[2022-05-23] The story of our possessions
This morning, I read an interesting article in The Globe and Mail called The great junk transfer is coming. A look at the burden (and big business) of decluttering as Canadians inherit piles of their parents’ stuff.
Author Erin Anderssen writes:
The parents of baby boomers, the oldest generation alive today, were savers, having learned in the lean times of war and the Great Depression to treasure what they owned. Their children were consumers. Together, they will leave behind houses jammed with mahogany dining room sets, silver platters, crystal figurines and all manner of tchotchkes that their kids don’t want. And, even if they did want them, this Great Intergenerational Dump is happening just as millennials are facing a housing crisis, which will leave many of them either renting or living in much smaller homes. Grandma’s massive china cabinet is not going to fit.
The challenge for those inheriting the stuff left behind by older generations isn't just the volume of assets to deal with but also the hundreds of decisions to be made about each belonging. The article quotes one person who faced this monumental task when her mother passed away.
"It’s just so easy to be immobilized by what to do with some stupid thing you wouldn’t even give a second thought to if you saw it on the side of the road," says Lori Walker, who cleaned out her parents’ home with her sister in 2019....
If it was just junk, it would not be so hard. But possessions have meaning; they tell stories and reinforce our memories.
How we treat the stuff of past generations—and how we divest our own belongings to the people we love—offers a lesson in what we value too much and perhaps don’t value enough. What matters in the end? What endures? That’s the challenge: what to take—and what to leave behind—when you close the door on your parents’ home for the last time.
I was struck by Anderssen's statement that "possessions have meaning; they tell stories and reinforce our memories." When I thought about some of my prized possessions, I realized that only I knew the story behind them.
And I'm not the only one. A friend recently shared a story with me about an object he had gifted to his son. He wrote:
Our son and his soon-to-be wife moved to Whitehorse a few years ago and last year decided to take up fishing. So as a rather unusual Christmas gift this year I sent them my old tackle box, which I've owned forever but haven't used in a long time. After sending it I got cold feet, feeling that an old tackle box full of old lures and rusty hooks was a pretty chintzy gift, so I wrote 6 one-pagers of memories that the box brought back for me. All of a sudden, the gift became special for them.
The stories he wrote were humorous and memorable. They no doubt turned a simple tackle box into a valued keepsake.
Deputy Minister's Award 2014
My own "tackle box" is a beautifully crafted award I received in 2014. Serge Dupont, then Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Canada, chose me to receive his Deputy Minister's Award, given to one or two individuals in the department each year. I was (and still am) incredibly proud of this recognition.
I can readily recall the day when I learned that Serge had selected me for the honour. His executive assistant called me to the Deputy's Office and told me that the boss wanted to speak with me. She ushered me into his empty office, telling me that he was traveling and would call me from the road. I felt sheepish sitting in the Deputy's Minister's personal office, taking a call from him on his phone. He came on the line and shared the news that he had selected me to receive his award. I was immensely honoured, in large part because I had so much respect for him. I had many opportunities to observe how he made decisions. In my experience, he treated people with respect, dignity and fairness, and he balanced his care for the individual with his responsibility to the collective.
A day after the awards ceremony, I learned that Serge would be leaving the department for his next assignment. The blog post I wrote as a farewell reflected my affection for him:
Serge almost always appeared to be serious, but I got occasional glimpses of the person behind the position. One day when I met with him in his office, he was visibly taken aback by my outfit and humorously commented on it. Now, I’m a pretty conservative dresser and my black and white suit could hardly be considered flashy, but it was—admittedly—a little different for me. Later that same morning, I went to Executive Committee to deliver a presentation and when I walked into the boardroom, Serge and the ADMs [assistant deputy ministers] were laughing. I looked at him and said, "You told them about my suit, didn’t you?" He bashfully hung his head and laughed.
Another day last fall, at the start of the Charitable Campaign, I entered 580 Booth Street and was greeted by several colleagues, including Serge. They all exclaimed "Jen!" when I walked into the lobby. Kami Ramcharan was the first to open her arms for an embrace. Anne Van Dusen and Geoff Munro followed suit. The next person in line was Serge and I wondered what I would do when I got to him. Not everyone, including a deputy minister, is a hugger. But when I looked at him, he repeated, "Jen!" and stretched out his arms. I went in for the hug.
