Simplify: Don’t Leave it to the Kids When You’re gone

Our double-wide bedroom clothing rack and shelves came crashing down with a bang last week.

Too many clothes and boxes above them proved too much weight and ripped the studs holding up the clothing rod right out of the wall.  On Cape Cod, that means waiting until Fall when one of the overworked local handymen comes up for air.

Faced with a bed piled high with shirts, pants, old shoes, useless ties, belts and more, we quickly filled three big garbage bags with clothes we hadn’t worn in years, threw some out and took the rest to a local second-hand store. It certainly wasn’t the first time our possessions had gotten the better of us.

Eight years ago, we sold our home of 20 years in Lexington, Mass., and moved into a rental there for two more years so our grand-daughter could finish at the same elementary school. Before the first move, we had a yard sale, brought in a dumpster and donated about 350 books to a second-hand book store run by and for struggling teens.  Some of the boxes that went straight to the dumpster unopened we had moved from California to Syracuse, N.Y., 25 years earlier. They hadn’t been opened since.

We tossed another dozen boxes of stuff and dumped a dog-eared couch and other old furniture when we moved to our home here on the Cape six years ago.  And yet once again we have seven or eight boxes and four picture boxes we’ve never unsealed since moving to Falmouth in 2018.

If there’s one thing getting old should have taught me, it is the need to simplify.  Yet we’re still doing a mediocre job of it.

I recall when my mother died in 1999, going through her basement storage room with my brother, agonizing over what to do with her high school papers, teaching certifications and dog-eared family photos of my father’s childhood cousins from pre-World War II.  Only after four or five hours in the sweaty confines of the hot concrete basement room and garage did my brother and I start dumping things at a faster clip.

That’s why I’m offering you this advice: Give your kids a break. Do the job for them.

I’m all for self-publishing a book with your life story. By all means, write a family history.  I’m all for labeling and organizing family albums. Maybe one from each decade?

But get rid of the loose photos from music camp when you were 14 (I did in my late 60s when we left Lexington). Either sell your baseball card collection from childhood or give it away. No one cares about your prom dress or the op-ed you wrote about the Unabomber. And they’re not going to care after your gone.

For the next several months our “closet” will be a rolling clothes rod in the corner of the bedroom, compliments of Walmart for about $70.  I haven’t opened our once-overstuffed closet in three weeks now. And I haven’t missed it.

I’ll have to remember that next year – and resist all those $1 bargains we bring back from the library book fair and 50-cent CDs I never listen to.

We actually do still have a CD player. But then, I really don’t need that either.

Jerry Lanson a writing consultant at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a professor emeritus from Emerson College’s Journalism Department.