Letting Go

Seven years after I moved to Maine we are cleaning out the Pennsylvania house.  The "For Sale" sign has appeared at the bottom of the drive at long last. Last week I went down to dispose of the personal belongings I still had there in closets and bureaus and piles. Keep and take to Maine, charity pick-up, and throw. The piles grew unbelievably, especially the last two. Once-precious possessions now seemed only pretty regrets. Who was that woman who collected a houseful of country kitsch? Surely she is not I.

Our grad-school daughter, Anne, came in from Pittsburgh to join me in the process. Her room was a collection of childhood memorabilia mingled with remnants of her teens and early adulthood. The woman she has become was shaped by experiences now represented by things, but she was able to let go of so much with amazing grace. The art projects, the jewelry box with the ballerina, the college textbooks--all filled her get-rid-of cartons.  Her godmother, my best friend, helped with the last afternoon of sorting, and her laughter and understanding and ability to carry gave the job a cathartic glow. Anne keeps the memories of laughter and tears cried in that room, but the husks of the experiences are gone.

Why does getting rid of things feel so freeing?  We are weighted by our possessions. We are tied to the person we were at any given moment by what we made, bought or were given on the occasion. Fear, however, lurks underneath the pushing away. Will I remember who I was? Do I need this as a memorial? Movement becomes possible as we shrug off the old "comfortable." Change moves like light into newly exposed dark spaces. The potential for growth and clarity, and the sense that we can only travel forward when we leave the past behind flood into the cleared rooms of our minds and hearts. We will not find the promised land until we journey on. Home is not, as I once thought, only in one particular place. It is not in a family frozen in the past, but in the roots that stretch across the land, underneath like the giant fungi of the forest. My poet friend says that one side of the woods has rain, and it is felt by the cells on the other side.

Eric, the man who lives so lightly on the earth, but whose emotional strings are tied to Three Mile Run Road, has yet to tackle his room. I suspect that he will have the hardest time deciding what to let go, and yet I may underestimate his abilities. Perhaps he will garner a new song from the experience.

It is strange to think that Neil is living in a house from which the other family members are erasing themselves. The rooms will finally be as organized and uncluttered as he has always wanted them to be. But though he often culls his clothing, he, too, will have to begin the task of choosing what to take and what to let go. He is a firm believer in documenting every decision and has the lists and piles of papers to prove it. The small candles on every flat surface in the home may represent his need for light. Some piece of clothing in every closet in the house--is that symbolic of staking claim? And his mother's ashes in the bedroom closet. Is he perhaps waiting for a time when retiring from business concerns gives him the space in his life to mourn her properly and let her go? We must be careful when letting go that we remember love.