Things give our life structure. Like the sea creature that takes on or creates a shell around itself, we use our homes to give us that protective shell and we fill it with the things that make life more than livable. ‘Things’ make life wonderful. So when someone dies, families are required to ‘settle their estate’ but what they are really doing is dismantling that person’s life.
How family members approach that task, will depend on their relationship with the person who has died. If family members are all grieving the person, the task of taking apart their beloved’s person’s life will be a torture for each of them, literally, the job will seem like one continuous avalanche of emotion. If the family knew the person would be passing, they ‘pre-grieved’ him or her. After the death, there is an anticipated finality and dismantling that loved one’s life will be somewhat less traumatic. If the person was difficult all of their life, and virtually no one is grieving, then settling the estate may have little grief attached, but an odd sense of bewilderment at how the person chose to live their life.
So, just how do we dismantle the things that gave meaning and structure to someone’s life? What does it feel like to go through their things? First of all, it is completely exhausting because so much very stagnant energy is now being moved. It is dusty, often dirty work, moving furniture, going through piles of papers sorting, deciding.
At first, the task feels like utter chaos. Sometimes the person saved mountains of things that seem like garbage to family members, especially if the loved one who died was a depression era person. This means that every single scrap of paper will have to be carefully analyzed. Those folks saved everything! Sorting through this will take hours, because you will never know what precious document is stored along with the empty envelopes. One lady had unused stamps from the Civil War mixed in with local pizza ads. You also have to be careful when you move things. One elderly lady kept her precious jewelry and valuable World War II artifacts, under a fully loaded file cabinet in the basement. Some people keep money in books while others absent-mindedly stash cash in envelopes that look like junk mail.
We learn a lot about a person’s life, their mindset as we pour through old documents, go through their clothes and gently run our hands in and out of all of the pockets, making sure that nothing precious is left there. We may even have to take apart furniture as one family discovered when they tried to move their grandmother’s brass bed. The old lady had stored a lifetime of silver dollars in the four brass posts and never mentioned it to anyone!
In a sense, going through the elements of someone’s life is a treasure hunt. We are looking for the precious things the person left behind. Slowly but surely we catalog, organize, clean and sort the things that defined the person. If the person left no instructions for the disposition of these things, then families must use the dismantling event as an opportunity to learn about their loved one, and each other as they divide among themselves, the elements of the estate. It is not an easy task. Patience, consideration and care are required.
Each person will take away not just a ring or a painting, a stack of towels, kitchen or garage tools, but memories of the person. Some things will be donated, some sold and some elements will simply be disposed of as trash. It is important to understand that you cannot keep everything.
However, the person will live on in everyone’s life through the things that they keep, display, use and cherish. We will dismantle the physical structures of someone’s life, but we can never dismantle, take apart or lose the memories of the person, no matter what our relationship to them. Memories and experiences are the elements we entered mortal life to gain and those are the things we take with us when we leave. Things will be dismantled because they served their usefulness for us. Souls do not need things. Souls take the experiential memories of life on Earth, on their sojourn through the heaven world. We, who are left behind, can still use those dismantled things to create or re-create our own experiences and memories.
Antiques are created as something of inherent value is passed down over time because of the strength it continues to hold. Even if we no longer remember who originally owned it, the item still serves, offering structure, memories and experiences. Eventually, someone will dismantle the structures of our own lives, rediscover treasured objects and marvel at what we created around ourselves. . . and so it just continues on and on and on. Maybe the lesson for all of us is to let go of attachment when we can, and hopefully make the task of dismantling our own lives just that much simpler.
As we dismantle the structure of a life, we must then begin to dismantle the structure of the emotions we have toward that person as well.
In Part 3, dismantling our emotions.
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