Things we leave behind

As I stepped up the concrete steps and into the decaying house of a person I didn’t know, the smell of stale air and lost life filled my nose. The feeling of heaviness hit me and the the notion of how I thought I’d feel in that particular moment as I walked from room to room gave me an unexpected feeling of sorrow and curiosity. Letting the sight of someone else’s belongings seep into my mind, the cluttered rooms felt as if the life that once filled their spaces had left a spiritual footprint that had yet to be scrubbed from the bones of the house. With each item picked over, some taken and some left, the memory of the person that once owned them slowly changed and began to lift at the edges, ready to float away at any given moment.

I remember pausing at a shelf lined with boxes of ashes of long lost pets and thinking that the time had finally come for their souls to reunite and how happy they’d be. Then I thought of the people this person now gone had left behind. Looking around the room the immensity of the stuff they left knocked reality into focus for me. The weight of the history left for someone else to manage saddened me. How would this person be remembered? WOULD they be remembered? Would they be remembered for their love of Harley Davidson? Or their ability to sew? Or maybe they’d be remembered for their love of cooking? Or their love of animals?

Thought after thought filled my head in a short amount of time. Weeding through those thoughts, something dawned on me. As I stood in the middle of a dusty bedroom at an estate sale while others meandered around me, it hit me. It’s not the stuff we kept while alive that we’ll be remembered for. It’s the memories that those things evoke in the people we leave that will carry our legacy into the future. It was at that moment the the old adage that “we can’t take it when we go” filled my head. With that I made my way out of the house, down the concrete steps, and back toward my car. As I drove off I sent a mental wish into the universe that this person I didn’t know would be remembered for a long time coming.