Decluttering and Curating Memories
in All Saints
This discussion was created from comments split from: Working towards a tidy house.
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@mark_in_manchester , judging by the number of lists of box contents around the place at the moment, I suspect Mr Nen is making an inventory even if he is not researching current prices. I also know the person to get in contact with should I be the one left with the classic car projects. The rest would probably end up in the hands of Garage Clearance. Mr Nen knows this.
Alongside all the actual sorting, my mind is much occupied with how to manage things going forward. I know how it has happened - we have been married for 40 years and have lived in this family home for 26 years with busy lives, work, child-raising - but we cannot continue to carry all this Stuff along with us for the rest of our lives. I'm feeling the burden of it and I don't want our children to feel similarly burdened.
I am also challenged about how to curate certain sentimental things. I want to honour the memories by keeping what's appropriate without it being too much. A recent example: I have a file of keepsakes from Nenlet2's wedding last summer. I want to keep them and to honour the occasion; but it is all in a file that will end up in a box or on a shelf. Nenlet1, on the other hand, has put the invitation, a couple of photos and the little place cards with their names on them in a frame which is on a shelf in their lounge. They see it every day. We see it when we visit. It's lovely; a much better way of preserving the memories. Why didn't I think of it?
This morning I was dismantling a picture display in one of our bedrooms that I put up for the GrandNenling to look at during nappy changes when the little family came here for Christmas in 2023 (yes, it's been there ever since
This is no doubt a subject for a different thread.
I have lots of stuff I lump together as memorabilia. I know I can get it out and it will bring back memories- but how often do I do that? When I look at things I cannot bear to part with any of it, lest I lose the memory too.
Most of it is personal: the scrapbook my mum helped me make, aged 9, my school needlework bag with its sample stitches and seams, cards for many occasions, photos, family events, school trips, holiday brochures.
Mr P famously said, when I tried to get him to prune some of his possessions, “You get rid of my stuff and you get rid of me” . Well since he died I have had to get rid of almost all his stuff, books, office stuff, collectibles of many sorts, including clocks, old radios, hi fi, tools….There is scarcely anything of his left. It feels almost as if he never lived here.
Yes, worthy of another thread.
Maybe that's a good thing - to have a new chapter somewhere different where we make new memories without forgetting the old ones, and being grateful for them. I read a comment somewhere on a decluttering video on YouTube (I am much better at watching other people cleaning and decluttering than doing it myself) that said, "You can't embrace tomorrow if your arms are full of yesterday."
ETA: Nenlet1 seems to have a much better attitude to Stuff. She had left a couple of boxfuls here when she got married 13 years ago. In the sort-out here I asked her if she wanted any of it. She said, "If I haven't wanted it in 13 years I can't want it, Mum, but if I see it I will want it." So she asked me to go through it, send her a picture of anything I really thought she might want and discard the rest. We kept (for ourselves) a piece of artwork that she did for her Art "A" level and the planning workbook that went with it (which she said she would have kept if we hadn't) and everything else went.
Books have a particular pull for me - when clearing my mum's house we brought back quite a number, but a lot went to charity shops and others were discarded. Throwing my mum and dad's books into the skip at the recycling centre was a particular low point. And going through the ones here: I'd kept quite a lot of children's books because of the sentimental pull and now we have a grandchild of course I want to have some for when she visits. But I weeded out the ones that were really discoloured or damaged and that felt a bit brutal, when it was books I remembered my own reading... with their names written in the front in a childish hand...
What do other people do, and think?
There is a box file of photographs & documents relating mostly to my mother's family, and a few from my father's. These are willed to my niece, as my sons have shown no interest in my side of the family tree, the stories on the paternal side being more interesting to boys, and a subject Mr RoS like to talk about at any opportunity.
Somehow I have to get round digitising them, making some photo books of the special ones and getting rid of the rest. It was going to be a winter job but now here we are in Spring. 🤔
My son says that the list will give him something to read while he's chucking the lot into a skip.....
Anything clean and readable I donate to the Oxfam bookshop in a nearby town. But I do put books in the wood-burner. It seems a more honourable death than putting them in the paper skip, somehow. Illogical, I know.
1. Take photos of anything you might have an emotional attachment to. If you fear you will never look at them, get one of those picture frames with an electronic screen in it that features an ever-changing photo image, and load the pictures onto that. Put it somewhere in your house where you will see it.
2. Dispose of the physical objects in a way that feels useful or at least not transgressive. For example, donating a wedding dress to the folks who make clothes for stillborn infants might feel better than simply trashing it. Recycling your mother's dish towels will probably feel better than trashing them. Paper can be used in the garden to create a new garden bed (one of the zillions of sites out there: https://www.agardenforthehouse.com/how-to-smother-weeds-with-newspaper/).
3. If you're inclined that way, create a simple prayer of gratitude to say before you dispose of something: for example, "Lord, thank you for the years of service that this rug has seen. I'm glad for all the good times our family had walking, even dancing on it. Now I'm letting it go, but continue please to bless us in the future." You can likely come up with something better. Do this one by one with difficult objects, or just before letting go of a group of them.
4. Admit that some things are simply too hard to cope with on your own right now, and find an alternative. For example, ask a friend to handle it (and you find some way to repay the kindness); if you can afford it, rent storage (sometimes money is the easiest way of avoiding severe pain); involve your kids NOW if you think that might be a support or comfort (if you know it will be the opposite, don't do it); give yourself permission (or get your kids to give you permission!) to leave certain things for them to deal with after your death (really, it's going to be far easier for them to dispose of sentimental stuff they don't even recognize than you, especially if you've inventoried and boxed stuff (like paper) that you know they'll get rid of, but you just can't take that last step yourself).
If you happen to live in a community with a lot of refugees, and especially if you have a church or resettlement agency who is looking for household items, donating your china, silver, linens, fabrics, etc. to them might work well). Ask before you do anything, of course, but good household items your kids won't take (having too much stuff already) might be treasured by those who don't.
That one made me laugh. My late Mum's mega-white, clean, voluminous undergarments are still the highest-quality cleanest keep-for-high-end-painting-jobs rags in my rag box. She grew up in the 30s and through the war, and would understand and approve!
Bet she'd haunt you if you'd thrown them away.