Letting go of our ‘stuff’

This is an indulgent post, so forgive me. I have categorised it under Personal so that does explain it away.

Since I lost my wife last year, I keep getting these sudden, crystal-clear insights into ideas. One that frequently hits, and hit they do, is the concept that in a sudden moment, all of your stuff, all of the things you accumulated in a lifetime, become nothing to you. In my wife’s case, this happened well before she left us. She had no interest in any of her belongings after a certain point.

At that same moment, this same stuff becomes something someone else has to make decisions about. Having married later in life, I had not had time to get to know much about my wife’s personal belongings. Each item has a story and a memory for her, but for me, very few mean anything. The thought of just disposing of some of it seems like denying her existence or the importance of all those millions of seconds and heartbeats through which she lived.

There is no answer of course. In the end you either keep it all or dispose of most of it. At least if it goes to a charity shop one can feel it has helped the world in some small way. Something that has come to me in the past is the worry that, subsequent to disposing of stuff, spotting it in a photograph and realising something was of some significance or of a very important moment.

Personally I am gradually leaving post-it notes on my more treasured  belongings so that my children might have some idea of the standing something had with me. I’m working on the assumption that I could suddenly lose interest in everything that I own, as did my wife. Such a strange thought.

Do you, reader, have any insight or comment? As I said, an indulgent entry, but why shouldn’t we talk about things like this?

Over to you…