What to do with stuff when people die
I don't know why this photo came up when I typed "home sweet home" in Flickr. (Image by mollyjolly via Flickr)
Buried in the cheer of the holiday weekend, there was this news item: Ruth Madoff, evicted from her $7.5 million home, by federal marshals.
Not a lot of people sympathize with the Madoffs. But Ruth’s predicament did remind me that I, too, recently left a longtime home and wondered what to take — what I could possibly take that would fill the hole in my heart.
Over the last year, I’ve thought a lot about the life of things. The house I grew up in was filled with stuff, as befitting a home of nearly 40 years for six people. After Mom died last August, my sister Emy took on the task of clearing out that house of stuff — sorting through the valuable (a chest of kimono), the meaningful (Mom’s oil paintings), and the crap.
Most of it was crap. A green glass clock. Touristy samurai swords. A one-string koto. Flower pots of every size. Prom dresses. Two shelves of empty perfume bottles.
The thing is, each of these things had a use. At one point, not so long ago, it had value, even meaning. I mean, Mom spent months twanging out Japanese folk songs on that dumb-ass instrument. And even though I looked at the empty bottle of Dior Poison and saw a recyclable, it still gave me odd comfort every time I arrived home and had to move it to get to the bottle of saline solution.
It occurs to me that the life of things is entirely contingent upon the life of its owner. With Mom gone, they transformed from stuff to trash.
In the end, I took so little. Unlike Ruth Madoff, I had a choice. I could have packed up that green clock. I could have humped that marble-topped bar back to my current home in New Jersey. Inside I would have found the 30-year-old bottle of Chivas that Dad kept refilling with cheap Suntory. (It appears my folks were abnormally attached to empty bottles.)
But I didn’t. There’s no rhyme or reason to what I did take. A couple of paring knives; a rectangular frying pan useful for making Japanese omelettes. I didn’t take the lifetime supply of pantyliners. I did take my Mom’s cosmetics pouch, including the sparkly eyeshadow I used on her corpse for her open-casket funeral.
Now the house is gone — razed by a developer minutes after I signed over the deed in March. Gone too is a life’s — or six lives’ — worth of crap. Meaningful, valuable crap.
I miss you, green glass clock.
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I guess part of who we are is the use we make of our surroundings- had a similar experience- twice- of cleaning out our family home of 30 years, then my mom’s apartment when she passed away. Stacks of old photos full of people I don’t know, various nondescript odds and ends. But as the child of packrats who grew up during the Depression, things like the 200+ empty hairspray bottles defy explanation…
When my father was sick, he kept giving stuff to me and my kids so he could either a) have the satisfaction of us having it or b) wouldn’t sell his collectibles after his death for less than they were worth because he had so damn many of them. Sometimes it was one or the other, sometimes it was both. I now am the proud owner of, among other things, about 40 promotional hats. Then again, my 10-year-old daughter treasures the old coins her granddad gave her.
I visited my grandfather right before he died. He took me into his room, opened up a gigantic armoir, and hauled out dozens of neckties. I had just graduated college and he wanted me to have his ties. To him they represented a lifetime of honest work that he would never have the pleasure of doing again; to me they were wide and striped and ugly. I took them but never wore them. Eventually I threw them in a Salvation Army clothes bin by the diner.
And after my grandmother died years later, I inherited that huge armoir. I took off the doors, painted it yellow and blue, and stuffed it with books and toys for my daughter.
In response to another comment. See in context »Did you read about that exhibit in I think it’s MoMA by a Chinese artist who displays all the crap in his mother’s home: 15 empty tubes of tooth paste, that sort of thing? I think it’s common to keep junk. Lord knows I do. If I died today, my kin would unearth a box of stained burp cloths.
In response to another comment. See in context »Lisa, I blogged about this exhibit. The hoarding — related to his mom’s poverty and loss of her husband — had a pretty powerful backstory and seeing it at MOMA it leaves quite an impression.