Let It Go - Peter Walsh Page 0,77
cans of paint) to the approved drop-off site in your area, or ask your trash service about options it can offer for these items.
Also, make use of the many options you have to recycle unwanted electronic devices. Again, your community may offer a drop-off point for these items. Some big-box electronics and office-supply stores will also accept these devices and some other household appliances. For recycling sites available in your area, check out GreenerGadgets.
Just make sure that the organization you plan to use will accept the specific items you want to recycle. (In some cases, you may have to pay a fee.) Also, even if the organization says it will wipe the data off an old computer, tablet, or other device, it’s wise to do this yourself before you drop it off.
Hopefully, after you’ve repeatedly sifted through your parents’ “material convoy” with each of these steps, all you’re left with is stuff that really, truly has nowhere else to go but the landfill.
Bag it up and set it out in the appropriate place for your trash collector to take it.
You can now consider your parents’ home thoroughly and completely downsized in the Let It Go manner. You’ve made it through one of the more significant family experiences a son or daughter will have.
I hope the process draws you and your family together, and that everyone comes away with the elements you’ll need for a healthy sense of closure. May you carry only the memories and stories of your parents that bring you happiness, and create new ones to treasure with the loved ones who remain.
AFTERWORD
Just 6 weeks after moving out of her home of 31 years, Susan Moore sounded like a different person. In a sense, I suppose she was, given that she’d gotten past the biggest change in her adult life.
She was finally living in the same town as her grandchildren. Between jobs at the moment, she was getting a taste of retirement a decade early. But part of her noticeable lightness also seemed to come from her new mindset about her possessions.
As you may remember from Susan’s story in Chapter 1, the weeks leading up to her move from the San Francisco Bay area to Arizona felt traumatic. Though her new home was actually bigger, the size of the Moores’ moving trucks determined how much they could take.
At the time, letting her stuff go felt like “I was throwing away my life! It’s like you’re committing suicide if you throw away your life!” she said.
Because she filled the trucks with stuff she didn’t truly want, she had to leave behind some items she actually needed. Her electric grill and some other worthy kitchen items went to a donation center. When she pulled away in her car, the pile she left on her curb as trash held a number of useful belongings, including two bowling balls in their bags.
She couldn’t put a value on the useful items that she could have sold or that she had to replace after she arrived at her new house. “It was probably a lot! More than a dinner out, I can tell you that!” she says. “Actually, I just bought a bowling ball this week because I’m bowling with my parents.”
Many of the things she brought, on the other hand, felt unnecessary in her new life.
“I packed things I found in the shed that my kids used to play with. I thought, ‘I’m going to play with those with my grandchildren.’ But I have brought them out a few times, and they have no interest! My 2-year-old grandson is an expert on the iPad. We’ve been doing numbers games, and he knows all his shapes, just from doing these games. He doesn’t care about the Mr. Potato Head that I had from when my son was little.”
On the day of this follow-up conversation, Susan was planning on picking out some of her treasures (like putting her daughter’s baby shoes and an outfit into a shadow box to honor them), then selling a lot of her unnecessary stuff at an upcoming community garage sale.
“The first time you start letting go of your stuff, it hurts. But I’m still me. My life is even better. I don’t need all that stuff in the bins that I thought I needed,” she says. “If I knew someone going through the downsizing process right now, I swear I’d go to their house and help them. I can honestly tell you . . . you think you need your