I’m not finished …
… with the topic of modern-day hospitals and the medical care found therein, which sparked a lot of discussion and comparing of sorrowful stories in this thread. But I need to take time between posts on what is a profoundly disturbing topic for me.
Right now my son is here and helping with the dismantling of his father’s place and all the many papers, decorative items, furniture, and memorabilia there. It’s a huge task and won’t be completed for a while. He’s here for a few days to give it a jump start, though. Wish me luck.
A very big undertaking. Continued prayers for grace and blessing.
“Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him. Children born to a young man are like arrows in a warrior’s hands. How joyful is the man whose quiver is full of them! He will not be put to shame when he confronts his accusers at the city gates.” – Psalm 127:3-5
I trust you are being blessed in this way Neo. Praying the work is bathed in laughter, washed in tears, and flooded with love.
Save ALL photographs. A hundred years from now and beyond your descendants will bless you for it.
When my mom passed I was allowed by my siblings to keep all of the family photographs my mom and dad collected and kept through the years. As a result I have what is truly a hoard of images, going back to the Civil War and beyond to when my forebears immigrated from Ireland as well as Saxony and Switzerland. Every single picture tells a story. They are priceless to me, their value is beyond reckoning.
Hope friends and collaterals can provide you with some extra labor.
Good luck.
There are some goodwill, church, rummage (or otherwise) organizations that, for no charge, pick up second-hand resale or donation items; but the sifting through can be, unfortunately, a long haul…
any family without a medical relative to serve as an ombudsman is screwed. If I could monetize it and make it a business, my wife and I ( she’s an RN) could do much good serving as ombudsmen. Currently we do it for friends and relatives.
Good luck, it’s usually a daunting task
Re: “I’m not finished”
I am reminded of Robinson Jeffers’ great poem:
_______________________________________
Be Angry At The Sun
That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.
Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.
Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.
You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.
Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.
–Robinson Jeffers (1941)
_______________________________________
Jeffers’ point is that anger may be justified against the iniquities of one’s time. However, being angry isn’t the point nor the right move.
Jeffers advises …the cold passion for truth / Hunts in no pack.
And finally, Yours is not theirs.
Which is, in large measure, why I read neo.
This is hard stuff, cleaning up and deciding what is worth saving and what goes other places. When we moved dad into a care facility and closed the house down they had built in 1930, that was in the early 90’s and it was so full of her collections of Wedgwood, Faberge and other fine stuff along with lots of Hummel’s and other nifty bits and pieces we did not exactly what to do.
My brother who is an accountant and had been through this stuff with clients had been through it several times and he asked us to have only the four of us there, all of us were adopted, no spouses, and we drew numbers to decide who got the first choice and picked each piece one at a time and we took care of each other. It became a bit of a joke because non of us needed anything and we edged my older brother on with the Wedgwood China stuff and we each took our special choices. I ended up with a grandfather clock I had brought back from Germany and gave to my parents and my mom had some old Japanese Prints a few hundred years old no one else was interested in and that was about all I wanted.
When we were through we gave all of the rest of the stuff to her church for an auction which she would not have appreciated however that’s the way stuff works when you move on along and get old, like I am now. I need to put names on a lot of old guns that I have not given to kids already and today is a good reminder for me to get some stuff done for those who will be around after me.
This finishing up stuff is not easy and I have helped others as they moved on and in my 80’s I don’s have too many more years to get my stuff done. So there’s that. Good luck and blessings and care for you Neo and Son as you do what has to be done.
Anger is a fruitless endeavor.
I hope Neo and son are finding comfort in going thru the remnants of the deceased. It is a tough labor, for sure. Sadness tinged with moments, surprizes, startling, of joyful love, memories.
I have a good shotgun collection, mostly Benellis plus my treasured 28 ga Rizzini. But none of my kids are shooters and I do not know whato do with them.
We are traveling this month and our first stop was to deliver a few things to one of our sons as his “share” of the family heirlooms. I took photographs of all the paintings and framed photos, plus a large selection of the big “coffee table books” that took up lots of space in our bookshelves; sent them in emails; and asked everyone to make their choices. We will deliver the other selections later (good excuse for visiting!), although for some items we will just “put names on them” (our family tradition) because we still enjoy looking at them; but at least now we can dispose of everything unwanted with a clear conscience.
We will continue to do that with heirlooms and special things, so hopefully everything important will be distributed (physically or prospectively) before we pass away.
