“Your House Is Just a Place for Your Stuff”
The secretary’s desk is dark wood with a pull down door and one drawer beneath the main section, divided into sections for office supplies and such. It sits now in a very dark corner of my parents’ living room, and I am certain we had that desk in our house in Enoree, South Carolina during the 1960s, and then in the two subsequent houses after.
I spent part of Saturday afternoon taking three car loads of trash from their house to the nearby dump. But part of the time helping one of my nephews go through everything in my deceased parents’ house was spent cleaning out that desk.
Stacks of medical bills reaching back almost two decades, tax returns from the late 1980s and 1990s, unopened packs of pens and Rook playing cards — the desk was some awkward combination of mausoleum, careless filing system, and hoarding.
I found handwritten notes my nephew had left for my parents to wake him on time; also his assorted certificates from school along with school pictures of my other nephew when he was on the basketball team.
In the single lower drawer was a hefty stack of newspaper pages and clippings — all of me.
There I saw a jumbled cataloging of my hair, facial hair, and glasses (or not) styles, and then on the bottom, I found a dark yellow page crumbling at the edges.
The date was 1968, and staring out at me was my first-grade school picture beside a brief story about my surprise seventh birthday party.
My childhood at that moment holding a crumbling yellowed newspaper seemed especially foreign, as if not in a different time but a different world. A child’s birthday party and picture in a small town newspaper.
I felt like the brother and sister must have in Pleasantville after being transported into a TV sitcom from the 1950s.
My nephew and I were on a second weekend of going through my parents’ stuff, in hopes that we can over the summer sell the house. The finality of my parents’ death can only come through the total eradication of their stuff, in the wake, of course, of all the legal complications of deceased people, their stuff, and those who may have claims against them and that stuff.
The process has developed into determining if everything is either something someone in the family would want, something for a yard sale, or trash.
Almost everything from the desk I shuffled through went into a large box that I loaded into my SUV with as many garbage bags as it would hold to toss mostly without any thought into the giant and relentless trash compactor at the waste site.
The main compartment of the refuse receptacle has criss-crossing bars over the top to control the size of what people can toss in. The near side is a large angled metal surface that bags and trash slide down violently into a smaller area where a giant plunger pulls back and then compacts the trash into a surprisingly small storage area to the right.
All this stuff my parents had kept, much of it paperwork documenting all the stuff of their lives — this machine thoughtlessly pounded into a uniform rectangle of just trash to be hauled to yet another refuse facility, probably a landfill.
When we die, people go through all our stuff and throw most of it away.
The stuff we just had to buy, the stuff we made ourselves miserable to attain, and the stacks and stacks of paperwork documenting all that stuff and all the payments of our monied lives — all of it comes mostly to trash.
But before it is trash, it must be handled one last time, christened trash, sometimes thoughtlessly and sometimes with the hesitation of placing it in a stack as if it should carry on — until in a flash it too is tossed into a box or bag as once-stuff-now-trash.
Three times carrying my parents’ stuff to my SUV, three times unloading bags and boxes to be tossed into the giant compactor, three times driving to and from the waste site — this mini-ritualizing of my parents stuff into trash was yet one more thing I could not have anticipated about the terrible thing that is any person’s death.
Just common flawed people, my parents both died in ways no one really deserves — clinging to bodies that simply had run their course and laboring under the dark cloud of how much everything would cost and a medical care system reduced to a mechanistic nightmare by the insurance industry.
As I paused a few times watching the giant trash compactor work — steeling myself against the smell and the din of this machine grinding on and on — I recognized an unintended metaphor for what my parents had experienced in their dying.
Or to be brutally honest, their living also.
When we die, people go through all our stuff and throw most of it away.
During one trip back to their house from the waste site, I thought about George Carlin’s routine on stuff:
“The whole meaning of life, isn’t it: Trying to find a place for your stuff” — so when you die, it is all in one place, easier to sort through and mostly haul off as trash: “They don’t bother with that crap you’re saving. Ain’t nobody interested in your fourth grade arithmetic papers.”
I put yellowed and brittle paper from 1968 to the side while I finished sorting through the desk. I picked it up, thought about being seven and recalling my parents as a young couple, and then could not bear the thought of taking this newspaper page to my house for someone to look at and decide it was finally trash.
All of that stuff mattered the wrong way, and then it became in a flash stuff that doesn’t matter at all.
When we die, people go through all our stuff and throw most of it away.
