what happens to my stuff when i die
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What's Going to Happen to All the Crap I've Accumulated When I Die?
All beyond America, we boomers are finding ourselves stuck with heirlooms and mementos that nosotros can't give away.
Yous gather upwardly a lot of flotsam and jetsam in a lifetime. What happens to all your stuff after you die? Illustration by Nathan Hackett
Not too long ago, we had guests over to the house — a rare event anymore, even every bit we all slowly reenter the Globe of Other People. The occasion was an almanac picnic we host for relatives, back on again afterwards a summer skipped considering of COVID. As I welcomed the first arrivals in the living room, I felt compelled to apologize for all the crapola lining my bookcase shelves. I could run into my niece and nephew taking in the array of ancient elementary-schoolhouse fine art projects, nesting dolls, Rubik'south Cubes, animal carvings, music boxes and pieces of driftwood with a sort of nervous curiosity.
"They're for Lucy," I explained, referring to my two-yr-old granddaughter. "She likes to play with them."
They nodded, looking not entirely convinced.
I don't arraign them. I'm not really a knickknack kind of daughter. I never accept been. Or, at least, I never used to be. I do my own dusting and vacuuming, so the idea of having shelves filled with quaint petty tchotchkes that accept to exist removed and and then put dorsum into place every week was never appealing. For most of my life, I ran a tight memorabilia ship.
But then I got old, and somehow, I started having more than stuff. People died — my dad, uncles, aunts, cousins — and we survivors had to divvy upward their treasures: sometime family photograph albums, communist china, curios, silverware. Children moved out merely somehow neglected to take their belongings with them. Past lives added up: What do y'all practice with the records from the Girl Scout troop you oversaw for a dozen years? The hundreds of children's books yous assembled over the decades that turn out to exist unwoke now that your kids are finally having kids? And the cookbooks, since you've more or less quit cooking completely, except for those rare occasions, like a picnic for relatives, when y'all take people over and they gape at your trinket-stuffed shelves?
1 thing you don't do, clearly, is pass things on to your children. Mine are such minimalists that I can't even interest them in actually choice items like the family silver. "Too ornate," my daughter Marcy said apologetically when I offered information technology to her. "And won't it need to be polished?"
"I accept silverware," my son Jake told me, simply stating a fact. That he might on some future occasion require salad forks, soup spoons and butter knives for 12, all monogrammed with initials that aren't his, was apparently unfathomable. And, come to retrieve of it, he's probably right.
I'm not lone in realizing that my offspring aren't interested in my stuff. All beyond America, we boomers are stuck with heirlooms and mementos that we can't requite away. Generations who grew upward to respect speed and convenience — who continue everything they need in their phones, thanks, and sigh audibly behind yous in the grocery-store line when you pull out your checkbook — aren't probable to clutter up their lives with Great-Grandma's mahogany pulsate tabular array or the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their homes are sleek and streamlined, pared down, meant for easy movement and recalibrated lives. They travel calorie-free.
Part of me admires that. I, likewise, was young once. I tin can remember the attraction of thinking I could pivot at any moment and alter my surroundings, head off to Paris or New York City with nada more than than the clothes on my back.
The remainder of me laments that I tin't find homes for these ancestral items — that they, and the whole trailing history they hold for me of Christmas mornings and crowded Sun dinners and barely but fondly remembered elderly relations, are blighted to air current up on shelves at Goodwill or the table of a yard sale, to take up residence, if they're lucky, among other people'due south families, other people's lives.
•
My hubby Doug's mom, who's 89, is going through her second stage of deaccession at the moment. Two decades ago, she and her late husband moved from the home they built themselves when they were married, in the foothills of Key PA, to a much smaller one-story identify in an over-55 customs. She'south pondering moving once more now, to assisted living. That means Doug and I are going through our second stage of parrying her proffers of taxidermied deer heads and World War II uniforms and backyard ornaments. This time around, I feel her pain — well, maybe not for the deer heads. But when things have meant a lot to you or someone you loved for a long time, it's hard to consign them to oblivion.
My situation is, ahem, somewhat further complicated by the fact that a lot of my most cherished belongings — the blue-and-white ceramic elephant occupying the fireplace hearth, the mid-century sideboard in the dining room, the Art Deco candlesticks — accept no meaning for anyone. They're just items I picked upwardly at thrift stores back when Marcy and Jake went off to higher and I made (I think; I'm not in therapy) a stab at filling the hole their absence left with shopping. In other words, I took other people'southward discarded crap and made it mine. I bought stuff but because I liked information technology and no longer had to worry the kids and their friends would pause it with errant field-hockey sticks. Information technology would exist a lot to ask anyone else to adopt that elephant. Fifty-fifty though — and I think this shows admirable restraint — it was part of a pair, and I only bought one.
