Songs from a Spiral Tree

My local newspaper ran a story last Sunday about Boomers having to clean out the cluttered homes of their Depression-Era parents. I’m facing this gargantuan task myself. My father died in 1999 and my mother last year, and now my sister and I have over sixty years’ accumulation of furniture, papers, clothes and “tchotchkes” to dispose of. My father was the prime keeper—old car batteries and fix-it manuals, scraps of wood and empty cardboard boxes, not to mention my pink ice skates, back issues of photography magazines, old fuses, dismantled wristwatches and every Christmas decoration they ever owned.

In the past you might responsibly have left most of this stuff by the curb for the trash pickup, but in this time of eBay and recycling, disposing of one’s things needs to be considered. And of course there’s the emotional journey of letting go of so many memory-laden things. Yes, it’s overwhelming.

So I read the article with interest and learned that I am not alone with these feelings. There were several touching accounts of creative approaches to this obligation: one woman made a wall hanging from her father’s ties, another kept her mother’s favorite chair and made it a sacred space for herself. But the article, for the most part, was the usual potpourri of cliché and expert-speak. “Coming face-to-face with all the possessions … can be such a powerful emotional experience,” one psychologist states. I suspect he said something much more complex that was likely boiled down to this banality by the newspaper in the interest of what I like to call “mental chewability.”

But the eye-catching bit of wisdom to my mind was the admonishment by one expert that “adult children should be paring down their parents’ stuff while they’re living, not waiting until they’re gone.” I had a mental image of a middle-aged son or daughter, wheelbarrow piled high with sentimental jetsam, emptying the house while the bewildered parent was trying to enjoy the last years of life. “Mom, I just can’t face doing all this after you’re gone so I’m going to start now. I’ve got a life to live—out of the way!”

My God—no wonder Baby Boomers are the objects of ridicule!

First of all [she said, struggling to get onto the soapbox], are we so simple-minded that we can’t figure out ways of living with the contradictions of seeing our elderly parents off on the final leg of their journey? Do we really have to sell the stuff out from under them in the interest of efficiency? Can we not tolerate a little clutter for them? So what if my father kept every swizzle stick, for pity’s sake. He spent two years on a boat in the dangerous Pacific in WWII, built me my first sandbox, taught me how to drive and rescued me every time my car broke down. He enjoyed having his stuff around him as he aged—he loved to spend time in the basement with his model trains and various fix-it projects that never quite got finished.

The problem here isn’t material clutter, but rather the one-size-fits-all philosophy of this kind of “news.” Some of us will have parents who downsize efficiently. Some of us will spend years caring for a parent with diminishing cognition and all the attending complexities. Some of us will expeditiously liquidate our parents’ estates, others—like me—will need more time to divest themselves of what’s left of their childhood. However they handle it it’s not a sign of mental illness, as one of the experts in this article would have you believe. It’s human nature.