Sorting through baggage of existence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/10/2020 (1964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month my sister moved across the country. A job opportunity came up on the West Coast and she took it. She’s always been a risk taker, unafraid of changing her entire life if the right thing came along.

I wish I was like that. I’m too scared.

For the latter part of August our mom, our other sister and I helped her clean, sort, purge and pack her belongings. There was a lot of life and memories crammed into her one bedroom apartment in St. Vital.

For someone who has no qualms about packing up and leaving for something new and different, she sure had a lot of baggage to go through before she left.

This isn’t a judgment on her in anyway. We all have baggage. Some of it inside ourselves, and some of it packed away into cupboards and drawers.

We spent days going through boxes of photo albums and yearbooks, notes, letters, pictures and cards. We rifled through our late grandma’s china and silverware and all the knick-knacks, trinkets, baubles, ornaments, and junk that my sister has accumulated throughout her life.

It’s a significant feat, packing up your entire life into boxes and totes and shipping pieces of it thousands of miles away. The cost of lugging memories in a cross-country move isn’t cheap, so you get to this point where you have to decide what’s actually worth it.

My sister is one of those people who will hold onto a gift because she sees how much feeling or love was put into it. Even while we were packing up, we had to keep reminding her that it was OK to let go of something that didn’t make her feel deeper feelings than appreciation and obligation. If the gift fulfilled its purpose, you don’t need to keep it. Let it go, we would tell her.

It’s just taking up space.

In a way, all the stuff she owned all of a sudden became more valuable not being in her life than it did being in her life. It was like an anchor, holding her down from getting out of here and starting her new dream job. What’s more, only a few of her possessions really meant something to her.

One evening in the middle of her move I got a frantic phone call from her. It was dinner time and she was still at work. She was anxious about closing her files and stressed out about the state of her apartment. It was partly packed up, partly still lived in and very, very messy. The way most places are when you are in the middle of moving.

“It’s never gonna get done. There’s just too much crap in my apartment,” she told me.

It seemed impossible, she was fatigued just talking about it.

When I got off the phone with her I ordered McDonald’s for my kid on Skip, then I left her and her dad at home and I drove to her place to wade through her belongings with her.

We spent hours sorting through her things, reminiscing about old times and people from our past. We dug things out of the guts of her cupboards that once seemed so important, but that she’d forgotten all about until we found them again. Some of the stuff we found no longer even had a memory attached to it.

“What is this?”

“I have no idea.”

Toss into the giveaway pile.

When my sister finally moved, she left with her senior cat, a couple vacuum packed bags of her clothes and some other odds and ends that were special to her. She ended up putting a few things, like our grandma’s china, into storage, but she got rid of most of her stuff.

“Do you miss any of it?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she replied.

Turns out she had been holding on to so many things for so long because she felt out of an odd sense of obligation. Because they were gifts, because they were things that meant something to her once a long time ago, or because she felt guilty not wanting something that was supposed to mean something to her.

It wasn’t just stuff that she was leaving behind either. It was a life, a job, her family, and friends. It was her dingy little apartment and the comfort of a daily routine, no matter how mundane it had become. She was walking away from old friendships, ex-boyfriends, and old workplaces. Some without closure. Some without care.

This was all the other baggage that she couldn’t just pack up and give away. But you can’t move forward without letting go.

For better or worse, she was riding off into the sunset with her senior cat and a couple of boxes of knickknacks, and lucky for her she was ready to let go.

shelka79@hotmail.com

Twitter: ShelleyACook