Letting Go

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about letting go.

It may have something to do with the back to back deaths of my father and our beloved dog, followed by a serious illness for my mother that landed her in hospice for a period of time until she decided she would keep going and graduated out of it. To that experience, I will say this: God bless the hospice people, as they are wonderful and experienced in all things related to end of life. They bring Morphine and Ativan. Oxygen and a hospital bed. Boxes of pink foam pads for protecting bony prominences and a chaplain to pray over the entire process.

But because they are so comfortable with death, they want to talk a lot about it. And when they aren’t talking about death, they’re packing up life experiences and memories in tidy conversations that generally end with “You’ve lived a wonderful life”.

Past tense, as in life is in the past, now. Death is what you have to look forward to.

They aren’t completely wrong, but the hospice experience firmly planted two thoughts in my mind that I keep coming back to.

First, as long as I am breathing, I am still alive and having life experiences. Don’t hurry me.

And second, my mother has a lot of stuff that’s going to need dealing with.

I come from a family of women who resist the temptation to throw things away. I conveniently blame it on the Depression and the times of scarcity that period brought with it, but I also think it’s a genetic trait that was passed down, like a 6th digit on one hand or freckles.

When we cleaned out my maternal grandmother’s house after she passed on, we found bags of screws, hundreds of twist ties from bread bags, marketing swag from gas stations long since closed, and rubber bands. Oh, the rubber bands.

We boxed up calendars dating back to the early 1970s, each of which had been used as a diary for keeping track of when it rained, or when the electricity bill was paid, or when a phone call was received from a family member. Her house was one of the cleanest, neatest places I’ve ever been and, had you not known what lurked in the attic, the label she would have worn today would have been “minimalist”.

But she definitely was not a minimalist. She wasn’t a hoarder, by any means, but she saved things. Things you couldn’t get easily during the Depression. Things you might need “just in case”. Things. So many things.

When she died, all those things went to my mother’s house and got added to her things. So when the time comes, cleaning out will encompass two houses, not just one. Bags of rubber bands I can deal with. The calendars, however, with snippets of my grandmother’s life written in her spidery handwriting - well, that’s where this gets hard. And for the last several months, my mother has been pointing out objects in her house and telling me their stories. “Your father gave me that when we were dating. My great grandmother made bread dough in that bowl. Your grandmother made sure that I got that blue pitcher.”

To be fair, I only have part of the Saving Gene. I have an aversion to clutter and will throw just about anything away (including one time a paycheck), but if something has a history I will attach myself and never let go. And looking around my mother’s house, and knowing the daunting task that would one day beset me, I vowed that I would not do this to my children.

So when I heard about Swedish Death Cleaning, the idea of which being that you continually engage in decluttering and organization so that when you die your loved ones don’t have to deal with your things, I thought there might be something in there for me.

Shortly after, I met someone who is a true minimalist. I admired the cleanliness of their house, the simplicity, the lack of things to move around, dust, and perseverate over.

It was as if the universe was coming together to tell me that NOW was the time to start sorting through all those clothes I never wear, and books I finished reading but didn’t really like, and shoes my bunion frowns on. Seemingly, the choice is simple - toss them or donate them.

According to the experts, my closet was the best place to start and I made great progress, filling two plastic containers with things I felt I could part with. I moved next to the kitchen, but there I found the Elmo spoon used by all my grandbabies and the light blue Buffalo diner cups I bought with my husband at an estate sale. I’ve never used them, but I like looking at them. The plastic green colander certainly could go, but how many pots of noodles had I drained in it whilst making the weekly spaghetti dinner when my children were growing up? Needless to say, the tarnished silver serving spoons that were given to me as wedding presents were definitely on the list of “don’t need - donate it to someone who will use it”. And yet…..

This was impossible. Everything I touched had a meaning, a story, a memory. Either I didn’t grasp the concept of Swedish Death Cleaning, or the influence of my genetic makeup was stronger than I realized. Two months later, the plastic containers were still sitting on the floor of the closet, the Elmo spoon safely resting in the back of the silverware drawer.

I’ve learned that when something just doesn’t feel right, to set it down for a minute and come back to it. I’m still relatively young and healthy, and not planning to call the hospice people for myself anytime soon so, barring any nasty surprise, I felt that I had time to get back around to sorting my things when I had finished sorting through the clutter of my mind related to all this letting go.

Enter, the box.

My wonderful aunt, only sister of my father and the embodiment of all that is best about the Bishops, texted me a while back saying that she herself was doing a little decluttering and wondered if I might like some dishes that had belonged to my grandmother. Of course I did. These were things with a story, a history, and a connection to my favorite person in the entire world. Weeks went by and I forgot about it until, on a trip to see my mother, I saw that the box had been dropped off and was waiting patiently for me on the coffee table.

Inside the box, neatly and carefully wrapped, was depression glass dinnerware, the most lovely shade of pink with the most intricate details.

She sent me this note:

These dishes were your great grandmother's, passed down to your grandmother, then to me ...now to you!!!! So, they are certainly filled with love and history from four generations of women!!!!

Our cup runneth over.......and WE are drinking from the saucer!!

The pink flowered Havilland China you have go with these pink dishes that Mama Steinmeyer collected during very hard times in her life. (The Depression years) She thought it was super important for women to have nice things. Her strength and fortitude certainly has been passed on in her genes!

That all these women would love this dinnerware and hold on to it so that I could have it and love it moved me to tears. I stood in the living room, alone with my pink dishes, and felt everything become very still. In that moment my grandmothers, whom I miss every day, reached through time and space from wherever they are and gave me the gift of clarity.

I was no longer torn between letting go and holding on. The things my grandmother saved, that my mother saves, that I save, are not burdens. They are connections to moments and bridges between the past and the future. While I admire my minimalist friends, it is ridiculous to think that we will walk through the fields of life and nothing will stick to us. Of course, there is a limit - not everything should be saved and I’ll still be throwing things out, but if something brings back a memory, reminds me of someone whose voice I miss, or simply gives me joy, why shouldn’t it be treasured?

So I will keep the Elmo spoon and the exquisite pink dishes. I will keep my children’s pictures created in kindergarten with so much macaroni, and the frayed bedspread that I slept under at my grandmother’s house when I was 12.

The boxes of birthday cards through the years, the monthly Pillsbury cookbooks I bought as a young mother before the internet became helpful, my old prom dress…..these things are my traveling companions, and what is any journey without someone special to share it with?

I do promise to try not to bequeath boxes of old newspapers, outdated shoes, and bags of rubber bands to my children. But I’m afraid they’re going to have to figure out what to do with the green colander. Because I’m not parting with it.