A User's Guide to Discarding Your Dead Loved One's Things

I hope you're not looking for practical, helpful advice based on the title of this post.  One, I don't have any, and two, if you're looking for advice, it means you've found yourself in the position I've found myself in, and for that, I am sorry.  Simply put, it sucks.

Before I could tackle the things of my departed mother, I needed to tackle the things of the nearly departed me.  After twenty years of living in New York, I felt aimless, drifting, unhappy, with not much to show for anything except agita and a not so healthy dose of confusion.  So I decided to give up my apartment of nearly ten years and tossed virtually everything that was inside it.  I made daily treks to Goodwill, racking up hundreds of dollars in Uber rides there.  I was scolded by my building management - aka the garbage police - for throwing out a plastic ruler and an alarm clock. Apparently these are items you cannot discard willy nilly in NYC.  Who knew?  I successfully refrained from losing my shizz all over the not so gentle man who yelled at me waving aforementioned ruler in my face.  Short on patience on a good day, after weeks of packing and tossing all of my worldly goods - and being disgusted by how much of the world I could have seen if only I had accumulated fewer goods - patience had long since been deposited on an earlier run to Goodwill, and I feel fortunate that I didn't take that ruler and find a new place for it that day.

What remains.

See how my cat is like, "What the eff?"  He spent the entire day running around cat screaming, worrying he was next to go.

Which is how I found myself on a wickedly humid July day sans many things of my own but with lots and lots of baggage moving back into my childhood home to tackle the things of another.

I'll admit it was long overdue.  Regarding her estate, my mother passed last July and I had yet to do anything except notify a few key people and, for obvious reasons, discard the bed linens in which she died.   As practical and thrifty as she was, I knew she could justify my throwing those out.  Even today, there are tons of calls I have not yet made, accounts I have not yet closed.

Enter dumpster, stage right.  I filled the hell out of that dumpster, with precious treasures such as this one, for which I am surely going to Hell.  I'll see some of you there, and we'll have a good laugh about it.

Jesus Christ.  Literally.

Having spent most of her life without a lot of money and part of her life with a husband who liked to burn and sell anything dear to her, my mother was someone who wasn't attached to things.  Which kinda made my job easy.   Well, easyish.  Because it's kind of depressing to see a person's life reduced to things. Who was I to judge what should stay and what should go?   I tried to put myself in her shoes.  Baby shirt carefully preserved that belonged to my brother who passed away at age 5 - keep.  Manuals for every appliance she ever bought and 37 pairs of reading glasses - toss.  Though I am sorry that I threw those glasses out actually, as I can tell you, typing this, I could really have used them.  I was surprised by what she saved, and touched.  I had never considered my mom to be a sentimental person really, but I found tons of old report cards, artwork we had created, Mother's Day cards.  Not being a mother myself, maybe I don't know that there's a law that you can't throw that stuff out, but still, it brought me to tears.

I worked and worked and was a busy little bee, not stopping until the dumpster was full.  Here she is in all of her glory.

Summer in the Hamptons.  Jealous, are you?

I felt proud.  Accomplished.  Devastated.  Panicked.   I hadn't kept enough.  I worried I had lost her scent, one of the many things I could never replace and I knew the exact item I wanted back - her robe, which she wore constantly the last several months of her life.  But I couldn't even dumpster dive for anything because it had rained heavily.  I cursed the one time in my life I overcame my hoarder like tendencies but deep down I knew it was for the best.  I can't spend the rest of my life carrying around that robe.  And besides, that robe smelled of unhappy times - medicine and sickness and the inevitable, not the vibrant mother I wanted to remember.

When all was said and done, of her clothing I kept two things - at my niece's request, the suit she wore to my niece's wedding, and a little shawl she used to wear around her shoulders.  I put the shawl away so safely that I sprung up in the middle of the night last night worried I had no idea where it is - and I don't - but it's here somewhere, safe from any future Marie Kondo-inspired cleaning sprees.

Having spent the past three months here in this house where I grew up, I feel comfortable and comforted, but I know it's not forever.   It's been positive and negative.  I feel good here, but out of step with any regular routine and life.  I'm grateful to my employer for allowing me to work remotely and enjoying being so close to family and old friends.  All in all, it's been a healthy place for me to look backward and look forward, contemplating my next move with a little less baggage.

Emphasis on little.  I still have enough to fill many more dumpsters - literally and metaphorically - but this is a good start.

I just wish I hadn't thrown out that Hanson MMM Bop cassingle. That thing might be worth something someday.