Musings on trash, treasures and the material legacy of a well-loved life

I did it. Five years and change after my mother's death, I addressed the looming problem of All Her Stuff. With the love and support of friends and the broad back and strong shoulders of a young helper, I have now achieved the impossible.

The pile yielded, as I knew it would, things -- stuff, objects, paraphernalia, items, junk, trash, nonsense. Some were long-buried items that I missed and wanted. A few were surprises (Waterford Alana cordial glasses to match all the rest of her stuff? Who knew?) Some -- many more -- were meaningless bits and bobs that should have gone out the door decades ago. (Truly. I don't care how much Great Aunt Tress adored her ugly little basket-shaped wall plaque; when it has that many dings and chinks and holes in it, IT IS TRASH, Mother. There's not enough Krazy Glue on earth, and even if it could be repaired, it would still be ugly.)

There was avoidance. There was profanity. There were tears. There was fury that she hoarded uncounted boxes of meaningless, valueless crap right alongside our family's precious treasures. There was self-recrimination at my own anger, because at the end, she had lost the reasoning power to evaluate, edit and discard that which was trash and to genuinely cherish that which was pure gold. There were more tears, powerless, impotent tears masked by anger and resentment. I knew, but didn't want to admit, that I was grieving her death all over again. 

But a few of those "piles of crap" brought unbridled joy. I'm going to move her buffet into my living room, where the piano used to stand. It's a graceful, bowfront piece that's exactly the right size, and I've always loved it. In the "off season," her Waterford ship's decanter will stand in the center, flanked on both sides by my grandmother's 1920-something glass hurricane lamps. In the fall and winter, it will proudly host my ceramic pumpkins and jack o'lanterns, then Gillen's nutcrackers.

I found several more sets of Winfield China, the dishes I grew up with (my grandfather worked in this minor "California pottery" in the 1950s, just after they came here). Aesthetically, they're not quite "me," but just the sight of them brings back a lifetime of memories from childhood meals (not all happy memories, and very few delicious ones unless Daddy was cooking, but vital to my soul, nonetheless). I want those dishes and I need them. I sobbed when we found them -- complicated tears, tears of longing but also of joy.

Somehow, at the end of this loathsome, sweaty, dusty, cobwebby journey, there is peace.