object permanence
on purging, remembering, forgetting
I am purging my house. I’ve purged before; when we moved from a house to an apartment many years ago, I had a garage sale and got rid of things that were both junk and beloved. Star Wars and Pokemon toys, video game consoles and games, a whole collection of graphic novels. They were remnants of another life, one where my kids and myself outgrew or got bored with the things we used to love, as happens.
When we bought the house, I started collecting things again. Before I knew it my book collection had doubled, my record collection has tripled. I have so many things. Things I love, things I cherish, things I absolutely do not need. And these things are not confined to books and records and cassettes and bobbleheads, they encompass all kinds of detritus of my life. My kids’ artwork from thirty years ago. Old Highlights magazines. Clothes with tags on them that I’ll never wear. Some people have a junk drawer. I have a junk closet (or two) .
I started purging because emptying my house of unneeded, unwanted, unloved things would make room for me to put away and organize all the needed, wanted, loved items that are laying around. My house is messy. It’s cluttered. And I need to let a lot of this stuff go.
What happens when I start to purge is I hit roadblocks. They usually come in the form of a box of photos or drawings or notebooks. I start looking at the photos, reminiscing about each one. I decide to put them in chronological order. There’s DJ at five, showing off his Derek Jeter jersey. There’s Natalie, eight years old and pouting at me with the attitude of a teen. This goes on for an hour. I make no headway at purging, but I spend some time with my children’s past and that’s ok. I know I need to get these photos sorted and scanned and organized but it’s such a big job. I’d rather just go through the box ever three years or so and sigh.
When we decorated this house, we shared ideas but somehow everything ended up his way. The decor shows his tastes, his sensibilities, the things he loves. I’ve been slowly replacing the art he hung with art that I picked out myself. I gave away his Picasso prints. I threw some stuff in the garbage. I have a hallway lined with framed movie posters that are all going to be sold. This is the easy stuff. I have no problem giving away the things that represent a life I no longer no nor care to remember. No, the hard stuff comes when I open the overcrowded chest in my room and I am faced with several years worth of the artwork and scribblings of my kids. These drawings and journals and Mother’s Day cards go back almost thirty years. Surely I don’t need to have these, but surely I do. My daughter’s rendition of Ren & Stimpy [below], my son’s attempt - at seven - at reporting on the baseball playoffs [below], various art projects. How do I get rid of this stuff? I don’t. I close the chest again and swear to come back to it another day.
Instead of working on the photos and overstuffed chest, I decide to declutter the living room. I reach for the old, used candles on the mantle above the fireplace to throw them out and start fresh and as I do so, I see something inside the glass candle holder. It’s my wedding ring. Once an object that represented love and honor to me, it is now a reminder of things that used to be and aren’t anymore. It represents failure, despair, heartbreak. It is a symbol of broken promises and shattered dreams. I want to throw it out, to put it in the pile of things I’m discarding. I want to toss it into the Atlantic Ocean. I want to crush it under the wheels of my car. Yet here it is, still in my possession, still causing me to relive moments of deep sadness. Why don’t I just put it in the garbage? Because to do so would be to finally close the door on things and for some reason I still want that door open every so slightly.
They are just object, I say to myself. How do I always end up ascribing such sentiment and meaning to objects, though? I could take a piece of garbage and somehow make it sentimental. And when everything becomes sentimental, you get rid of nothing. So I never end up actually purging. This Bloom County book means too much to me. This mug I got from Disneyland in 2012. This sweatshirt of a band I no longer no listen to but still have an attachment to. To discard these things, to even sell them at a garage sale, would be letting go of attachments and I am obviously not good at that.
When I was going through a bad time, someone said to me “nothing is permanent.” And I thought that was a crock of shit. Scars are permanent. Heartbreak is permanent. Even if I get rid of the books and records and various other pieces of sentimentality in my house, they would still exist. They might end up meaning something else to someone else, those Bloom County books, the old camera lenses, the Levi denim jacket with the price tag still on. I should let them go, let them be permanent somewhere else.
As for the artwork and writing of my kids, I will turn everything over to them to see if they want to keep any of it but I don’t think either of them inherited my trait of assigning meaning to every object collected. The photos will probably never get scanned, that’s just too much a time suck project and I’ll never complete it. All of his art will go, that’s for sure. Maybe, very slowly, I will be able to get rid of things. Maybe I will take a ride to the beach and throw the ring in the ocean. And maybe it will all just remain where it is, reminders of good times and bad times, of living this life.
I relate to this real hard. I've purged some stuff along the way but this is a hereditary issue in my family. My Mom still had file cabinets full of our old report cards and school papers when she and my Dad moved in 2019 (with my sister and me both in our late 30s).
I used to collect things but then I was homeless for awhile so not much space then things got better and I made friends with a Buddhist monk who reminded me of the peace that comes with letting things go. At this point i follow the principle that if I bring something into the house something goes out. Take pictures of the kids things and memories you want to keep but let the actual stuff go. It was freeing for me. Hope this helps. Good luck