Perhaps it was that occasion that made it so natural for Serge to hug me at the Departmental Awards Ceremony last week after announcing that I was this year’s recipient of his Deputy Minister’s Award. After he delivered his beautiful words and invited me to receive my award, he came out from behind the podium and once again extended his arms for a hug. It was a beautiful gesture, one that meant almost as much as the award itself.
I was shocked to hear, just a day later, that he was leaving NRCan. It made his award all the more meaningful. I felt like I had gotten the last cookie in the cookie jar. To be the final recipient of the Deputy Minister’s Award from Serge feels very special. To receive an honour is validating, but to receive it from someone I respect so deeply is extraordinary.
The Deputy Minister's Award is special not only for the person who gave it to me but also for the achievement it reflected. In leading the Department's response to Strategic and Operating Review, I brought my trademark collaborative approach to the exercise.
The physical award is also incredibly beautiful; it's a limited edition (mine is #12), four-pound art piece cast in NRCan's CanmetMATERIALS laboratory. It will forever remind me of the department to which I dedicated 28 years of my career.
I believe that, by sharing the story of this object, my children will know how much it means to me. And I hope that they will see in it the achievement of a woman respected as much for how she did her job as for what she accomplished.
The stories we leave behind
The Globe and Mail article shares the helpful perspective of Danielle Robichaud, an archivist at the University of Waterloo:
As an archivist, Danielle is an expert on stuff. She thinks like a curator who, faced with only so much space, has to be cutthroat about what will hold its future value. Letters and diaries are golden because they reveal a person’s thoughts and character. But a trophy is a title without a story, unable to say what made someone a good bowler or why they loved cars. Its value peaks at the moment of delivery, then steadily diminishes, gathering dust in the back of a closet, until a decade after the recipient’s death, it’s dead weight in your daughter’s hands, headed for the trash.
Until I wrote this post, my Deputy Ministers Award from 2014 was a trophy with a title but no story. I've probably never told my children why I won the award and what it represents to me.
If our children or those who are left to manage our affairs after we're gone don't know the stories behind our personal effects, they will face a much more difficult task in deciding what to do with our possessions.
I was also taken by the idea that letters and diaries are golden. I have binders full of journal entries (which I'm not sure whether I want to pass along) as well as more than 600 posts from my blog Café Jen, not to mention more than 600 posts from Jenesis, my ultimate legacy project.
But what my children value could be something entirely different. Danielle Robichaud's most prized possession from her father wasn't the trophy—it was his favourite mug. "There is something deeply comforting about drinking from it," she says.
Anderssen expands on this idea:
That’s another common theme that emerges: what your loved ones will save of you may be the last thing you imagine. Not the china tea pot or the crystal bowls, but the scratched-up cooking tray you used to make their favourite squares, the Corningware the family took camping; the twist of driftwood you found together on the beach one summer—items that fall into the categories of useful, portable, original and wrapped in nostalgia.
In other words, our loved ones will tend to keep the items that hold meaning for them or for which they know the story.
A possession I cherish is a guitar pick that belonged to my late brother, Greg, who was a self-taught guitarist. After he died, my entire family gathered at his house. When I found five identical guitar picks, I kept one and gave the others to my sister and three brothers. I keep mine inside the case of my cell phone, which is never far from me, which means this memento of my brother is also never far. It brings me comfort.
Anderssen concludes the article with the sage advice of Laura Gilbert, author of The Stories We Leave Behind.
She wrote the book after cleaning out her parents’ home forced her to consider her own possessions in a different light: Were they treasures or burdens? More importantly, when her kids opened the door to her house when she was gone, what story will she have left them? She began to think of her belongings as auditioning for a part in the movie version of her life, and at workshops, she coached people to wander through their homes, like members of a film crew, and think about the narrative their possessions tell. "If you think about the themes you leave behind, you get to shape those memories," she says. "By not leaving a disaster, the kids walk in knowing what was important to you." Also, she points out, children who can wander through a carefully curated home are less likely to crumble on the doorstep and call the dumpster company.
There it was again: the stories we leave behind.
I found myself thinking a lot today about the objects I've accumulated. For those that hold sentimental value (and who but me would know which pieces are meaningful and which ones aren't?), I will endeavour to give them a voice. That doesn't mean that someone who comes after me will want to keep every object I curate, but at least they'll know what it is and where it came from, and perhaps that will make their decisions a little bit easier.
