With the holiday season chaos behind us, there is now the post-holiday cleanup/chaos to contend with. And since January is historically the month many will start anew and tackle a lot of decluttering that got put off throughout the year, it stands to reason that there are potentially a lot of very anxious clients waiting their turn to go through this process in the coming weeks.
And while that can be intimidating enough for most people to begin after January 1st, imagine if you spent the last week of 2024 cleaning out the stuff you had been storing for the past decade in your recently deceased parents' crawl space in another state and went back to your current home with a van load of stuff to now make room for it all.
It was a very important clearing that had to happen for the parents' home to be put on the market to sell. But it was not something this person wanted to tackle on her own.
Did I want to drive 15 hours in December holiday traffic and potentially bad weather each way?
Or deal with the dreary, damp, chilled-to-bone grey Midwest winter blah-ness?
Not really.
But I did it for a friend who needed my professional expertise and, more importantly, my emotional support.
Besides, I am using her second vehicle, a somewhat beaten up van after having to say goodbye to my even more beaten up vehicle as a result of being forced over a median by another car that cut me off making a left turn mid-December…<insert UGH...Happy Holidays to me>..
So it was my way of repaying her for her generosity until I could wrap my head around what car I wanted moving forward.
But I digress…a little…
Giving up an entire week for an out-of-state project like this is not unusual for me. I’ve spent a sizeable amount of time over the past several years traveling to various places for clients. Luckily, most of those trips were to locations where I have family and/or friends (even Oklahoma where I went this past summer and highlighted it in a blog about my summer work/play travels but unfortunately didn’t get to see my friend that lived in Tulsa, 90 miles from where I was in Oklahoma City for 48 hours).
Anyway, I was ready to work nonstop in Chicago during Christmas/Hanukkah week at my typical high-energy pace especially since I was promised some play time in the city (we were in the suburbs ) once we had completed the tasks at hand. But that assumed my friend could work at the same pace as me, however, that is just not an assumption I ever make. As I always tell prospective clients, this is each client's journey to go on so I was there as her “spiritual” guide so to speak and whatever pace she needed to work was her call…to some degree. After all, we had a hard deadline and did need to get back to CO before New Year’s.
We planned to do the drive in one day each way to maximize the time sorting through decades of memories. Unfortunately, we didn’t anticipate the difficulty in finding some local heavy lifters to help haul the stuff out of the crawl space the first day and then haul all of the junk away that wasn’t coming back to CO the last day. We also struggled with getting some items donated as most of the donation centers in the area were either closed for the holiday week or we were limited by what they were willing to accept.
When all was said and done, the job took 2 days longer than anticipated and a lot more stuff had to go to the landfill because we simply ran out of time and resources. We did ultimately find a small thrift store not far from the house that did take quite a bit but when my friend walked in there the last day we dropped anything off I could tell how emotional it was for her to see a lifetime of her memories on display in the store ready for someone else to give them a new life.
Here’s the thing though...everything that had been stored in my friend’s parent's house hadn’t been seen or touched in 9 years. She moved from Chicago shortly after her divorce and left all of those memories behind and built a whole new life in the Denver/Boulder area including filling a townhome with a lot of the stuff from her previous life as well as new things.
Did she need anything from Chicago at this point?
Probably not the household items although a set of Japanese china, some martini glasses and a few other things she really does love and will use did make it back to CO.
But all of the old photos, school papers and other memories?
Those clearly needed to be sorted through and if you have ever done this type of decluttering you know it never gets easier if you are someone who is very sentimental.
My job, though, is about walking the very fine line between compassion and ruthlessness so knowing when to go into the more “tough love” mode is hard enough with clients but with a friend?
I mean, I don’t ever want to hurt anyone’s feelings or stress them out but whether I am being paid or not, I still take my role very seriously and want to make sure our time is well spent.
Most importantly, I want to walk away from the experience knowing I set the client/friend up for what their version of organized success looks like moving forward.
I wish there was a way for everyone to go through this process with a guarantee it will not be painful but on some level it needs to be or the clutter in anyone’s life and the burden of containing and maintaining it will never go away.
As I am about to begin a very slow and steady downsizing project for an elderly couple that I anticipate taking the better part of the year (they are in no rush), I am going into it knowing they will get plenty of “space for grace”. We plan to work in very small chunks of time (3 hours max) and at most only one day every few weeks and whether they do any “homework” I may assign them doesn’t really matter. Time is for the most part on their side. Granted, if they suddenly fall ill and become incapacitated, that will obviously impact our progress. But I can say that about any client of any age. We just never know what could happen so we are back to the "why do you want the burden of stuff at any stage in life?".
Only you can answer that question for yourself.
When I moved from FL to CO in 2016 I left a few things behind but with the understanding that I would probably never come back for them. There was a giant framed photo of my mother modeling for a furrier in Detroit when she was 16 that my sister claimed and the china and crystal from my first wedding that my daughter will probably incorporate into her NYC life in few years but for now my ex-husband is apparently using on occasion.
Do I miss any of what I parted with?
Not really. My memories of it all are very much intact and that is sufficient for me.
Would I want any of it back if I had the space or I could justify the space it would all take up?
Definitely not! I simply don't want the burden.
As I am writing this blog, Southern California is ablaze and just like when the Marshall Fire happened here in my community in Colorado 3 years ago, it is gut-wrenching to think about the devastation thousands are now facing. I know 2 people so far who have lost their homes and there is nothing I will be able to say in the weeks and months to come that will make them feel at all ok about the situation. Right now, they don't have the luxury of time to go through a lifetime of memories and make the deliberate decisions of what to keep vs. leave behind. While I suppose I could be an "I told you so" kind of person who has preached for years the importance of routinely going through your stuff and finding intentional ways to preserve the memories, I am not that kind of person. But there's no sugar-coating the current situation in California and my heart goes out to all affected.
My heart also went out to my friend a few weeks ago while she sat on the basement floor surrounded by so many memories but obviously in a very different way. She had a very finite period of time to finally deal with her stuff and while I could say she should have done it years ago and the pressure would have been significantly less, again, this particular journey in her life was hers to control.
I was just more or less along for the emotional ride. Nevermind, the literal ride from CO to IL was ridiculously long and boring, I hope I provided her with the right mix of humor, empathy, grit and “pull up your big girl panties” advice…and trust me, I have friends I need for that too…without any judgment.
Were there some intense moments along the proverbial way?
Absolutely!
But at the end of the day…or week…it unfolded how it all needed to unfold.
Could we have done without her dog getting into a bag of food before we had even left her house the first day at the crack of OMG and eating a bunch of toffee and half of a pumpkin bread with chocolate chips only to spend the next several hours wondering if it was going to come out all over the car???
Or did we really want to stop for a tire check an hour into the drive on the Sunday morning before Christmas in Wiggins CO and hope someone at the gas station could help us since nothing else was open at 8 am on Sunday in Wiggins CO???
Obviously but at least I was prepared for potential road trip spills/disasters and had thrown a few rolls of paper towels and some Clorox wipes in the van the night before.
Would we have been able to find it buried in the car?
Probably not, but that’s what rest stop bathrooms paper towel dispensers are for right???
Be well and, remember, always be kind,
Beth
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