Last fall, Kevin Cameron stood in the doorway of his parents’ two-storey Saltbox home in the woods on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, the place he’d built with his dad when he was a teenager and woken up to during snowy family Christmases with his own kids. The silence felt like a punch in his gut. For the first time, his mother was not coming around the corner to greet him. His father was not in the basement, tinkering with an engine.
So what’s the result? A booming business for junk companies willing to take it all away. An exponential growth in storage lockers that are never emptied. Endless Saturdays of garage sales, and trips to the landfill. An exhausting cycle of cluttering and decluttering. For every painting you’d fight your siblings for, there’s a Hummel collection – the one your parents said, “would be worth something someday” - that’s going in the garbage.
But as Kevin Cameron discovered, there’s an emotional challenge to dealing with the treasure and trash that your parents leave behind. It’s not easy to throw away these pieces of them. How we treat the stuff of past generations – and how we divest our own belongings to the people we love – offers a lesson in what we value too much and perhaps don’t value enough. What matters in the end? What endures? That’s the challenge: what to take – and what to leave behind – when you close the door on your parents’ home for the last time.
As an archivist, Danielle is an expert on stuff. She thinks like a curator who, faced with only so much space, has to be cutthroat about what will hold its future value. Letters and diaries are golden because they reveal a person’s thoughts and character. But a trophy is a title without a story, unable to say what made someone a good bowler or why they loved cars.
The pair also tried to respect their different emotional responses. Lori saw that it was painful work for her sister, who compared the job to disturbing a memorial. When the owner of a local consignment store came to the house to assess their mom’s beloved antiques, Sandy wept with relief that they’d found someone to treat the furniture with reverence and care.
Both Lori and Sandy understand why families get a junk company to just take the stuff, especially when you live far away, when the job is too overwhelming. But Sandy also says that sorting through your parents’ things, if you have time and energy, can result in special moments – bonding with your sister, or finding a card you once gave your mom, scrunched in the bathroom cabinet, on a day when you are especially missing her.
The largest transfer of wealth in history is the Trudeau Liberals transferring Canadian wealth to all countries of the globe.