Clearing 1209 -- with a Buddhist overlay

I started writing this a month ago. Things have changed (i.e., the house featured in this posting has been emptied and sold), and I will blog about all that later. But before I do that, I wanted to document the following experience:

My two (remaining) brothers, sister, and I have been working pretty steadily for the last two months on our Dad's house -- getting it ready for sale. When we started working, it was pretty much completely furnished for a family of seven: five siblings and two parents. Two of those seven are no longer with us, and four of those seven had moved away, but the furnishings and mementos remained.

So Dad had been living alone at 1209 Tupelo Place (thus the title of this piece) for a number of years, turning aside repeated suggestions from us kids to move to an assisted living facility. Finally, his increasing physical fragility coupled with his deepening loneliness helped him see that moving was the only sensible thing to do. (He's currently in an assisted living facility just a few miles from 1209, where he is enjoying the restored health that comes from regular meals, taking his meds as prescribed, and being surrounded by friendly, caring human beings. He looks and sounds great. Thought you'd want to know that...)

He also now understands that none of the four of us wants to move into 1209, and that he can't move back himself. So the only thing to do is sell the place. Now, while 1209 wasn't Dad's first house, it is the place he's lived for over 50 years -- and the place where his kids grew, matured, and left to form their own families.

Bottom line here is that 1209 was chock-a-block with mementos of seven people: furniture, school awards and graduation diplomas, report cards, finished and never-quite-finished projects of all sorts, hardware and tools, letters, greeting cards, perfectly good but unwanted clothing, scouting and camping equipment, artwork and mirrors from the walls, kitchen and dining-room wares, sporting goods, piles of records (including 78 RPM's of swing-era musicians and classical performances), and photos. Oh lord, the photos! Their sheer number was astonishing. Many of them were pictures of ancestors that none of us recognized. Many of them were of us kids when we were ever-so-much younger. All of them were poignant. In fact, almost all the stuff was poignant.

And it all had to go. The furniture and much of the kitchen ware went to Goodwill. That was pretty easy. But so much of everything else -- maybe 98 percent -- simply needed to be thrown out. There's no room in any of our houses for holding on to that stuff.

But how to do it? And what to save and what to throw away?

Each of us had spent some time alone at 1209 trying to deal with that question. And it wasn't working. In part because each of us would pick up an item, stand over the "throw-it-out" bag, and think: "If sibling X found out I threw this away, he or she might never forgive me." And then put the item back down. Outside the "throw-it-out" bag. And there it stayed until the next sibling picked it back up again, went through the same mental routine, and put it back down. Still outside the "pick-it-up" bag.

But when two or three of us gathered together at the house, each of us would see a sibling toss out something that clearly had sentimental value. And that encouraged each of us to do the same. And so we managed to throw out considerable amounts of stuff -- albeit with a pang of conscience with almost every toss.

My sister was moved to hold items over the "throw-it-out" bag, thank it for being there and all that it had meant to us over the years, and then deposit it into the bag. My sister, as you might have guessed, holds a marvelous balance between spiritual depth and everyday common sense.

And watching and listening to her took me to the Buddhist education that I've been accumulating here and there over the last several years. In particular, the notions of compassion and non-attachment came to mind. Buddhist philosophy is based on compassion for all things -- animals and plants and minerals as well. So, one should care about everything in the world. But along with this idea is the notion that one should stay unattached to the events that occur therein.

And within the boundaries established by these two notions, is (it now seems) the proper way to clear out a house -- whether it's your house or someone else's: when you pick up that item, be grateful for the experiences that the item brings back to mind. And then throw the item out. Keep the memory if the item supports you in a positive place, but ditch the item itself. It has done its work, and now should move on to be and do something else.

More lessons from 1209 to come...