My Dad was a pack rat. But I did not know that until after his physical body died. I had gone over to my mother’s house to help sort through things and clean out a few things, and it was incredible to me the amount of stuff he had saved. He still had resumés that he had made up from back in college when he was first applying for a job. There must have been at least 50 of them. As I discovered them, I thought, "Why? What’s the point of saving so many of these?"
I could immediately begin to understand my own pack rattish ways. I have probably four boxes and a trunk that possess a lot about my life in the past. Over the years, I have gone through them at intervals, condensed boxes, thrown away stuff, and yet there is still some stuff I just cannot seem to bear to part with. Like old letters from my mother. She was very good about writing me while I was in college. I always swore that I would do that for my own children, but it never happened.
All of this is to get to last Saturday. Our middle son had to finally come to grips with boxes and boxes of his stuff that he was stored and kept since high school—something like 10 years ago. A lot of it was trash to be sure. Things that were just basically worthless, but there were other things, that I know he would have rather sifted through and relived and treasured one more time. The problem is that we are moving to smaller digs, and where his stuff has been stored, that house is being sold. He did not want to pay for storage, so he finally had to figure out what was the most valuable stuff that he wanted to save. I know it caused him an immense amount of pain and grief to have to finally do this, and I hurt for him every moment of the way. It was shocking to me to participate, and yet, I could not not be there for him. I couldn’t imagine being in his shoes and watching so many memories go up in smoke (we had a big fire out back). I know that in a lot of unconscious ways, some of that stuff was firmly linked to a happier time in his life when our family was whole and intact and life seemed simpler.
Yet, I know that this is probably what is going to happen to my "stuff" someday. My boys will sort through it all and wonder, "Why did Daddy save all of this? Who did he think was going to read it? Who even cares?" Most likely, when my time comes, my own boys will be very busy with their own lives, and will have to grudgingly take some of their precious time to see who wants what, and I suspect that personal mementoes and effects that meant something to me, will have little if any meaning to them. Even still, I will have to admit that this particular posting has been very difficult for me to write. I pondered about it, wondered about it, resenting the passage of time in some ways.
