My wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do.
I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things.
In a little more detail, I think that previous generations were time-rich and stuff-poor. Objects were laborious to make so people had few of them but also more time on their hands. That meant it was reasonable to obligate someone to spend a little time keeping and maintaining an object even if you weren't likely to use it often.
But now thanks to automation, globalization, and other stuff, physical objects are cheap. And thanks to an infinite number of media services who want to vacuum up every moment of our attention, time is costly. So objects come and go in our lives because it's not worth spending any time holding on to a thing you could just buy again when you need it later.
While I certainly take advantage of the convenience of cheap stuff, I don't think our current situation is really healthier.
> ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do.
I try not to collect things. But I noticed I have an increasing number of gaiwans. Somehow, I always find an excuse to acquire another one...
(Them gaiwans are of the "I won't be too sad if the kid breaks one" variety. Props to the kid for not having broken any yet, despite regularly enjoying a variety of oolongs/pu-erhs/greens...)
Since silver is important in making the front contacts of solar cells, sell that old unused silverware blackening in the drawer and help replace fossil fuels.
Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.
I inherited a family cabin. It's nice - I'm there right now. Rural WI, fiber connection, fireplace, on a lake, etc but god does it suck up the money. I'm looking forward to giving it to someone in the next generation but I have to wait until one of them has a job that can afford the upkeep.
It could be worse, you could have spent money to store a bunch of furniture or other things you'll never use for a decade, out of a sense of obligation to someone who isn't around anymore to tell you how stupid you're being, and just get rid of it.
I come from poverty relative to the United States and never want to let go of things, electronics having been the hardest to acquire in my childhood. My wife comes from being middle-class America and correctly perceives these fast outdated things as pure carrying cost, worthless in the near future.
A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility.
Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
We should think of mementos as going through a distillation process or something. For the original owner, the set exists as a reminder of their whole younger life—throwing parties with overcomplicated settings and finally getting into the middle class.
For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces.
These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.
>> But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a
trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to
not end up needing it.
Having gone through this exercise recently, silver is typically only valuable if it’s not plated and then only for the metal. Unless you have some really special pattern that someone else wants, it will be melted down for other uses.
Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.
I am from a European country with a long… very long history, some of the family heirlooms date back to Byzantium. I don’t live in that country anymore, and I live in terror of inheriting them… I could give them to a museum, yet asides from that feeling like a betrayal, I know it will mostly just sit in a box till it rots away. Maybe making it out to an exhibit once per 30 years.
I feel like we are all losing interest in our past.
This is the comment on here I most relate to myself. I'm also from a family with old roots, although our family heirlooms date back only to the Fourth Crusade at earliest. My mother passed away a few years ago, and I was made responsible for an awful lot of items that people would generally be surprised to find outside of a museum.
So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one.
But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true.
I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history.
So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other.
One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.
I'm reminded of Swedish death cleaning [1]. If I don't die outright, I'll try to do as much for my daughters.
When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.)
Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought.
The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste.
A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years.
This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay.
I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma.
Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil.
Sadly, this also matches my impression of the quality level of treadmills sold on Amazon. They are cheap and optimised for easy transport rather than usability.
family Heirlooms are basically junk as far as resell goes. many are surprised to learn grandma's cutlery or trinkets isn't worth the price paid to apprise it. This goes for collectables in general. People think that if their collectables maybe go up that they made a good deal, but they would have been way better off putting the money in the S&P 500.
This article came at a very apposite time for me, I inherited a lot of family heirlooms and have spent the last three years avoiding doing anything with them, not knowing much about where they came from or why I ended up with them. A lot of glassware and silver plate, some crockery, lamps etc.
In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it.
I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them.
If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.
If it makes you feel any better the hand written note is perhaps the real memento. Its got your grandmother's writing and thoughts on it. A real window to a deceased loved ones thoughts.
The stuff? Just materials passing through time and space.