Whatever’s left can go through something like OldTexan’s procedure, but I will ask for the grandchildren to be included; there were things of our grandparents that we wanted, but no one asked us!
If your church isn’t interested in a funding activity, there are professional estate-closers who will run a sale of everything the family doesn’t take, and who know what the local market will bear; then the rest goes to the charity of your choice (Goodwill, the Arc, whatever), but you don’t have to hang around and do it yourself.
In a large city, second-hand-bookstores sometimes buy books by the box rather than evaluating them individually (my older sister did that this year). You can do a check online to see if you have anything really valuable, but most people don’t unless they have been conscious collectors of first editions or rare antiques. Most libraries have book sales a couple of times a year and will take them.
Sometimes I think it is taking us longer to get rid of stuff than it did to collect it, but that is just an illusion. However, deciding what is important to keep and what isn’t genuinely does take a long time unless you establish definite criteria for your own peace of mind.
AesopFan, my mother collected equine books and had a number of first editions. I found a specialized bookseller and discovered that most of them were worthless, and those that weren’t probably weren’t worth what she had paid for them. The bookseller explained that the internet knocked the base out of the old-books market. People used to have to haunt their favorite bookstores and wait until the treasures they hoped for were found. Now they can just go online and find them in Texas or London or Japan or wherever, and of course books aren’t that expensive to ship. So, the bookseller took some, another bookseller took a few, I kept a handful and the rest just went in the estate sale. My mother would have hated it but wasn’t there to see it happen.
It took me the better part of two years of weekends to clear out my parents’ house, even with the help of my siblings. My mother was not a hoarder, but a deeply committed keeper of things with family history, artistic value or whatever, and unfortunately she handed that tendency on to me. Each thing seemed to deserve thought and time. And some of it, I was glad to keep. Just this morning, as I do every day, I used a trivet that came from her kitchen, a flat circle of lacy cut-out metal that slides open on tiny wheels to hold larger pots — and just yesterday I spotted that trivet in a photo of me at age 3 at my grandmother’s dining table.
I learned a few things that might come in handy for Neo. After a quick rough weeding I sent all the generations of photos to a scanning outfit (a place where you pay a flat fee for a box holding as much as you can stuff into it.) That way all the photos could be shared among the family but nobody had to store them. Likewise my mother’s handwritten poems, newspaper articles about familly members, etc. Beautiful or sentimental objects that nobody in the family had room for could likewise be photographed. Other things could simply be held for a moment, remembered, appreciated, and then handed on. And we filled a couple of dumpsters with pure junk.
However, Mr Whatsit will tell you that I still kept far too much. There are useful things, like that trivet, but I still haven’t been able to bring myself to throw away the best of the originals of those photos.
It was hard and painful to stare that deeply into my parents’ lives, but also a privilege. And as a result, I’m trying hard not to leave that kind of puzzle for my own children. Little by little I’m shedding what I can. But having inherited my mother’s sentimentality about objects, I’m not very good at it — better than she was, but I keep finding reasons to keep more things than I shed. We visited an older friend who was going through his possessions, doing what he called “Swedish death cleaning.” He gave me a little wooden carving that I treasure because it was his. It’ll be one more thing for my kids to deal with.
Mrs Whatsit:
My ex saved just about everything. The task is daunting. He definitely invested meaning in many many things that now must be tossed. Going through it is overwhelming.
@neo at 12:14 pm:
IMO, the things had meaning for him. He is gone.
Assuming that they have meaning for no one else, they should be gone.
Life is complicated enough without meaningless stuff to deal with.
Neo, your ex sounds like my mother. It WAS an overwhelming task. I agree with Stayin_Alive_555 that meaning to your ex shouldn’t matter, as he’s gone. But for me, at least, it did matter. I encountered a lot of guilt and oldest-child responsibility in trying to navigate a course between taking care of my parents’ things as they would have wanted me to, on the one hand, and freeing myself from the burden of things on the other. It wasn’t easy, and honestly, I only just THIS YEAR managed to get myself to dispose of an old rug and some vintage designer clothes my mother left behind. They were valuable, or had been valuable once, and I had to let go of the idea that I was going to find a better answer than simply dumping the rug and giving away the clothes, which is what I finally did. I have to say that the relief of finally being free of them was tremendous!
I hope your son can stay and help for a while, so that you aren’t doing too much of it alone.