Holding on While Letting Go: Clearing Out After a Parent Dies

Two boxes of her jewelry-making supplies, a box of jewelry she had made and had planned to sell, two oil prints of prominent Williamsburg, Virginia buildings, her iPod and cell phone, approximately 24 thumb drives that housed all of her photographs from when she used roam downtown Charleston before cancer spread and her body failed her. My mom spent much of her time taking pictures of the pineapple fountain, the cruise ships, quaint lamposts on East Bay, the intricate wrought iron gates, and countless birds, flowers, and buildings — the things that make Charleston, Charleston — these items are mostly all I have left of my mother’s belongings after she died in the early hours of Halloween in 2021.

What to Do With “Stuff” After Someone Dies

I’ve been staring at those two Williamsburg prints for over two years now, thinking about where to display them in my home, because that’s where her ancestors were from. Those prints, I thought, were my connection to the Bentley side of my family, the ones who descend from Matoaka and Jamestown.

Those things, the belongings that I’ve been holding onto since 2021, get moved and shuffled regularly. The iPod and cell phone are pushed to one side of the “junk drawer” when I’m looking for batteries or an errant soy sauce packet for our sushi takeout.

The box of her jewelry stares at me, waiting to be sorted and distributed to family members so they have “something to remember her by.”  The thumb drives, well, they stay in my desk drawer; I’m sure I’ll go through them . . . someday.

There’s a lot of guilt that surfaces when you’re working through figuring out what to do with those belongings that just don’t quite fit in your home. Some just aren’t nostalgic enough to display on the bookshelf, their existent screaming for all to see just how much you loved your mother. Other items suit her personality, but not your personality, style, home, or life for that matter.

Guilt makes us hold onto things that don’t serve us because we feel that if we let the thing go, we’re letting a piece of them go. Grief is funny like that. It makes mountains out of molehills. It puts conditions on the unconditional.

So what can you do when you’re feeling paralyzed, unable to move forward, and unable to clear out things that you know you don’t need or want?  I recently found myself thinking back to when I was 13 when my grandfather died, and then again back to my early twenties when my grandmother died.

There were things then too. A drawing tutorial book that belonged to my grandfather that I somehow lost in my countless moves and an autograph I obtained for my grandmother from radio broadcaster Norm Nathan — whom I had met at a Boston charity event. How she’d cherished that crumpled Faneuil Hall napkin.

When you move states as much as I have, things get misplaced, lost. But I was reminded that while at the time the things I lost each held a piece of my grandparents, or at least my history with them . . . over time, those tangible items didn’t matter much after all. When I tell my kids stories about my grandparents, I’m not scrambling to find that art book or that crumpled napkin to punctuate my heartfelt words. They’re not necessary.

And so it will be with the Williamsburg prints that suit neither my decor nor my style. As it will be with the jewelry that I pass along to her siblings. When I tell my mom’s story, her ancestry, and her life, I don’t need the dangly earrings she made to illustrate how crafty and creative she was.

Sparing My Children This Same Guilt

William Morris once said, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” As I move into the last year of my forties, I’m reminded that it’s only a matter of time before my children will be going through my belongings, feeling guilty and indecisive. I don’t want that for them. I want them to have big, bold, funny, sad, wonderful, tragic, beautiful stories instead.

A special memory passed along through generations, in the form of stories told is far more meaningful than any trinket or box of long-forgotten hobby supplies. So today I choose to clear my space to make room for all of the stories highlighting my mother’s memory.