Throwing Out Your Loved Ones’ Stuff: A Letter to CBC The Current

A letter in response to an article I caught the last few minutes of the other day:

Friday August 25, 2017

How unwanted family heirlooms create a divide with aging parents

Dear Current,

I am one of those apparently clinging oldsters—not so old, actually, but one who places value on belongings kept over many years. Not economic value. I have not owned anything worth a dime nor have my friends, by and large, who have died and whose homes I have helped to dismantle.

Stuff costs money to house. Along with dumping our inherited belongings before we have had the chance to really understand what we are ditching, we fill up every inch of our increasingly tiny homes with random things that, often, we would throw away first if only we had the mental space to sort it through.

I have lived for over thirty years in the same room. Compared to most people I don’t have much stuff. But I certainly have enough. My furniture is carefully acquired antiques, none worth much except in the warmth their soft woody lights brings to my eye. I have books, mostly old, beautiful to me for their age and content, again, few worth much in dollars. I have petalware plates and bowls lifted from the trunk of a friend who had just died, a neighbor I had cared for increasingly over many years until I was his main support. I have knickknacks, including an Olde Englande teaset that is cracked and glued together. These I inherited when my Northern Irish friend died, suddenly and distressingly. I have, too, her granny’s potato masher, worthless to her brothers, and some pieces of Tyrone crystal that she adored, as do I, but her executor couldn’t move them at the yard sale. I have souvenirs of my family—Dad’s old sweater and cap, Mum’s last oil painting, gifts from nieces and nephews, some from siblings, too. Meaningless to anyone but me.

When I have a friend facing death, I do everything I can, if I am able, to support them and connect with them in their present life. And when they have died, if I am able, I sit in their room or rooms, see what they saw, touch their obscure and well familiar belongings, reinforcing what I knew of them, learning something more. If I can take some memento home then I bring a piece of that friend with me. Every time I see it, year in and out, I see that friend.

When I die, no one is likely to want many of my things. We all already have too much stuff. But this saddens me. I have spent a lifetime making as gentle a home as possible; I would like to contribute that gentleness to the people I love. I would like them to pass the old wardrobe and not just think, that damn door is always drifting open, but, Auntie Casey is saying hi to me.

In many ways, I have felt incompletely understood by people. I have this odd sense that if they took the time to be with my things, as they might not have thought to be with me (that is, still and receptive, rather than chatty as we usually are—as much my doing as anyone's), they might know me better after death than before it. Or, perhaps, as I have done with my friends, invent new versions of me to carry with them. Even that is a communication. A continuation.

Some of us toss out everything but the “best” stuff from our parent’s homes when they have died or are going into care, and later keenly wish we had not let everything go. We are so into being practical that we forget that we are something more than that, too. I regret throwing my dear friend’s letters away because there were so many of them. He is long dead and I can never have those conversations again. Would it really have been so hard to keep them?

Sure, there is a time to let stuff go, even beloved stuff. But it should not be rushed, if there is any other option. Besides everything else, that stuff can open the doors of our hearts, and help us heal—long after our loved ones have turned to dust.

So, divest away, oh modern practical people. But do not throw out the deep connections that are possible through the loving acceptance of a well meant gift. One that will be there long after your loved one is gone. Think long and hard before you pitch. You can always toss it at another time. But you can never bring it back.


Image: Parents see heirlooms. Their kids see junk to clean up. It's a keepsake dilemma for families. (Pixabay.com)

Bottles on a Vast Sea: Letters to the Radio (1) CBC Rewind

Bottles on a Vast Sea:

Letters to the Radio

I listen to thoughtful radio. Sometimes, unavoidably, I listen to thoughtless radio, too, and sometimes that’s even fun.  But mostly if I am going to fill my head with sound I like it to be thought-provoking, informative, hopeful perhaps—I want it to feed me, heart, mind, and soul, in some way.

Of course, this leads to responsive thoughts in my own private cranium, and the odd time I want to express them to the speaker. The obvious way to do that is to write a note to the radio program, an email or a comment on their website or even a tweet. Seldom do I get a reply, though occasionally a producer will say something brief and encouraging. My thoughts go bobbing off on the vast internet sea, to be read or ignored, but there is something useful in doing it even without the response, so I carry on, a little sheepishly, my one-way correspondence with the mute unknown.

