After a Parent’s Death -Dismantling the Family Home

The house is sold, Photo: Ronna Wineberg
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This article was posted on Psychology Today two years ago, but it’s especially pertinent now. Many of us have dealt with deaths of family, friends, colleagues, and others during the pandemic.

Our normal process of mourning has been interrupted. Some of us have been unable to visit an ill parent who is in the hospital or a nursing home, or have been unable to travel to another state to see a parent. We may have attended funerals on Zoom. And we may be unable to sort through possessions our parent has left now, or, at least, sort through things with the luxury of time we would have had in the past.

So many memories

A friend of mine’s mother died in the spring. Her mother lived in another state. My friend couldn’t travel there because of the pandemic. Her brother lives in the same city as their mother and put possessions from the mother’s apartment into storage — those items the adult children want to divide when travel is possible. The funeral was held virtually.

Despite the limitations of this moment in the world, the feelings of grief remain after a loss occurs. There is still the need for mourning, and there are still possessions to sift through and dispose of, one way or another. 

Bernard Wineberg, my Dad

Here is my experience with this process after my father’s death:

After my mother died seven years ago at eighty-four, my father didn’t want to live in their house alone. He was ninety and still healthy. They had lived in a small house near Chicago for fifty-five years.

He wanted to move to an apartment in a senior community.  He didn’t want to spend time in the house.  It had been a happy place but was full of sadness for him now.  The rooms felt empty of my mother, yet somehow full of her presence.

 This was a difficult time. We were grieving.  But dismantling and selling the house had to be done. 

“Is this what we’re all reduced to?” my cousin said after her grandmother died.  “Someone else throwing out our things?”

 When a parent dies, a part of our life ends.  Dismantling a parent’s home is another ending.  The objects that belonged to someone close to us are more than “things.” They are wrapped in memory and emotion.  

Sigmund Freud wrote in a letter to his brother about their father’s death: “By the time he died, his life had been over, but at a death, the whole past stirs within me.” 

My sister, two cousins, my children, and I sorted the furniture and personal belongings in the house. We emptied closets, drawers, and cabinets. This was exhausting, emotional, yet, on occasion, comforting work.  We found: letters, invitations from sixty years ago, lists my mother wrote, World War II savings bonds, boxes of old photos, clothing from the 1950s, report cards, a 1972 calendar open on a desk—even my mother’s home-made wedding dress and old-fashioned, elbow length, white cotton gloves. 

The secrets revealed from possessions of a lifetime tell us a story, whether it’s our first parent who has died or the last. Often what we learn helps us discover the unknown—a side of a parent that wasn’t seen or hadn’t been available before. We may experience a range of feelings we weren’t in touch with, such as leftover anger, regret, loss, disappointment, or gratitude.  We may be surprised by the way the past can invade the present and spill into the future.   

We can ask family and friends to help. Some families delegate tasks and hire an estate service to organize a sale of items and donate or discard the rest.

 

The piano

My sister and I made tough decisions. In the crawlspace, we found the wooden sled we’d ridden in the snow as children.  The sled sparked memories.  It had to go; I felt as if I were letting go of childhood.  No one had room for the old baby grand piano or the armchair where our grandparents used to sit.  She and I wanted some of the same things, but we were flexible and able to negotiate, and also moved furniture to my father’s apartment, gathered donations, and filled bags with trash.    

The amount of stuff in a parent’s home may be overwhelming. 

“After my mother died,” a friend told me, “we had to give away all her furniture. Her dining room set.  Big walnut pieces.  No one could use them.  I felt guilty. She was proud of how she’d put together her home.”

We can keep things, give some to family and friends, and photograph items that have meaning but that we have to give away.  

In the basement, my son found a bulging manila envelope in a pile of papers.  Inside the envelope were letters my father had written from the Army during World War II. He wrote to his mother, sisters, and brother about what it was like to be a soldier at that moment in history and time in his life.  

Loretta and Bernard are married

As we sift through a parent’s possessions, we are seeking closure, but what we discover may give us new perspective.  The bits and pieces we learn about a parent can teach us about ourselves.  There is unexpected meaning in both saving and letting go.  

We also may have the opportunity to revisit a parent’s past dreams and ideas, and to see what a parent had to give up in order to take care of the necessities of life. 

Finding my father’s letters reminded me of his dreams when he was young.  He’d wanted to be a doctor, but that wasn’t possible. His father died when my dad was seventeen. My father took over the small family dry goods business; he had to support his mother and siblings. 

My father had a sense of humor, was responsible, smart, practical, nurturing, and devoted to the family. He knew about politics, sports, history, enjoyed music and theater, but he didn’t talk much about emotions.  He did, however, in the letters. 

The letters from World War II 

The letters are sitting in a file cabinet in my apartment. I have read only a few. There wasn’t time to read them all after my mother died. The house sold eight months after her death. My father died a year later; the losses had felt too fresh. The letters I’ve looked at give me a new understanding of who he was.

His voice, hopes, and disappointments are on the pages he wrote. The war, history, and politics are there, too.

I read once that every letter has two lives—one in the writer’s mind, and the other that the reader gives to it.  

I’m ready to read my father’s letters, to give them their second or third life.  Perhaps in some form they will make their way into my own writing.

We may not find letters like my father’s. However, we’ll most likely find something that gives us new insights—good and bad—about a parent and our own lives.  Sorting a parent’s possessions triggers memories, discoveries, and unexpected emotions.  These insights are gifts, laced with both joy and grief. Their meaning will become clear to us in time. 

All photos – credit: Ronna Wineberg

Ronna Wineberg is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel. Her most recent book is Nine Facts That Can Change Your Life. She won a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Ronna is the senior fiction editor of the Bellevue Literary Review and a founding editor of the journal.

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