A Garage Full of Heirlooms and One Signed Toilet Plunger

I used to think that keeping all of the things meant I was keeping the person.

After Robert died, life moved quickly. I packed up our house and moved almost immediately, then six months later I moved again. There wasn't a lifetime of belongings to sort through; Robert didn't leave much behind and we had only been married six years. I held onto a dresser he had owned since childhood, his tools, and a chest of things meant for our daughter Emmy one day. Those items traveled from place to place because I couldn't bring myself to let them go.

At the time, the reasoning felt noble. I told myself the items mattered because he had chosen them, touched them. Underneath that explanation was something far less tidy. I carried a deep fear that letting go of his belongings would signal something about my love for him, as though the act of selling or donating an object might reveal a lack of loyalty I could never undo.

A few years passed before the dresser forced the issue. Emmy was still young, years away from needing furniture of her own. The house had limited space, so the dresser lived under a blanket in the garage. Eventually, I decided to sell it.

The decision felt heavier than a piece of furniture deserved. I worried about how it might look if people knew I had sold something that once belonged to him. A strange sense of failure followed me through the process, as though an invisible standard existed somewhere and I had already fallen short of it. I listed it anyway. Someone needed an early American dresser, came to pick it up, and drove away with it. I never saw it again. Robert's life never depended on a piece of furniture sitting in my house.

Years have passed since then, and the question has returned in a different form. My husband David and I are the default keepers of family heirlooms. Items arrive through relatives who know we have room and that we will safeguard them until someone decides they want them again. We have a large garage, which apparently means we have infinite capacity for family treasures. We kept saying yes because it felt right to preserve these things.

Now the garage holds furniture that doesn't fit our home, boxes of dishes that once sat in someone else's dining room, decorative things tied to stories we treasure. Every piece arrived with some history attached, which makes the decision to release it feel heavier than the object itself. We've been sorting through it all, and the practical reality stands in front of us every time the garage door lifts. We can barely squeeze the cars in anymore.

Some of the items will go into a small booth we recently rented at a local antique shop. People who appreciate old things will find them there and give them another life somewhere else. The guilt shows up the same way it did with Robert's dresser. Letting these things move on feels like I'm discarding family history, like I'm saying the people who owned them don't matter anymore. I know that's not true, but guilt doesn't care about logic.

Our children may want a few pieces someday, so we're keeping the items that seem likely to matter to them later on. The rest will find their way to someone who will use them and give them a place in their own home. I'm trying to remember that this isn't abandonment, it's just admitting that love doesn't require a storage unit.

Belongings stay in place after someone dies because touching them feels like disturbing something sacred. You think about letting something go and the guilt is immediate. The fear touches something deep inside grief: the idea that love itself might fade if the reminders disappear.

I carried Robert's dresser through multiple moves before I could release it. I still have some of his tools in the garage. I also have a toilet plunger with his name carved into the handle. Twenty-three years later, I'm still carrying around a toilet plunger because no one wants a used one, let alone an autographed one and I can't bring myself to throw it away. I kept what mattered most - the things he'd marked as his own. He engraved his tools, including apparently that toilet plunger. Anything with his handwriting or his carved initials stayed. Emmy has the chest of keepsakes I saved for her. Everything else I let go of.

The people we've lost don't need us to preserve every object they touched. They exist in the stories we tell, in the way they shaped us, in the parts of them we carry forward without trying. Letting something go just means the object no longer needs space in your house. The person it belonged to stays exactly where they've always been.

With Grace for the Mess,

~Stef