Objects In Space

I’m a little late getting this written and posted. I’d been pretty good about writing these essays every Sunday morning and posting them. I apologize for missing last Sunday, but I have a pretty good excuse.

I was a bit busy last week and didn’t have much time to sit down and write something. That doesn’t mean that I hadn’t been thinking about it. You see, last Monday my brothers and I closed the sale of my father’s house. While the financial aspects are certainly favorable and as far as selling houses go this one was a piece of cake, it was still a busy few days leading up to the signing of the paperwork.

Anyone who has sold or bought a house understands what a stressful experience it can be. Over the past month or so, I had been running around making sure inspections were done and then getting things fixed after the inspections. I now know more about the licensing and permitting of septic tanks, water wells and water heaters in the state of New Mexico than I had really cared to know.

It was more than a little stress and I cleaned out the last of the stuff in the house, it’s attached garage as well as a shop and sizable shed, I also gave some blood to the cause. It was my own stupid fault, I know better than to use a sharp pocket knife in place of a screwdriver when changing out a lockset. One slip and I was on my way to urgent care to get two stiches. Having worked with sheet metal years ago I’m not unfamiliar with the process of getting stitches. Which doesn’t take into account the stupid things I have done since boyhood.

In any event, the sale was completed and I don’t know if I can really convey the amount of relief I feel. For the past three years I have been taking care of two houses and a few people who had lived in both of them. Again, anyone who has dealt with an ill parent knows what I’m talking about. Pretty much none of it was what you would call fun, but it was a responsibility and I did it willingly. If anything, I was lucky that I lived near dad and was able to do everything that needed to be done.

Now, it is complete and with it a chapter in my own life. I’m now finally able to “move on” from the illness and death of my father. I’ve always hated psychobabble metaphors comparing life to a journey. Most of the literal journeys I have been a lot more fun than watching your father decline and die. Granted, I have had some pretty miserable journeys before – I’m thinking my 24-hour bus ride from Wichita Falls, Texas to Albuquerque. Overall, though, most trips I’ve been on have been relatively enjoyable.

Dealing with the decline and death of a parent, while navigating a pandemic and a prolonged existential crisis of my own has been no picnic, but it has been one of the milestones we humans have confronted since we first understood familial bonds. For my brothers and I, we no longer have parents to worry about. We live with the pride that we did right by our mother and father in the course of their demises. Along with that is the feeling of relief. No more doctor consultations, no phone calls in the middle of the night, no more powers of attorney, and trusts and electronic signatures. For me, I no longer have a house or a father or his widow to take care of. My brother still has some financial stuff to iron out, but I won’t have much to do with that.

What no one really tells you about, though, is the amount of stuff that needs to be addressed. For my brothers and me, our “journey” can be summed up in a three-year disposition of objects. I’ve heard stories from my peer group about having to clean out a hoarder mother’s house and trying get probate done and houses sold. I was pretty fortunate that my mother and father were both modest people, but there still was a lot of stuff that has to either be kept, taken to the thrift store or taken to the dump and the decision of which pile something goes in isn’t always so easy to make.

When mom died, I kept some things, but a lot of it ended up in drawers, boxes and plastic bins put into storage. When dad died, we had a lot more stuff to get rid of.

Dad was a plumbing and electrical contractor for many years. The offspring of contractors immediately understand what this means - that there is a lot to clean out and a lot to get rid of. For instance, dad had a rather extensive collection of tools, including dozens of screwdrivers. We discovered this when we were going through his tools to determine what we wanted to keep and what we would take to Habitat for Humanity. The consensus among us was that dad would most likely be on a job site when he realized that he didn’t have a tool on his truck that he needed – let’s say a screwdriver. Instead of driving to the shop to get the screwdriver he needed, he would go by the hardware store and get a new one. It also should be pointed out that, as an electrician, many of his screwdrivers had burn marks on them.

In addition, I think he just simply liked tools and didn’t want to get rid of any of them. We found drills that were at least 60 years old and probably should never be electrified again. Going through that stuff and disposing of it was pretty easy if not a little physically taxing – there was a shed full of parts leftover from not only dad’s career, but from my grandfather’s past as a plumbing contractor. In dad’s will, my brother Kerry was left the tools, which Shawn and I were fine with. Still, Kerry didn’t want everything and God knows I considered taking the 48-inch pipe wrench with me.

A problem arises with the more personal stuff. That sometimes requires some thinking. Obviously, there are things that are no-brainers, like a diary my grandmother had kept or the pocketknife my dad had in his pocket when he died. But what to do with the doo-dads and knick-knacks that a person collects along the way? It’s enough to make question your own relationship to physical objects. I’d already been having questions about the meaning behind much of what I had obtained over the years.

It's like this: Everything, including ourselves, are just objects in space. There is no definition behind a stapler other than a tool to fasten sheets of paper together, but the red one I own is imbued with a meaning beyond its simple task. It is a symbol of a difficult time in my life that I overcame. To someone else, it’s just a red stapler, and not even a very good one.

When you start thinking like that, you start to look at the things in your space and questioning their meaning. A couple of years ago, this compelled me to clean out a lot of clutter. I’d determined that holding onto them was just absurd and taking up space. Meanwhile, more stuff was finding its way into my house. As Dad was declining, he would have me take things from his house whether I coveted them or not.

As part of the trust he had completed long before, his wife would be able to live in the house they shared for as long as she wanted. While we would have liked to have sold it and gotten rid of everything in it, we were fine with the arrangement. We also did not want to leave dad’s widow in an empty house, so there would be another round of disposition once she moved.

With both my brothers living some distance away, this duty was left to me. As I said before, this was really no big deal and made complete sense. But this is how I ended up with more stuff in my house. Items as large as a desk and as small as an old Klipette nose hair clipper were moved into my space to determine what to further do with them. However, as I was making decisions on what of my dad’s stuff to keep, I had a renewed vigor in getting rid of things currently in my house. That’s how I ended up last weekend boxing up a 12-setting set of China and taking them and corresponding hutch and silverware to the thrift store. Yes, I can remember the holiday dinners I’d had on those plates in my childhood, eaten off the table that we had used until recently. Up until the last couple of years, almost all the furniture I had in my home had been handed down to me. You would have thought I had a taste in furnishings very similar to your grandmother.

I have been in a purge mentality and I have found surprisingly little sentimentality in getting rid of this stuff. I supposed I could have made a little money off the items, but it would have been more trouble for me to try and get them sold and packed up and transported to the new owner. There honestly wasn’t enough actual financial value to justify my time dealing with them. So, that it how a set of China that my grandmother probably scrimped and saved to obtain ended up at Salvation Army. I imagine that to her it was something of a status symbol. I know the China was always pulled out when she would host Republican Party fundraisers at their Corrales home.

That set of China meant something to my grandmother, but it came to mean nothing to me. When my kids were younger and we were the run of the mill nuclear family, the China was used to serve up Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family. Now, I can’t imagine ever hosting an event that would require nice China. The set and its hutch was something taking up space that I could put to better use, plus I thought they were on the ugly side. So, it had to leave.

Regardless of what happens to that China set, the important thing is that it is out of my house, soon to be replaced with something I find appealing and useful.

I still have some work left to do to declutter my life, but an important milestone has been passed and my weekends become completely mine to do with what I choose. It’s taken some years to get there and I still have some things to get done – such as get new carpeting and flooring – but that is part of the next phase, the next step in the “journey.”

I wonder if there is traveler’s insurance for that kind of trip?