Looking around at my grandma’s house, I’m overcome with the two pronged assault of relief and despair. After weeks of cleaning, hauling out her packaged trash and dozens of car rides to the Goodwill, the living room is finally bare. Not even a 17-foot U-Haul and the 21-foot dumpster could drag all her junk away. Fifty years of accumulated garbage, and now, it’s gone. I can finally let out a sigh and let my shoulders fall. I won’t have to come back here to clean anymore. Now it’s up to the realtors to put it on the market and sell. And yet as I look around the room, I’m filled with a keening sadness.
This isn’t my childhood home, yet I’ve spent many hours here. I can remember the Fourths of July and Fathers Days coming over to my grandparents, my grandpa lighting up the gas grill that’s now broken and lying in a dump somewhere. I remember his death and the monthly visits my mom and I would make so we could pick up my grandmother and drive her to the cemetery to pay.
I remember the afternoons spent stretched out over the living room floor reading Sunday newspaper comics, and how my grandma would always save her newspapers because she remembered I liked reading them. I remember weekends with my sister here because our parents wanted some space and unloaded us onto our grandparents. There are too many memories here. I can’t imagine how my mom must feel looking at this place.
For those who don’t understand the Buddhist concept of attachment, I recommend cleaning out their parents’ house. It’s a bitter feeling, an angry feeling. Why did they store all this junk? When would they ever use this? Did they just buy this because it was on sale?! You begin to see how enmeshed people get. More begets more. You never truly understand how much stuff a person can own until you have to get rid of it all.
And yet, you begin to realize that these things, this trash, might be the last things that your parents thought of. They might be the last things that can remind you of them.
Looking around, I feel like this is the last time that I will belong here, and even then, I still feel like an outsider looking in. Sure, I’ll be able to drive down the street and glance at this property. I might even be able to peek in through the windows or ring the doorbell and have a pleasant conversation with the people inside (Unlikely as that may be). But I’ll never be able to claim this place as my home, or in reality, as my mother’s home.
And I suppose that’s why I find my Buddhist professor’s words swirling in my head right now, because it’s not just the physical things that tie me down here. All my memories and the sense of them all ending, of this particular chapter in my life closing, also carries a melancholia. It’s not just the anger of having to deal with the trash, but the sadness of losing things I never considered important in the first place. That damned impermanence that makes attachment so problematic.
I try and think of things from the newcomers’ perspective, and again, I’m overcome with two emotions, excitement and dread. I can feel the vastness of the space before me, and it reminds me of new possibilities and also the expectations of those possibilities. Where will I find the furniture to fill this space? Is this shelf meant to hold food or would it be better to set china here?
But I push myself off the floor. Despite all this confusion of emotions, I know that it’s not anything that I can change. I’ve already done the cleaning and the sorting and the trashing. I need to learn to let go, but there too, I know that I can’t help but feel a little sorrow.
My mom arms the security and gestures for me to leave the house, and I follow.
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