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Letting Go of Sentimental Items
by Joshua Millburn
My mother died in 2009. It was an incredibly difficult time in my life, it goes without
saying.
She lived a thousand miles away and after she passed it was my responsibility to
vacate her apartment in Florida. It was a small, one-bedroom place, but it was packed
wall-to-wall with her belongings. My mother had great taste—she could have been an
interior designer—and none of her stuff was junk. Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff
in her home.
Mom was always shopping, always accumulating more stuff. She had antique
furniture throughout her apartment, a stunning oak canopy-bed that consumed almost
her entire bedroom, two closets jam packed with clothes, picture frames standing on
every flat surface, original artwork hanging on the walls, and tasteful creative
decorations in every nook and cranny and crevasse. There was 64 years of accumulation
in that apartment.
So I did what any son would do: I rented a large truck from U-Haul. Then I called
a storage place back in Ohio to make sure they had a big enough storage unit. The cost of
the truck was $1600. The storage facility was $120 per month for the size I needed.
Financially, I could afford this, but I quickly found out that the emotional cost was much
higher.
Memories
At first I didn’t want to let go of anything. If you’ve ever lost a parent or a loved one or
been through a similarly emotional time, then you understand exactly how hard it was
for me to let go of any of those possessions. So instead of letting go, I was going to cram
every trinket and figurine and piece of oversized furniture into that Lilliputian storage
locker in Ohio. Floor to ceiling. That way I knew that Mom’s stuff was there if I ever
wanted it, if I ever needed access to it for some incomprehensible reason. I even planned
to put a few pieces of Mom’s furniture in my home as subtle reminders of her.
I started boxing up her belongings. Every picture frame and every little porcelain
doll and every white doily on every shelf. I packed every bit of her that remained.
Or so I thought.
And then I looked under her bed…
Among the organized chaos that comprised the crawlspace beneath her bed, there
were five boxes, each labeled with a number. Each numbered box was sealed with
packing tape. I cut through the tape and found old papers from my elementary school
days from nearly a quarter of a century ago. Spelling tests, cursive writing lessons,
artwork, it was all there, every shred of paper from my first five years of school. It was
evident that she hadn’t accessed the sealed boxes in years. And yet Mom had held on to
these things because she was trying to hold on to pieces of me, to pieces of the past,
much like I was attempting to hold on to pieces of her and her past.
That’s when I realized my retention efforts were futile. I could hold on to her
memories without her stuff, just as she had always remembered me and my childhood
and all of our memories without ever accessing those sealed boxes under her bed. She
didn’t need papers from twenty-five years ago to remember me, just as I didn’t need a
storage locker filled with her stuff to remember her.
I called U-Haul and canceled the truck. And then, over the next week, I started
donating all of her stuff to places and people who could actually use it.
Lessons Learned
Yes, it was difficult to let go, but I realized quite a few things about our relationship
between memories and possessions during the entire experience:
• I am not my stuff. We are more than our possessions.
• Our memories are not under our beds. Memories are within us, not within our
things.
• An item that is sentimental for us can be an item that is useful for someone else.
• Holding on to stuff weighs on us mentally and emotionally. Letting go is freeing.
• You can take pictures of items you want to remember.
• Old photographs can be scanned.
It is important to note that I don’t think that sentimental items are bad or evil or that
holding on to them is wrong. I don’t. Rather, I think the perniciousness of sentimental
items—and sentimentality in general—is far more subtle. If you want to get rid of an
item but the only reason you are holding on to it is for sentimental reasons—if it is
weighing on you—then perhaps it’s time to get rid of it, perhaps it is time to free yourself
of the weight. That doesn’t mean that you need to get rid of everything though.
Giant Leap or Baby Steps
When I returned to Ohio, I had four boxes of Mom’s photographs in my trunk, which I
would later scan and backup online. I found a scanner that made scanning the photos
easy. Those photos are digital now; they can be used in digital picture frames instead of
collecting dust in a basement somewhere. I no longer have the clutter of their boxes
laying around and weighing me down, and they can never be destroyed in a fire.
I donated everything else. All of it. Literally. I donated every piece of furniture
and all of her clothes and every decorative item she had strewn throughout her home.
That was a giant leap for me, but I felt as if it needed to be done to remove the weight—
the emotional gravitas—of the situation from my shoulders.
You see, I don’t need Mom’s stuff to remind me of her. There are traces of her
everywhere. In the way I act, in the way I treat others, even in my smile. She’s still there,
and she was never part of her stuff.
Whenever I give advice, I tend to give two options. The first option is usually
the giant leap option, the dive-in-head-first option (e.g., get rid of everything, smash
your TV, throw out all your stuff, quickly rip off the band-aid, etc.). This option isn’t for
everyone, and it’s often not for me, but in this case, that’s what I did. I donated
everything.
The second option is to take baby steps, and it works because it helps you build
momentum by taking action. Look at it this way: what sentimental item can you get rid
of today that you’ve wanted to get rid of for a while? Start there. Then pick one or two
things per week and gradually increase your efforts as you feel more comfortable.
Whichever option you choose, the important part is that you take action. That is
to say, never leave the scene of a good idea without taking action. What will you do
today to part ways with sentimental items that are weighing you down?