From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (7.3MB)
Subscribe: More
My uncle had lost his powers of speech by the time he died. In his hospital bed, surrounded by his loved ones, he used a bead board to spell out what he wanted to say during his final days. At one point, my cousin told me, everyone leaned in close because it seemed like he wanted to say something important. C-H-A-N-G-E—the whole family sounded out the word—change!—and wondered what important words might follow. T-H-E O-I-L F-I-L-T-E-R eventually came through. He was reminding my aunt to do a job he had always done on their furnace. For some reason, letting go of this detail was critical for him as he departed the planet. These were some of his final words.
My mother, who weakened and died slowly from cancer over three years, was very focused about cleaning up the house and other affairs before she went. Once when I came to visit she asked me to go to the huge mess of a basement and clean it up. “Just throw it all away,” she told me. I spent the afternoon straightening and cleaning, but quite quickly realized that the “everything” she was telling me to throw out was my father’s stuff—my father, still living, still planning to stay in the house. When I told her I wasn’t going to get rid of his stuff, she got really mad and, uncharacteristically, yelled at me that I wasn’t helping at all. Stunned, and tired and grimy from several hours of hard work, I yelled back, “You get to die, but I’m still going to be here with him, getting blamed for his stuff being gone!”
My mother was clear about what she gained from letting go of old baggage. For decades my parents, both teachers, had owned a farm in central Ohio, where they spent many of their summers. Once a family center, with huge gardens and dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins in and out all summer, this was now an abandoned mess of tall weeds and brambles, surrounding a fallen barn and mouse-eaten house. After my parents sold it, my mother said, “As long as I worried about the horrible state the farm was in, I couldn’t remember any of the good times we had there. The moment we sold it, I got it back! Now I can savor memories of all those summers I loved so much.”
After my mother died I saw better why she would want to just throw out my father’s stuff. He was a hoarder. He kept certain rooms locked so that none of us could see in them; when he died we discovered they were full of giant rubber bins of papers, ranging from critical financial and legal documents to newspaper circulars from 22 years before. In the ten years that he lived after my mother died, the entire house began to resemble those locked rooms more and more.
When my father died, I was tasked with finding and sorting all of the financial documents in the house. This took over a week. I couldn’t just look in a drawer and say, “Nope, this is family photos,” because every single drawer, ever single folder in a file drawer, every single closet, was filled with such a random assortment of things that you never knew where you would find something essential.
After my mother died, my father lost interest in tending to details such as filing taxes or responding to collections agencies. So we never knew what might be necessary to close out his estate. At some point, I definitely felt as if we should just throw everything out—or, more precisely, have an estate sale company come in and clean it out, sell what they could and empty the place. I was so overwhelmed with his stuff—my mother was right, most of it absolute trash—that I couldn’t access my grief. Like my mother with the farm, my stress about dealing with his stuff blocked my ability to hold on to memories of happier times.
My sister, however, had a different path to grieving. She needed to touch every item in the house. And so, my brothers and I backed away, benefiting from this need of hers as she spent week after week sorting and examining. I never asked my sister how much of his stuff she took to her own over-stuffed house, because I really don’t want to know. I do know that while she cleaned my father’s house, I was at home taking bags and boxes of my own excess stuff to the thrift store, cleaning out old files, and otherwise trying to divest myself of whatever I could.
We each walk very different paths when it comes to grief, as we work our way through the complicated process of figuring out what we can best hold onto, and what we need to let go. It is my hope that there is always room for many different ways to live—and to let go of—our brief and precious lives.
- From Your Minister - July 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - June 1, 2020
- From Your Minister - May 1, 2020
