that the things one is drawn to in life are significant—not to be reasoned away or ignored—and may presage some essential later development of the self.
*A document about the values I hold dear, and which I absolutely hope that my children will embody and carry forward. Again, off the top of my head—honesty; integrity; hard work; kindness; tender-heartedness; the primacy of the natural world; the primacy of conscience; the oneness of all life; the significance of the unseen; an emphasis on gratitude; care and celebration of the body; nurturing of important relationships; the essential importance of poetry, music, art, and dance; lifelong growth, improvement, and learning; and the willingness to formulate, articulate, and defend a minority opinion, to be the cheese that "stands alone," like in the Farmer In The Dell game.
*A document sharing communications I experienced with my mother after she died, along with my hope that my children will remain open to "hearing" from me, even though my physical self has passed.
*A recounting of a dream that I consider an essential communication from our shared consciousness.
*Blessings on each child, and clear reminders of their many individual and collective strengths.
*An official document of liberation, stating that loved ones going through my stuff can do with it what makes them happy, without added guilt or other emotional or psychological burden.