Gone Girl: Phase 1
The stuff is not the person. The person lives on in your memory and your heart.
This is going to be a long post. It’s the “prequel” to the final clearance of my parents’ house in Chatham, Ontario after my father died in December 2023. My siblings and I spent the better part of 2024 working to get it ready for sale. As a professional organizer, my job was to make things go away. Gone.
Knowing that I had this large task ahead of me one day, I had already removed a lot of things after my mother passed away in September of 2016, a year and a half before I became a professional organizer. I consulted with my father at the time and he was wise enough to separate my mother’s memory from her stuff.
“She’s not going anywhere,” my father said, so with his permission I packed up my mother’s things for donation.
My mother was a squirrel and every drawer, cupboard, and closet in the house was full. She and I had spent some time in 2012 clearing things out of the basement but a lot remained. In the weeks after her death I streamlined the house for my father’s convenience and comfort. I did not strip the house. On the surface it remained looking the same but I cleared and rearranged its inners to make it more functional for an elderly man on his own.
Separate the memory from the stuff
Remember this: wise enough to separate my mother’s memory from her stuff. I’ll acknowledge that this can be very difficult, if not impossible, to do but the stuff is not the person. The person lives on in your memory and your heart.
Now, having said that, I urge you to consult with other family members and the friends of your loved one before donating their things. Someone might want something to remember them by. I thought I had done my due diligence in this regard but I ended up donating a special sweater that held memories for my sister and for that I am sorry.
I took home a few things that I had given my mother over the years including a book of poetry, a butterfly in a frame, and a set of wind chimes, as well as three pieces of her brass decor collection and an orange and white bowl that I had admired as a child. All of these items are now in use in my own home. I also claimed the Kobo that I had given her a couple of years before.
Clothing, toiletries, and medical
Mom’s clothes, shoes, and bags had taken up two closets and three dressers. Both of my parents were smokers so everything that could be washed went through the laundry first. I used the pool table in the basement covered with a clean bedsheet as a sorting table and made neatly folded stacks, then put everything in clear bags for donation to the nearby Goodwill store. Goodwill takes bras, underwear, and socks in good condition. Mission Services in London will take them as well. Discard anything torn, stained, or stretched out and launder the rest.
Our mother didn’t own a lot of jewellery and most of it was costume. Her few special things were divided between my sister and me.
I cleared out her lotions and potions from the big hall linen closet so that I could reorganize it for my father. Unopened, unexpired toiletries can be donated to women’s or family shelters. Her prescriptions and OTC meds were taken to a pharmacy to be disposed of responsibly. Alternatively, over the counter meds can be tossed in the garbage in a sealed container. Don’t flush them down the toilet or drain. Hakim Optical accepted her used eyeglasses for donation.
Strangely, my dad wanted to keep her walker and wheelchair, among other things, convinced that he would need them himself one day. The master bedroom ended up looking like a medical supply house. He had kept his own father’s heavy wheelchair after he passed away in the early ’80s and it collected cobwebs in the basement for over 40 years, which was a shame because it could have been sold or donated for someone else to use.
Hobbies and handmade
Our mother was a talented home sewer, crafter, and artist. The daughter of a fine seamstress, she sewed many of her own clothes and our school clothes, created inventive and award-winning Hallowe’en costumes, made her own draperies, and refinished and reupholstered furniture. We kept her sewing machine and notions because I continued to use them myself.
The upside-down clown costume that won awards wherever my brother wore it. The wearer’s feet went into the gloves and an internal scaffolding held up the legs to make the clown appear to be walking on his hands. The sofa was reupholstered by my mother, then consigned to the rec room after years of use.
The dressers and tables at our childhood home were decorated with the doilies that she crocheted. She had many more stored away. My sister and niece chose their favourites and I kept the rest, intending to dispose of them in some way—how, I still don’t know. They’re in a box in my closet. What remained of the Hallowe’en costumes went to Value Village in time for that season.
