Emptying out your parents’ house is like opening a time capsule, or maybe like falling down a rabbit hole, take your pick. On the surface, it all seems so simple: just go through the house, room by room, and empty everything out – except it’s not so simple, and there is more stuff there than you had originally thought. Some stuff is obviously trash – and other things are items worth keeping (although, honestly, not too much is worth keeping) but the majority of the stuff is the stuff that makes you stop in your tracks and remember every detail about when and where, about who and why, and it tears you apart to know that you need to get rid of the sentiment, close your eyes (and heart) and pitch it. You don’t look back, you just keep moving forward – but it takes so long, and you’re not even half way through where you thought you would be when you said, 6 months ago, that you’d have the place empty by September. There has been progress, no doubt, but nothing major, and it really won’t feel like a lot has been done until the big items – the furniture – have been removed. In the meantime, you’ve been able to reconstruct your parents’ history, with their old high school yearbooks, the old photos of them as kids, along with the photos of so many other nameless people, frozen in time. You find your Dad’s entire Navy history in boxes full of papers; the receipt from the music hired for your parents’ wedding reception; the receipts for their bedroom furniture set, the only one they ever knew, the one which is still in their bedroom now after 60+ years of marriage. You discover so much about the lives of these two people who decided to join as husband and wife, and to spend the rest of their lives together, and to make a family together. It is all there, for you to see, to hold and to touch, to travel in time…
On the other hand, you have a better appreciation for how much stuff you’ve been accumulating in your own house, and the opportunity to learn from the experience.