I’ve spent the past few days helping my mother settle my grandfather’s estate. He passed away in the spring and we’re just now getting around to dealing with the contents of his house, which is an exhausting and overwhelming ordeal, even though the fresh, sharp pain of his loss has lessened a little. It’s funny, my grandmother is the one with the reputation as a packrat, but it turns out my grandfather was too – he saved everything. Cans, bags, broken appliances (I’m sure he intended to fix them), bits of wires and pipes and tools.. Â I can’t even describe it.
The summer was a blur and I’m only now beginning to feel sort of back to myself. He had cancer for almost two years and it seems like they passed so quickly, I don’t know where the time went. Life felt hectic, rushing around trying to keep up with work and driving out to help take care of him, and you keep telling yourself to try to enjoy every moment you can even though he was so sick and in pain and grouchy and scared. And then, suddenly, he’s just gone. Poof. The world keeps going even though this giant hole in your heart makes you feel like it should stop. But it doesn’t, and some day down the road, you have to deal with the practical realities of that, like selling his house and cleaning out his things.
I should be grateful, perhaps, that we had all these months in the interim to grieve without having to do this awful task of sorting through his possessions. I might not have been able to do this a few months ago, physically or emotionally. It’s hard work. My body aches all over from all the heavy lifting, and my heart aches from missing him, and it seems quite strange that this house full of stuff is all that’s left of a man that stood so large in my life. But then I think, that’s not quite true, Dad’s voice is the voice of my conscience – he lives on in my head, tsk tsking when I’ve done something wasteful or stupid, proud of me when I’ve done something good or worthwhile. I hear him, still, loud and clear in my mind.
And in doing all this, sorting through his things, it occurs to me that besides my physical possessions – the things in my house, the papers, and furniture, and pots and pans and clothes, and all the items I’ve tucked away here and there – I also have so many digital (possessions). What becomes of them? Dad had few online accounts, mostly related to his investments, and my mother and the estate attorney are taking care of those, but what happens for those of us who live digital lives nearly as full as our physical ones?
It’s been a journey to touch and smell and see the things he saved over 75 years of life. It’s been difficult, sure, but also.. healing in some way, to remember his life through the prism of the artifacts left behind. And you can’t be this close to mortality without thinking of your own end – who will do this for me? Who will sort through my things? I can imagine my sister sorting through my house, but who will sort through my Second Life inventory? My delicious tags? My flickr photos? The contents of my hard drive? Dad left behind scads of lumber and unfinished projects and tools and the products of his work, but so many of the things I do and work on are digital, online, in the cloud, behind a log in screen.
Who will sort through them and will it give them this sense of closure to flip through a digital inventory the way touching Dad’s tools gives me closure? I worry maybe not. For those of you who have children, have you left some instructions for them to find your online things? Should those of us who “live” online be keeping some record for our heirs to find? How exactly would that work? And is it morbid to even think of such things?
I’m really not sure.