At this point, my home is then knickknack-heavy that it resembles a Victorian parlor crammed with scrimshaw and broidery and antimacassars and artwork made from man hair. This isn't all that odd, I suppose, considering it's a Victorian business firm. I could try to justify my interior design by saying I'm but taking the compages back to its roots. Alas, that doesn't business relationship for the Rubik'due south Cubes.
Every now and again, I'll noodle around online to try and figure out if anything I ain is worth any money, hoping I might entice the kids to take it into custody that way: "Hey, I saw a couple of candlesticks just like this on 1stDibs, and they were worth 500 bucks!" Apparently, though, I don't take an unerring center for quality or value, simply for elephants. Pity. What'south worse, I've begun to reluctantly have furnishings I once gifted to Marcy and Jake that they now desire to render to me, as their careers build and they're able to hit Wayfair up for household appurtenances they actually like.
•
I've been somewhat heartened lately by stories in the press about how thrift-store shopping is the original recycling and is gaining new cachet among immature consumers drawn to its ecological pluses. This should add another pointer to my quiver of arguments for getting either Marcy or Jake to adopt my wrought iron found stand up when I'm ready to offload information technology. Why buy new stuff and add to the world's pollution and congestion when I have a house filled to the skirt with useful and unique items? I'll even deliver them to you! Of grade, this rationale sort of undercuts my refusals of Doug'south mom'south mounted deer.
And then at that place's the grandmillennial fashion of interior blueprint, which one "lifestyle blogger" (I hope never to use that expression without scorn quotes) recently alleged "the Jackie O. of interiors" — it never goes out of way. I understand it juxtaposes wallpaper, floral fabrics, patterned pillows and upholstery, assuming colors, and furniture with "classical elements" like cabriolet legs and curved artillery. This is, literally, a description of my living room, so long every bit you include the elephants. (In addition to the china ane in the fireplace, there's a rattan one that's a plant stand, another carved from soapstone, i that'southward part of a series of animals surrounding the rim of a wooden bowl from Kenya, and a very nice FAO Schwarz blimp version that crouches, hugging a smaller stuffed bunny, on a curlicued metal bench whose absorber I covered in a handsome brocade. Hey, whimsy is my middle name.)
Living through a pandemic has a fashion of making you think about death and dying. And thinking about death and dying makes me wonder: What's going to happen to all the stuff that I've accumulated?
Meantime — and forgive me if I audio a tad bitter — our home is the repository for all sorts of items the kids experience free to borrow and and then return to us, just and so they'll never accept to buy and shop them for themselves. Backpacking equipment, tents, ladders, roof carriers, gardening utensils, power tools and coolers of every shape and size roost in our basement and garage, like a homeowner's lending library of wonders. In that location was a fourth dimension, not then long agone, when Doug and I grew cantankerous if a chainsaw or camping ground stove was checked out and wasn't returned. Now, we cross our fingers and pray the missing goods will just savour their new, more than agile domicile.
That'due south non to mention the books burrowed in boxes all through the business firm — the aforementioned kiddie books and cookbooks, sure, simply besides all the photograph albums, the hardback ready of Harry Potter, the Scouting manuals, the complete Baby-Sitters Guild and Goosebumps oeuvres. … Add in the VCR tapes and CDs, and what you have is a time capsule of middle-grade American life circa 2005. We should only declare the identify a museum and accuse for tours.
At some point shortly after I had kids, my dad announced that he was going to throw everything belonging to me and my siblings the hell out if nosotros didn't come and remove it from his house within 30 days. I think he'd have made good on the threat, too; he wasn't every bit sentimental equally I seem to be.
Just living through (so far, anyhow) a pandemic has a way of making you recollect about death and dying. And thinking about expiry and dying makes me wonder: What's gonna happen to the elephants? The cathay sets? The lovingly stored-away class photos of the kids from preschool through graduation gowns? It'due south easy enough to say, "Put it all on eBay!" Only nobody on eBay wants those old course photos. And I've yet to see anyone's VCR tape collection ring upwards big bucks on Antiques Roadshow.
