Alan S. Oser

By Alan S. Oser

It's time to move. My wife and I have been married for over 50 years and have lived in the same house for 33 of them. We love the house, but it's large and expensive to maintain. But to me it actually feels cramped because it has so much Stuff.

That's the problem.

How are we going to dispose of all this Stuff before we move? I say "dispose" of it. I do not say "get rid" of it. Getting rid of all our stuff is unthinkable. If it were thinkable, there would be no problem.

I have here, for example, an envelope that contains a message sent by my father to his father crowing about my birth in 1931. I even have a message sent by my grandfather to my great-grandfather in 1899 announcing my father's birth. What are you supposed to do with items like these?

I suppose I can pass them on to my son. But my son has a family and they have a house full of stuff of their own. He is the logical recipient, though, of these family mementos and a few of the other things we've collected: dozens of framed family photographs; a thousand books that my wife and I have amassed over the years; my unpublished manuscripts, several framed diplomas; my violin music; our yellowed newspaper clippings of famous events; our 24-volume 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica; my collection of personal letters going back 60 years; the small but choice collection of pornographic books passed down by my father, some in German; my father's collection of cameras and camera equipment, his cufflink collection; his antique metal tool cabinet; and an ugly bronze plaque of him that is too heavy for me to lift and that no one else in my family wanted. All right, I'll get rid of the plaque.

This partial list excludes the easy items — rugs, furniture, kitchen implements, clothing, paintings and drawings. These can be discarded in bulk, sold or offered to charities if not taken with gratitude by relatives. My wife's own Stuff is formidable in itself. She's got a lavishly furnished dollhouse and sundry miniatures, a doll collection, a rock and pebble collection, choice art and photography books, and over 30 albums of photographs of our life, our family, and our travels. She also treasures the cooking implements and serving pieces that she has collected and used over decades of entertaining, and wants to find a home for them.

In some respects, my wife is more optimistic about all this than I am. She believes, for instance, that our son will gladly accept her collection of books in French. This may be true, but we are both beginning to wonder where he will put our much larger collection of books in English. He has already taken most of my collection of 33–r.p.m. classical records.

Issues like these I faced and ultimately overcame in the 1980's when my parents were in the ninth decade of their lives. I helped move them three times after they both turned 80. The first move, from a house they had occupied for 42 years, was actually the easiest. My father had sufficient vigor at that time to pack his stuff neatly in labeled cartons. The problem of disposition remained, but at least he accomplished the packing and labeling of the Stuff he could not bear to relinquish. (This included half-used cans of paint that also followed him on a subsequent move.)

The remainder succumbed to a brutal form of disposition inflicted with my son's muscular help during a rainstorm in March. We filled a U-Haul truck three times and disgorged each load at a city dump six miles from my parents' home.

My sole clear memory of the contents of these hauls is that they included sacks of materials that my chemist father had used in laboratory tests for corporate clients, plus soggy piles of The National Geographic Magazine, assiduously collected since its inception. The magazines had been stored unwisely in a concealed section of the basement where storage space had been dug out of the soil.

Most of the neatly packed boxes went from the house to my parents' new apartment in Bayside, Queens, to become problems for another day. We managed to find room for almost all my parents' treasures, including fine china, crystal, silver, table linens, travel mementos and sundry collections. Eventually, there was yet another relocation, to a two-bedroom apartment in a senior-citizens' residence in Teaneck, N.J. The domestic treasures and most of the memorabilia went along, packed and unpacked by family members.

The time came for that overstuffed apartment and two storage rooms that went with it to be exchanged for a room in a nursing home. My wife and I spent a memorable weekend setting out treasures to be picked over by grandchildren, and by the home helpers my parents had needed and who were urged to take whatever they wanted. We took three trips home with whatever we could cram into our small car, and lugged the rest to a trash heap behind the residence. This was not strictly in accordance with environmental rules, but we urged employees of the facility to raid that trash heap for whatever they could use, since we had left more than enough Stuff there for a fully equipped kitchen.

Much emotional strife accompanied this process over 12 years, and I am determined to spare my children the same ordeal. Unlike my father, I will have no trouble discarding old photos and records. Unlike him, I have no books of tributes from colleagues in the course of an important professional career, or photographs of associates and professional peers at meetings held all over the world, or scientific papers or records of scientific experiments from years past.

But it is not easy to accept the trash heap as the immediate destination of items that have conscientiously been preserved for a long time. Each toss slightly devalues the worth of one's life. Or, putting it positively, each time someone willingly, or better yet eagerly, accepts such an item, one's life gains in value. A form of immortality is assured. Looking on that item 50 years hence, won't somebody say, "That belonged to my grandfather"? And even if not, the act of giving away gives pleasure. Throwing away gives pain.

So now I look with new determination at a stamp collection that had been bequeathed to my father, and that my father turned over to me (an early but fallen stamp collector). It has some financial value, but I would not dream of selling it. I must turn it over to one of my children, or better yet a grandchild. None of them collects stamps. That does not matter to me, as long as one of them gives me the pleasure of accepting the gift enthusiastically. Enthusiasm carries both the greedy and the considerate a long way in matters of inheritance.

So hear this Elias, Miranda, Rebecca and Ari: The stamp collection goes to the first one of you who instantly exclaims "I'll take it!" when it is offered. If you are insufficiently instant, it goes to Alina, who is too young to understand the question.

And if you do take it, I'll throw in my father's old bow ties. You'll thank me some day.