‘My apartment has become a museum of family stuff and stories. Once, I couldn’t bear to let the stuff go; now I feel suffocated by it.’ Illustration: Victoria Hart View image in fullscreen ‘My apartment has become a museum of family stuff and stories. Once, I couldn’t bear to let the stuff go; now I feel suffocated by it.’ Illustration: Victoria Hart Death and dying ‘I feel like I’m cancelling out her life’: the wrenching work of clearing out a parent’s home From old love letters to pieces of string, our homes are stuffed with stuff. When it comes time to empty a parent’s home, sorting the junk from the memory can be overwhelming
Soon after her marriage in 1952, Ellen Rogers’ mother, Fay, bought a coordinated bedroom ensemble – a floral dressing gown and matching bedspread. The day I talk on the phone with Rogers, she has made a tough decision – she is putting the gown and bedspread in a garbage bag to be sent off to a charity shop. “I feel so bad,” she says.
Fay died in May aged 97, and had lived in the same terrace house in Camperdown in inner Sydney her whole life. Rogers grew up in the house and returned three years ago to be a live-in carer for her mother. Now she’s cleaning out the house so it can be sold. The decisions she must make are endless; which pile for what item – family, rubbish or charity? “It’s overwhelming – there’s so much,” Rogers says, “including every bloody card she ever received.”
Through winter, Rogers moved through the house alone, trying to focus on the task but not always succeeding. Her three brothers are elsewhere. “It’s quite lonely and I hate this house because it’s so cold. I just wish I could speed up the process but I can’t. Some days I’m right on to it, and then other days I just can’t, because it’s very emotional – and I’m not really an emotional person.”
I’ve been in a similar situation. I know the emotion and loneliness of emptying a family home. After my father died in 2010, my mother moved to a smaller place on the Queensland coast. The large family home in Toowoomba where I grew up remained – overflowing with my parents’ household items, their collections (beer steins, fabric, books, Royal Doulton figurines), as well as every last item from my grandparents’ home which arrived in a large removal truck when they came to live with us.
View image in fullscreen Ellen Rogers in her mother’s kitchen in inner-Sydney Camperdown. Photograph: Joel Pratley/The Guardian It took me 12 years to empty what came to feel like an emotional halfway house; I flew up from Sydney for a fortnight or more a couple of times a year. My mother was with me, but absent too, lost in memories and completely incapable of making decisions about anything. We argued over everything. We argued over a piece of string. “That’s a perfectly good piece of string,” she said one day of a fragment maybe 10cm long.
I moved through the silent house feeling the ghosts of the family’s past, the grief-filled shadows, the immense weight of possessions, of stuff .
A house full of things is not a house but a memory machine; things are not things but layers of recollection of self But Rogers and I are not alone in the challenges we’ve faced. The global population is ageing and members of the so-called “Silent Generation” – those born before 1945 – are now in their 80s and 90s and either moving into care or dying. (Deaths in Australia have risen by 20% over the past decade.) This is the generation that came of age during the increasingly aff…