This weekend.....I broke down and cried. My house has been taken over by my parents' things...boxes...furniture....papers... that I still need to go through and either save, donate or sell.
Although it took me a year to sell the house from the date of their deaths.....a year is not a lot of time to deal with their 80 plus years of accumulation.....when you are dealing with two people who were organized mini-hoarders.
When you layer this with the fact that I need new carpeting...need to repair a wall....need to paint a wall or two....and I can't get at my needs because of their stuff.....it's real nerve racking.
So I decided there were only two options....move all their stuff out of my house into a storage unit where I could pluck a few boxes a week and work on them....thus clearing my house so I can clean and do maintenance or put things in the garage. My hub didn't like the idea of moving trucks and hauling things far off....so he offered to help me start loading things up in our garage. We swept and cleaned and tidied the numerous boxes there....then started hauling stuff off....only keeping photos and materials that would be sensitive to heat in the house.
I can see progress already....and when I peered into some of the boxes I was stunned with some of the stuff I saved.....a box of "good" rags??? I guess I wasn't thinking too clearly.
Today....for the rest of the day....I'm going to continue to haul out stuff....and free our house from all the boxes. When this is done....I'll do our normal cleaning and repair work....then tackle things bit by bit.
Sometimes I am confused as to whether or not I'm "wasting" my time and life on stuff.
It's a bad feeling.
I'm hoping when the "stuff" is cleared out....life will feel better and the task of editing my parent's things won't be so overwhelming.
Sometimes and some days...I just want to donate everything and be done with it....but there is a part of me....perhaps because I am an only child.....which looks upon this stuff as a responsibility.
My parents....my maternal and paternal grandparents.....all their memories and all the things that made them who they are.....rest on my shoulders. If I don't organize the pictures....if I don't write the stories.....if I don't cull the junk from the true keepsakes....no body else will. Many people...many generations of families have died without leaving a trace....I suppose that is an option too....why hold so strongly on pretending that their lives were so important in the scheme of life?
I don't know how to answer that question....they and me .....we're just ordinary folks....what does it matter if our memories and who we are .....are preserved?
Perhaps the yearning for meaning....for a sense that all of this ....the breathing in and breathing out was worth something.
All I know right now...is for the next couple of hours...I will cull, discard, and repack stuff up and move it....and I will probably have to commit to one more year of work.....to get all this generational stuff organized.
I hope it was a good use of time, of life.
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