Our mom was the adventurous one in the family and was always game to try something new. She had taken art classes when I was a child and liked to experiment with creative hobbies. Mom kept a cupboard in the basement tool room full of paints, stains, brushes, and all manner of bits and bobs. I tossed whatever had dried out or was obvious garbage and put the usable materials in a box to go to a friend of my father.
One of her last hobbies was flower pressing. I donated her flower pressing frame and collection of dried flowers to a garden club in Toronto.
My sister and brother-in-law took away her boxes of computer-related gear and her computer went to my niece. My Dad sold her convertible to the father of a local mechanic.
Collections and miscellany
Mom had kept every birthday card she ever received. (I save all my birthday cards too.) I sorted through them and put aside the personal, handmade ones to return to the givers and recycled or disposed of the rest.
Two recycling bags of Mom’s greeting cards and the box of musty old TV Guides that my father insisted on keeping because “they might be fun to look at some day.” The TV Guides date back to the 1960s. That’s Mary Tyler Moore from The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–66) on the front of one.
Her collection of baskets stored in the basement went to Value Village but I held back some special ones—more on that in another post. My father wasn’t interested in decorating for Christmas so the tree and many boxes of decorations also went to Value Village. The boxes and boxes of canning jars and equipment stored under the basement stairs went to a friend.
Dad later decided that he didn’t have the energy to look after her houseplants. My sister and I already had houseplant collections of our own, including the offspring of my mother’s own plants via cuttings, so they went to the curb to be claimed by someone with a green thumb.
Mom had amassed a collection of over 100 stoneware pieces which she displayed on the tops of the kitchen cabinets, where they collected grease and dust. They hadn’t been washed in years and were especially dirty. When my young self was still living at home we took her (then smaller) collection down once a year and washed them by hand. I wasn’t prepared to do that so I put them through the dishwasher a few at a time. That was risky, I know, but I had just one casualty. I wrapped and boxed them to store in the basement until I had a plan to dispose of them.
After multiple dishwasher cycles the whole collection is clean and shiny. Total count was 104, including a 20-gallon crock that lived in the corner of the rec room. Larger items, like those below, got washed by hand.
Why did I not leave them on display in the kitchen? I wonder now. At the time I was anticipating the huge job of disposing of both of my parents’ things and, as stated at the beginning of this post, I wanted to get a head start. Does that sound callous? I guess you had to be there. Of all the things she had collected, these weighed the most, not just physically but mentally as well. I didn’t want to just donate them. There were many collectible pieces amongst the bric-à-brac. I had to photograph them, research them, and advertise them. I posted the collection as a whole on Kijiji and FB Marketplace, and approached antique dealers and movie prop houses, all to no avail. I’ll reveal their fate in an upcoming post.
The breaking point
I was living in Toronto at the time and, as a freelancer, had the flexibility to fit visits to Chatham in between jobs. I had been working on clearing Mom’s things since early October. By Christmas I had removed a large percentage and finally turned to the kitchen cupboards with the plan to streamline the contents for my father.
Mom’s collection of vases and storage jars, as well as extra dishes stored in the basement went into boxes ready to go for donation. This would be another weight off my mind. It was late in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve and the boxes sat by the front door, waiting for my father and I to pack them in the back of his Jeep and drive them to Value Village. We had an hour to go before they closed and just as I was getting ready he said,
“Let’s just leave them here. I want ________ to have a look through them.”
With a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach I walked into the back bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed I slept in. Then the dam burst. I sobbed for several minutes. The weight on my mind would not be lifted that day.
When my mother was younger and able she enjoyed refurbishing old steamer trunks. There were five in the basement and two were filled with her personal items. I didn’t have the stomach anymore to go through them. They would have to wait. I put aside dealing with my Dad’s house for the time being to concentrate on my own business.
My New Year’s Eve tears were possibly an overreaction and those boxes wouldn’t have worried me on any other day. Boxes and boxes. Volume and weight. Cubic feet and mental weight. The burden of our loved one’s worldly goods, all the stuff that they can’t take with them, weighs on those they leave behind. Writing this now, I realize I’ve cleared two houses: the house that I emptied last year and the secret one that my mother occupied, hidden away in drawers, cupboards, and closets.
