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You Can’t Take Your S*** With You When You Die
How growing up in a house of “stuff” affected my life and changed the way I look at material things.
Several months after my mom entered assisted living where she’d spend the final year of her life, my dad ramped up his eBay habit. Not with buying, but with selling.
They’d been collecting antiques the entire 56 years of their marriage. The last five years my mom withered away from Alzheimer's, and her “collecting” turned ugly. She no longer had her discerning eye for detail of the beautiful Early American Colonial items she’d loved and adored from her years growing up in Connecticut.
She now had shiny object syndrome.
If she saw something that captured her attention she wanted it, and to avoid confrontation or a scene in public, she got it.
My parents’ home unexpectedly became a hoarder’s home.
Our home always had a lot of stuff. The antiques were there since I was born and I always joke that I grew up in George Washington's house. Everything was old. Not hand-me-down old, but 19th-century antique old. We had a pair of antique wire-rimmed glasses that looked like they belonged to Benjamin Franklin. As far as my elementary school friends were concerned, they did. That…
