Sooner or later, someone will sort through all my stuff

Sooner or later, someone will sort through all my stuff. What will they find and what impression will that leave?

That has been my recurring thought after the days spent recently helping to decide what to do with life collections of three different family members. Yes, three, all in five days!

First, I spent a couple of days with my siblings to help organize the things that belong to my mother. Thankfully Mom is still here to give some directions with this task. She has made it clear, often with notes attached, which items in her life's collection are the most meaningful in terms of sentimental value. Just as we have always known, Mom honors the memory of her grandparents and other relatives by holding dear items that belonged to them. This might be something small, such as a lapel pin of her father's or a stained stone bowl used by her grandmother in her primitive kitchen, but to Mom they serve as precious reminders of special people.

Next, we spent two more days with Earl's siblings sorting through their mother's items. Due to significant medical issues, Emma, my mother-in-law, was not able to be involved in this process. Her home is being sold and her things had to be moved out. We spent hours looking though boxes that sparked many interesting conversations and many emotions, everything from sadness, to amazement, to slap-knee funny. One of the most interesting things to me that we came across was Emma's senior memories book from the year she graduated high school in 1949. As I looked through it, reading notes she'd written and seeing pictures taken during this time, I had a sense that, although I have known Emma for over 35 years, I was meeting that teenage girl for the first time.

We finished up the process of sorting and distributing Emma's things, and one more task awaited us. Earl's cousin Janet from California has arrived with her SUV packed with things that had belonged to "Grandma Rowe." Janet lost both her parents in the last year and has been going through the process of sorting their things. In doing so, she decided to pass along some of the items that had been passed down to her parents from this grandmother.

I have only brief memories of Earl's grandmother Rowe. She lived only a short while after I joined the family. Listening to Earl's father tell stories as he looked through the old photographs was one of the most enjoyable parts of the week. Talk about a walk down memory lane!

The past few days, with all the looking, sorting, dispersing and remembering, has been quite an amazing and often emotional ride. You can certainly learn a lot about people, even those you have known for decades, when you get an up-close look at their life's collections.

Maybe I will spend some time this summer cleaning the attic and the other storage areas in my house, getting it organized and leaving notes, as my mother has, to identify those things with special sentimental value. This might help when the time comes -- and it will, eventually -- for someone to sort through my stuff.

Annette Rowe is a freelance writer from rural Gentry and a speech-language pathologist at Siloam Springs High School. She may be reached by email at [email protected] expressed are those of the author.