IN THE last few years, my sister and I have been volunteered to pack up our mother’s independent living unit and also our aunt’s home when she too went into aged care.
The volunteering proposal put to us went something like: “You’re organised, good at tidying up, you’ll know the background to all the stuff and you’ll know what should be kept and what should be thrown out.”
High end skills indeed!
Hardly persuasive but my sister and I had already decided we would do it as a new Ice Age would be upon us before any other older family members got around to it.
And those two women had played a big role in our lives and we loved them.
When we helped our mum, many years before, pack up her home to go to the independent living unit, she wouldn’t let us throw anything out … well, very little.
In the end, boxes and boxes of stuff lined the garage walls of her unit and were jammed into the cupboards in her second bedroom.
So, when it came time to pack up the unit we were faced with a challenging task.
It wasn’t the big stuff that was of concern – mum had already decided who the furniture should go to, her jewellery and other valued possessions – it was the boxes and boxes of paperwork, weird odds and ends, records and CDs and the like, that hadn’t been touched in decades that drove us mad.
When faced with boxes of paperwork that had been put into boxes in no particular order one simply can’t throw it out, one must go through it, page by page.
My mum had saved invoices dating back to when she took over looking after the farm accounts more than 50 years prior. Mixed among the receipts and invoices, the ledger pages and the odd silverfish, were her wedding certificate, photos of us as babies, letters between dad and mum when they were courting and a gorgeously written letter from our dad to our grandfather asking for mum’s hands in marriage. It listed all dad’s qualities (very humbly put), his future prospects and in what we believe were possibly the only poetically, flowery lines our dad ever wrote, when he outlined his feelings for mum.
Anyway, you get the drift.
It was a challenge.
Our aunt’s home pack up was a lot more ordered until we moved into our uncle’s study, which we think our aunt may have done no more than close the door when he passed away.
What a challenge – it seemed that like our mum he had regarded all paperwork as sacrosanct – never to be thrown out, “just in case it was needed”.
I won’t even attempt how the “just in case it was needed” decision making had played out in his shed and workshop.
We may have grumbled at the time of packing up but it did give my sister and I a chance to endlessly chat – something we hadn’t had the time to do in years.
But as I write this, I remember our resolution to go through our own homes when we finished packing up.
We were going to get rid of all the things we had kept “just in case it was needed’ and follow the principle that if it hadn’t been needed in the last two years, then it was time to move it on.
All I can say, at this point in time, is that all those boxes in the storeroom at my home, haunt me.
