Last month I sold my mom’s house. It’s a strange thing to sell someone’s home without them knowing it. After moving my mom into a memory-care facility last spring, it came down to me, her only child, to tie up some of the loose ends of her former life. One of those ends being a large house situated on the side of a mountain in western North Carolina. “I can’t help but feel a bit guilty about this,” I said to the attorney who drafted the closing documents. He shrugged, adjusted his mask, then pushed a stack of papers toward me. As I signed them, the pit in my stomach grew. The last document was an agreement to have all personal property removed from the house within sixty days. That’s when I almost threw up.
It’s shocking how many things a person can collect over 81 years of life. My mom wasn’t a hoarder. I think casual accumulator is a more accurate term, but her house was absolutely crammed full of stuff. Every drawer, every cabinet, every shelf held a cache of ephemera. If I were retired and had the luxury of time, say a solid eighteen months, I probably could have set up an eBay store and made a small fortune selling off the clutter my mom had amassed. Instead, I hired an estate company to take all of the furniture, hauled dozens of boxes of clothes, dishes, and decor to local charities, then rented a one-ton capacity dumpster and filled it four times. I called my daughter when I finished the job. “I literally threw out four tons of junk from Nana’s house,” I said. “And I don’t mean ‘literally’ the way you use the word—I mean literally literally.”
During the disposal process, I repeated a mantra to myself: I’m never going to put my loved ones through this. I made a promise that when I returned home to Greenville, I would begin discarding all of the useless crap I’ve collected so when my time comes, hopefully later rather than sooner, Jess and my kids won’t be left with the burden of getting rid of it. But while I found throwing out my mom’s stuff to be a mindless task, throwing away my things is a bit more challenging. Every item I start to toss in the trash seems, upon further reflection, worthy of keeping. Ten-year-old issues of The New Yorker? There are some good cartoons in those. A MacBook Pro that hasn’t worked since 2013? That could be a collectible one day. Fifteen identical Allen wrenches for Ikea furniture I no longer own? Better to have them and not need them. Deep down I know a lot of my stuff belongs in a dumpster. But I’m afraid someone else is going to have to put it there.
Steven Tingle is the author of recently published novel Graveyard Fields and the monthly contributor to this column. Find more at steventingle.com.
