Your Life in a Box

My Father in law died in November. For the past several months we have slowly dismantled his home. His wife died five years prior to him. There was a lot of work to be done in emptying the house and preparing it for sale! A lot!

A lot of belongings can be gathered in 80 years. That is how old he was when he died-half past 80! That’s a long, full life by any standard! As we gathered and sorted and tossed and stored his life was seen in its various stages by the “things” we were sifting through.  We would pick up an object and say, “Oh, yeah.  I remember this! He got this when he retired from Westing House.” We might say, “Oh, I remember this sweater. He wore it all the time. Who got that for him, wasn’t it … ?”  It was once again a walk down memory lane.

The house closed last week. We did one last trip over there yesterday. We had to clean out a closet yet and the rest of the belongings in the garage! There ended up being a huge pile stacked in the middle of the driveway to be thrown out! Some things, of course, we kept for posterity sake, with no real value other than emotional. There were a few things that were actually useful. For the most part though, most of it was tossed.

I commented to my SIL, “Is this what a life comes down to-people throwing all your junk away once you’re gone?” She paused and looked at me, and I at her. It was a quick second.  It was but a flash of sentimentality that could have swept us along, but we had been doing this for months now. We had worked through our grief.  It made us think though in a quick moment about our own mortality, our life, and our “things”, and just what people might find and toss or keep after we are gone.  She looked down a second and then said, “Yeah. You wouldn’t find that much for me though, really.”

I thought to myself that I bet that there would be a whole lot more than she realized. I also wondered how much junk still clutters my life. I try to rid myself of clutter and junk.  It is so easy to get behind the eight ball on that one!