After some time of doing this I suddenly thought, somebody might actually be interested in these thoughts of mine. So I am collecting a few together to toss off into the sea again, messages in bottles, on their own solitary journeys once again.

CBCRewind with Michael Enright

ON THE ROAD 1972 (3 July 2013)

I have written before to say how much I love this program.  I'll say it again. So rich.

It was strange to listen today to the boys interviewed so close in time to when I myself left home and hitch-hiked around the countryside. So familiar: the slang, the inquisitiveness, the delight. I wonder, if there had been any girls interviewed (I am using the words we used then, not the ones—Men and Women—I would apply now) if they would have been any more honest about life on the road. Which is not to say these fellows were lying, only that they were leaving out an awful lot, cleaning things up terribly for the interviewer. Or maybe they were a different class of traveller than I generally met.

That sounds like I have some sour grapes but I don’t, though I must say along with the wonders of the road that they describe, which I, too, experienced and still treasure, it was an often frightening and sometimes very painful time. I was younger than any of the interviewees. I climbed out my East Vancouver bedroom window one night three months before I turned fourteen and set out on an adventure that was nothing like what I expected and which I would not have had the nerve to embark on had I had an inkling of what I was about to do.

I wasn’t a successful student or cold weather employee bent on exploring Canada or a young philosopher out to discover life. I was a grade eight dropout and runaway who discovered a mass of young people who were almost adults compared to me, who alternately aided and exploited me, shared their wisdom and their flea-bitten puppies and a world I had hardly suspected. Of marijuana, hashish, belladonna koolaid, and self-appointed gurus who set my adolescent teeth on edge. Of young pregnant women abandoned by boyfriends and trying to use sex to attract a “father” for their unborn children. Of bikers whose sense of humour was frightening and degrading to me. Of guys my dad’s age who had wives and daughters at home but who thought it would be great to be given comfort by a castaway like me. Of gentle First Nations girls who tried to help me after I'd been hurt once more. Drop-in medical clinics, social workers and Christians with a mission to save me, old rubbies who taught me about logging camps and rolling cigarettes and what it was like to live on the street. Well-meaning doctors, disinterested cops, kindly farmers, prurient young men who I thought “liked” me but that wasn’t quite it.

Being on the road taught me about the intense beauty of the West, the towns and orchards and ditches and fields, the southern mountains and the northern taiga. They taught me about history, about European immigrants whose view of the world was so different from mine, about hippies and their ideologies. Jesus freaks, Kraft dinner, panhandling, throwing up, lice. I relaxed a little, started wearing a dog collar (not done in those days), discovered how hard it was for me to risk displeasing anyone, no matter who or what a wanker, realized how comfortable I was with wilderness, how unalike I felt with people, though I loved or though I loathed them.

It’s difficult to express in a few words how enriching those awe-filled times were, despite the hardships. I don’t know who I would have become without that unparalleled opportunity to see a thousand different perspectives all at once, a literal kaleidoscope of eyes, minds, histories, obstacles, and aspirations. I had emerged from the parental home with some creativity and little confidence intact. Crushed by a milieu that thought me weird and my ideas dangerous, being among idealists, however flawed, among people who at least thought it was okay to try new things, be wild, take risks, be unconventional (even though underneath they were as girdled by conformity as their parents were) gave me the first outside world confirmation of my mother’s strange philosophy. That we could be other than what the world tried to force us into. That we were good and alive and valuable. That somewhere in life we might find permission to be truly free.

If one of my nieces or nephews were to take to the road now, I would die of fear for them. I look back affectionately on streets that had no drug more dangerous than heroin, at a country that didn’t yet know mass murderers, where one thirteen year old, anyway, was never forced into prostitution. It was dangerous, gloomy, greedy, and often stupid then. It is a world far more terrifying and cynical now.

And yes, I do pick up hitch-hikers now and then, when I have a car and am travelling. They are younger than I ever learned to be, and every bit as eager to be alive. I wish them well.

On This Rare Occasion I Got a Response

Marieke Meyer (5 July 2013)

Hi Casey:

Thanks so much for your great letter and for telling us about your experience. Very thoughtful. You should write a book (or at least an article) about it!

Marieke

Note: Unfortunately, the episode I was responding to is no longer on the website. At least, I can't find it. You might try writing them a letter!