The Stuff

If you have an aging parent that you are responsible for, you are going to have to deal with the stuff. Many people acquire more things as they age. My mother was always a collector. Before she moved to Florida from Massachusetts, we had a series of estate sales, and she still moved with a full moving truck and a large pod shipment. She still regrets she let so much go, but she now has a three-bedroom house larger than her previous home, and it is absolutely full of her belongings.

Nearly every person I talk to on this journey has mentioned that they are confused about how to handle their parents' possessions. It brings up a lot of challenges because everyone's relationship with possessions is different. I've always been uneasy with stuff because of my mother's attachment to it. Possessions are everything to her. They are nothing to me. I've collected nothing, left cars and furniture behind, and moved cross-country with a single suitcase multiple times. My father was similar. When he left a relationship, he simply packed a bag and moved on. I don't need personalization, keepsakes, or even much art. A bare wall soothes me.

My mother wants more, always more. More clothes in every closet in her house. Every cupboard is stuffed with kitchen gadgets and dishes. Every cabinet is at capacity. The garage is barely usable. If she weren't homebound, she'd buy more, and there was a point where she was spending thousands of dollars on jewelry from the home shopping channels. Her sister, who is in the fashion industry, sends her boxes of clothing for her to look at and donate. She rarely donates and so most of the floor space in her home is covered with plastic totes full of clothing she says she will wear. This is especially challenging because she uses a wheelchair and so she is constantly moving things that are in her path.

Like many people in a similar spot (and there are so many of us), I can't help but look at all this stuff and despair. I've followed the auction markets for a few decades and watched prices for brown furniture and ceramic collectibles fall as supply increased. This is basic market forces at work. Tastes have shifted in favor of modern clean lines. An antiques expert told me that taste shifts are generational. Perhaps the next generation will fall in love en masse with collectibles and faux Chippendale tables but I doubt it.

I think sometimes about the Beanie Babies. My mother was a fan of home shopping since the 1980s but thankfully wasn't buying a lot of the little plush toys then. She has, however, picked up many in thrift stores since, and we have a full plastic tote of them that she insists are valuable despite the fact that I once had her read Zac Bissonette's excellent book on The Beanie Babie Bubble. There are thousands, if not millions of these plush toys in plastic totes all around the country. They have no utility and little value. It's not just the figurines and the tchotchkes, it's even the things my generation loves like comic books. The nature of collecting drives people to go long and deep on a vertical but when that vertical becomes unpopular, we are out of luck until the next cycle begins. If it begins.

What do we do? I can think of this as my problem but I also know that millions of people are dealing with this. The proliferation of self-storage facilities is another testament to this. One reason that this becomes urgent is when a person suddenly needs to be in a care facility, then the family is forced to reckon with how to sift through decades of belongings and try to determine what is most important both to themselves and the parent. Sometimes, the parent is not able to make the decisions on what they want to keep or discard. It is very hard for people to realize their decades of possessions don't have the same value for others. It's even tricker when there are valuables involved, and some people want to claim things for themselves.

For me, for now, living with her, I'm living with the stuff. It's not easy or comfortable for me, but she loves her belongings, and I'm not going to fight that unless I have to for her own wellbeing. Someday I will have to cross this stuff bridge, it won't be easy and I will have to have a lot of conversations with family about how to handle everything. If your family is different than mine, have open conversations about "the stuff" and clutter as early as you can. Have a plan for what you can get rid of now, what is held on to, and who it goes to next. Work together to downsize and let things go gracefully when the time is right. It's one of the biggest gifts the aging can give the young.