The freedom of losses

Sometimes, losing something one felt attached to turns out to open doorways one would never have thought of opening otherwise.
As I mentioned before, I grew up at my grandparents' house. My parents moved in there, too, up to the year when I finished school and went to study at a university several hundred kilometers away. The same year, my parents bought a house of their own and moved in there, along with grandma who at the time couldn't live on her own anymore.
But she did keep ownership of the old house, which after her death passed on to my mother.
I had always taken it for granted that one day, that house would pass to me.
I was also certain that I would spend my retirement there. I actually had that fantasy of putting everything that my grandparents had owned back in the places where they had kept it, every piece of furniture, every knicknack, every picture.
So, I hung on for dear life to every single piece of my grandparents' inheritance. I even kept my grandmother's aprons.
Then, one day, I learned that my mother had sold the old house.
I was devastated.
For a while, I toyed with the idea of buying it back, or recreating it. After all, I still had a copy of the blueprints.
It took me a long time to realize that my needs for a place to spend my retirement might be dramatically different from what my grandparents needed.
And I also realized that many of my grandparents' things I had kept, or that I had expected to someday come into my possession, did not fit in with my lifestyle at all.
Preserving one's inheritance was something that was very important for my grandparents. Great-grandma's watch, or Uncle Edward's books, were, just by virtue of who had owned them before, treasures to be kept and passed on to the next generation along with the stories of their former owners. For almost every piece in that household, there was a story.As a child, I sucked up those stories like a sponge, certain that I was the keeper of my family's history.
I also imagined that I would someday pass on the stories along with the items to my own children, who of course would be brought up to value them as much as I did.

What I had not thought of was that there might be no one coming after me to pass those things on to.

But that is exactly what happened. I am, at close to fifty years of age, childless. There is nobody left who will memorize the tales of my family after I am gone. And it's almost certain that one day, my household will be dismanteled by someone who is not even a relative.

Knowing this, I have been forced to take a long hard look at the reasons I had for keeping certain things.
What I found was that I had kept a lot of things that I would never even use so I could pass them to my children- who quite probably wouldn't use or need them, either. There were even things that had been worn-out and tattered when I had first come into their possession. Most importantly, there were also plenty of things that might have been at the height of style and fashion when my grandparents acquired them. By today, they were painfully outdated and old-fashioned.
If there is no one I can pass those things on to - apart the fact that imposing last century stuff on my offspring would have meant passing on my grandparents' unhealthy attitude towards such things, too, and would most likely only have annoyed them- that means I am free to decide which items I want to keep to remind me of my childhood home. The old house having been sold means I am free to decide where and how I want to spend my retirement.

It has taken me awhile to come to this point. In a way, it is a scary place to be. Moving away from a path I thought was preordained for me, to a place where everything is possible.
But those very possibilities demand that I release my grip on the things of the past. Spending a sizeable part of my income on maintaining a museum of my family history is not a wise use of my money.
Today, I have better uses for my time, space and resources. Perhaps I will write down some of the family stories someday. But I do not need to keep all of the attendant stuff for that.

And I know that the former owners would not want me to spend my life in a cluttered mess, either.


Julia