Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
What Remains
Labor Day is coming fast, and while I’ve had a great summer, it has also been a summer marked by death. I’ve attended two funerals and written half a dozen sympathy notes. It’s made me reflective and a bit melancholy.
It seems horrible to admit, but when I’m confronted by death, I think about the stuff that remains. It’s just a control mechanism: I can’t control the randomness of death, but if there is anyone who can control the stuff that remains, it’s me.
Over the years, I’ve helped many people empty apartments after a family member has passed away, or sometimes just clear a closet after the loss of a spouse. My sister and I had the luxury of time when disposing of our mother’s wardrobe, which made it easier for us, though in retrospect, perhaps not on my father. Sometimes people have a short window in which to dispose of a relative’s home and belongings, which is hard, especially if you are grieving.
As you know, I’m a little bit of a control freak. While the feminist in me is annoyed that I am somehow automatically the family archivist, the control freak in me revels in my opportunity to spin the story when I make the scrapbooks and photo albums. The objects we leave, and how we leave them, are how we tell our story to those we leave behind. Will our children marvel at our easy-to-understand filing system? Will our siblings shake their heads at the childhood stuff we kept?
There’s a lot that we can’t control in life, so control what you can. Leave your papers in good order, don’t hang onto every dress you ever wore and every book you ever read. The more we handle our messes on a day-to-day basis, the less chaos we will leave behind, and that is good.