Marie Kondo insists I should strip myself of anything that no longer brings me joy. There would be a lot less stuff in my business firm if I made joy my barometer. But information technology wouldn't reflect what I've weathered nearly as well.
I could always stuff all this crap into Hefty numberless and toss it out with the trash. I mean. It is trash, right? Stripped of my memories of when and how information technology was acquired and used, it'southward non worth dick. At this bespeak, I'm concerned about not burdening my offspring (and Doug, who's such a workout fanatic that he's certain to outlive me, though if he doesn't, just saying, that will be the sweetest revenge e'er) with going through it all. I faced that task after my dad died, which is i reason there's so much memorabilia at my house, including Dad's and my mom'due south old yearbooks, their wedding and honeymoon albums, and a 20-book black-and-gold-bound set of Shakespeare's works, bought early on concluding century ane volume at a fourth dimension by my grandmother from a door-to-door salesman, faithfully preserved by my dad, and now my responsibility. At some signal, somewhere downwardly the line, someone is gonna have to say: Enough! To hell with it all!
I don't think, though, that it tin can be me. That nag Marie Kondo insists I should strip myself of annihilation that no longer brings me joy. Life isn't all about joy, though. It'due south too about wistfulness and grief and hurting. In that location'd exist a lot less stuff in my business firm if I made joy my barometer. Just it wouldn't reflect what I've weathered nearly as well.
•
As I drive through America, now that we're more or less gratis to drive through America again, I marvel at the acres and acres of country devoted to cocky-storage units — those attached garage-similar edifices stretching across vast vacant fields along highways. According to the most contempo statistics I can turn up, the manufacture is now worth $39.five billion annually. More than a tenth of American households rent self-storage units, at an boilerplate cost of simply over $89 a calendar month. That'southward more than a thousand bucks a year … to pay for empty space.
The self-storage industry got its commencement in the 1960s in Texas, where houses don't have basements, and has been burgeoning always since. What's weird is that the business model has grown and thrived even as the places where we live got bigger, morphing from rowhouses to split-levels to McMansions. In 1973, the boilerplate single-family American habitation took up 1,660 square feet. By 2015, it had grown to 2,687. And nonetheless, at that place isn't room for our stuff. Imagine what my grandmother, parsing out pennies for her handsome prepare of Shakespeare while feeding and clothing vii kids during the Bully Depression, would have made of a house with a dedicated gift-wrapping room. Accept you ever seen how tiny the closets in a Philly rowhouse are?
I used to wonder what lay backside all those identical blank doors of all those storage spaces. I imagined frantic consumers avariciously laying in circus-style popcorn poppers from QVC, garish Christmas inflatables, unused pressure cleaners, decades of old taxation records, bins and bins of inexpensive fast-fashion clothing in sizes ranging, per the latest nutrition trend and their ability to stick with information technology, from small through extra-large. Now, I've softened. I'thousand more tolerant. I see them crammed instead with layered accumulations that are the natural outgrowth of our nation's prosperity, as generation afterward generation washed up on America's shores with non much more than than pocket change and dove headfirst into capitalism, which is, afterward all, most acquiring stuff. We may be choosing cremation over burial these days, simply cocky-storage units serve equally the new cemeteries: hilltop monuments to our impoverished pasts, tributes to our heady successes, funerary urns holding all that will exist left of the states after nosotros're gone. I've come to think of them as shrines.
My house is a shrine, too, for as long as I'm here.
Still, I remain self-conscious, worried the kids will think I'm tipping over into hoarding. When they're slated to visit, I make a stab at streamlining, gathering up some of the overflow. Before the family picnic, for instance, I grabbed a couple of boxes from the basement and filled them with some of the photos and driftwood, a couple aboriginal Furbys, Big Mouth Billy Bass, a host of true cat toys, a devious stuffed beast or two …
In strolled granddaughter Lucy, groggy from her nap in the car on the fashion here only effulgent when she saw me, knowing she was in for some nonstop spoiling. She glanced around the living room, sharp gaze taking in the still-plenty-cluttered bookshelves, the novel landline telephone she loves to play with, the plastic baby shark atop the Television set, the FAO Schwarz elephant on the brocade bench —
"Where'south Bunny?" she demanded, outraged that everything wasn't simply as she remembered, picking up instantly not on all that existed, just on the vacancy.
That's my girl. We're non raising some mini Marie Kondo. You're never likewise young to kickoff staring into the void.
Published equally "Hot Stuff" in the October 2021 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
Source: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2021/09/25/stuff-after-you-die/
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