Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life

When my mother was in her final years, she took out a reverse mortgage on her house in my hometown, against my advice. Soon after, she couldn’t live alone any longer so she moved to a different city to live with my brother and his family, leaving almost everything behind in her house. 

A few years later, she died. 

My husband drove down the mountain to her house to begin the process of clearing it out. He found the door padlocked, with a notice that the bank had seized the house and its contents weeks before she died. We had not only lost the house, but everything in it—family photos, all our family memories, a house full of things she had treasured and intended to pass along to us. The impact was physical, like a gut punch. It made my ears hot, a warmth I could see move into my face, my neck, and down my body. 

Even now, seven years after her death, I am sometimes flooded with the sudden recognition of something else I lost in that moment. Everything was gone. The people who bought the house from the bank for almost nothing held a yard sale with the things that were left after they threw away family mementos that would have no value to others, except us. All the paintings I did as a child and teenager now hang in their home, oddly. All of my mother’s belongings were laid out on the driveway for people to bicker over. Nothing remained of her life, and a big part of mine seemed to disappear as well. 

It was hard in the beginning. There was anger, blame, sorrow. Now it is just a momentary pang every once in a while. The shame my mother would have felt at seeing her life treated in such a callous way has faded to a dull ache. But now I can now see the beauty in that solution—I needed none of those things. They were not important. I am especially grateful when I hear of people bickering over family heirlooms or spending years cleaning out the house of a parent who has died. 

Detachment is a trait at which I excel. It takes time, sometimes, but I get there more quickly than most. After all, we will take none of this with us except the experience of having lived among it for a short while. We imbue our things with meaning, but that meaning rests in us, not in the things themselves. 

This detachment is also handy when dealing not only with things but with people. Would I have liked for my father to live to see me married and to have known his grandchildren? Absolutely. And I also know that he has been with me this whole time. A death ends a life, not a relationship. 

Conversely, would I wish to end any form of relationship with people who are toxic to me? You bet. I am not the Asshole Whisperer, and neither are you. 

There are things in my home that I love—art by artists from around the world as I traveled, my Fluevog shoes, drawings by my kids when they were little, letters and gifts from John. The meaning of many of those things will go away when I return to stardust, and they may well be items laid out on the driveway for others to pick over. So I am choosing to lighten my load for the rest of my life while I can. Detach, detach, detach.