Memory Keeper No More

 Last week, Meg and Nick had dinner with Dan and his family. They enjoyed seeing them one last time before moving to Florida.  As an added bonus, they were able to pick up the items that Phil and Doug wanted to keep from the boxes that Dan had cleared out of Carl’s condo.  I was glad that they were able to get them for us, but wasn’t prepared for how much there was for me to sort through.  I started last night and was pretty frustrated when I went to bed.

I would like to say that I felt a lot better about everything today, but in the end, I didn’t.  I had spent a lot of time downsizing over the past few years.  Thus, I thought that many of the items that were being kept were ridiculous.  I was surprised by how upset I got today, but I believe I reacted that way because I realized from sorting through those boxes that Carl valued those possessions more than he did our family.  There were very few pictures or memories of us or of his children when they were younger.  His note that his great grandchildren would love all of the artwork and hearing about his life in the peace corp represented an overinflated opinion of himself.  My children would never be interested in artwork from a grandfather that did not pay any attention to them or support them while they were growing up.  I know that would have meant a lot more to them than a few pieces of artwork from a time period before their father was even born.  

Even with my negative feelings, I did carefully repack everything into two boxes for Meg to bring to her dad in a few weeks.   I understood why Doug wanted to keep some of the Nigerian art work as it had been a part of his life since he was a child.  I remembered him showing it all to me the first time I visited his home in DeKalb.  If he had been with me, I believe that we could have sorted through it all and downsized some of it before bringing it to Florida.

The amount of items that Phil wanted to keep were another story.  They were heavy, bulky and for the most part not of any importance.  Bank certificates from the 1970s and duplicate pictures of trips that none of us went on weren’t necessary, but he insisted on keeping them.  I was annoyed as I had to drag them around for the week so that Doug could bring them back to Ocala next weekend.  One Illini yearbook alone  was over 5 pounds.  Since no one in the Heinisch family was famous and there wasn’t going to be a museum in their honor, I really did not want to keep everything as I had learned from Father Mike last year that very few of us would be remembered in 100 years, so keeping all of our possessions wasn’t important.  Living a good Christian life was.  Phil did promise to store all of the items himself if we got them to him, and also agreed to buying me a bottle of cherry vodka for my troubles.  I didn’t stop complaining about it after I heard that, but it did help.  Either way, after this week, I  am officially retiring as memory keeper of unwanted items.