The Things that Make Up a Life

I've been going through things here at Mom's house. There is so much to look at and to dispose of. I can do it only in small batches. At times I feel like I'd like to take everything home. Almost everything I touch is attached to a memory and feels special to me.

A few years ago I read about something called Swedish death cleaning. If you do an Internet search, you'll find lists and workbooks to help with it. There are blog posts about it and articles written and published. There's even a book. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.

The basic idea is to go through and organize your own things as part of preparing for end of life circumstances like moving into senior housing or death. It feels very Scandinavian to me. Simplicity. Clean lines. Uncluttered. Organized.

I think my mother tried to do some of this. She tried for at least a year before she died. I don't think she got rid of much, but she did get some clarification around who she might like to pass some of her belongings to, and she also had the chance to read letters and journals and look at photographs. I think that put her life into some perspective and allowed her to reflect on family legacy and an interesting family history.

She began to pack things into boxes. I've seen things I did not know we had. Like a military dog tag that belonged to one of my paternal grandfather's brothers. He must have been in the service in World War II. I did not know that, and now I'm wondering if he died there. I am not sure we have a family record for that. My paternal family history is difficult to trace. It was kept through stories more than anything else, and I wonder sometimes if the stories are more like tall tales than history. My matrilineal family history is more defined.

These visits to my mother's house help to ease my grief in some ways, in other ways it feels more confrontational. I'm picking my way through a landscape that at times is rocky and at other times is thorny. The one thing I can say is that there is no way around it. 

The only way is through.

Creating Space: Three Months of Showing Up for What's Showing Up is a daily writing practice. Turns out that a lot of this writing explores the landscape of grief. My mother died shortly before I began this writing, and this is what my mind is on most of the time these days.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012, and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life.