Heirlooms are one thing but collections of mass produced items are a real drain on children to dispose of. We are working thru my mother in laws storage locker, 30+ yrs in storage, currently $5000/yr. The locker was 10x10 and 100 percent stuffed. To get work room, we rented three lockers to sort the material. We now have one locker with 20 antique clocks, one locker full of porcilin lladros, and another one with furniture. And the original locker is still a challenge. So much of this should never have been acquired.
And I still have my parents wedding silverware, 1958, still in the original wrappers.
> So much of this should never have been acquired.
I fully agree. My mother was a compulsive buyer and holder.
My brothers and I literally had to sort, evaluate, sell, recycle thousands of items. I found stuff like a knife to cut a birthday cake with a button so that it plays the "happy birthday to you" song. Fake candles, with an electrical wire: she'd buy five identical boxes of those. Never saw them used once.
This served as a lesson to me: I'm not perfect but I'm working on it. Having lived in four different countries helped me understand minimalism too.
And, much more importantly, I definitely don't want my stuff to be a drain on my daughter. The first thing I told her: have zero regret, zero hesitation, about throwing out stuff that belonged to me. Anything that doesn't talk to you: throw it, sell it, give it. I don't care and you shouldn't either.
Pro tip: if one wants to collect stuff, at least collect things that are going to last. For example instead of collecting Labubu dolls, collect gold coins instead. Gold doesn't rust. And at least you'll pass down something valuable to your kid(s). Focus your compulsive hoarding tendencies on something that'll teach you something (gold coins are very good at teaching history). Gold has value since, literally, thousands of years. Can't afford a 1 oz coin? Save and buy a 1/10th oz instead.
I still have too much stuff. For example a real vintage arcade cab: this thing still works. Movers do actually swear when they have to move it. But at least I still play once in a while a game on it. And so does my daughter. This one is probably my worst offender but, well, it still brings me some joy so there's that.
You don't need all these items: don't be a wandering hyper-consumerist soul.
Where is a 10×10 storage locker $5k/yr? That's a bit over $400/month! About a decade ago, I rented a 10×15 storage locker for $130/month, or $1560/year. Surely inflation has not been that bad to triple the price. Perhaps it's a geographic thing.
I feel you. When we moved my mother into semi-assisted living, she insisted on taking all of her 'valuable' Lladros with her. She still mentions what an endowment she's leaving us. They aren't without value, but the idea that they're going to put the grandkids through college or something is Beany Baby levels of delusion.
Or you can just get an estate sale company to handle everything for you, especially if it's just hoarded antiques that don't have any real sentimental value. You can even have them set the obvious family photos and such aside for you.
I feel this article acutely. My mother has a house full of antiques, fine china, and silverware that she values enormously but has essentially zero market value. Most pieces wouldn’t cover my monthly electric bill.
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
And "Sell on Ebay" is easy advice but, if you're not an antiques dealer, pretty uninteresting and impractical. The fact that there mostly aren't 50 cents on the dollar third-party Ebay sellers any longer should probably be a hint that it isn't a good business--and probably less so than it once was.
> 1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
The wild thing is that “what actually matters” likely becomes “what doesn’t matter” after one more generation when people who never met the person in the video inherit the video.
We are all just here for a brief time and yet we (myself certainly included!) cling so hard to attempting to leave a mark.
Most people we know only think about us for a month or so after we’re gone. Only our closest family and friends think about us longer and even then maybe not so many years later.
> 4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?
My ILs have traveled the world and have a home full of things they've purchased and loved. My FIL's parents passed away about 15 years ago. It took my FIL years to go through all that stuff and figure out what to do with it.
They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests.
I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.
8500+ ft² Victorian, with every last thing to fill it in style, and every last thing that was purchased along the way, functional, identifiable, or niether, objects going back generations, 2~300 lbs of photos and negatives 2500 + books, very large furniture,and mountains of pure junk in a never emptyied out in 165 years attic.12 or more full pickup loads to the dump, and 3 or 4 to the local hospital donation, thrift store.
Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen
selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.
No mention of size of houses either. I have great grandparents who had farms, parents with big 4 bed houses who have now passed. Meanwhile I'm in a two bedroom with kids. Not much room for that grand piano, antiques & book collections.
This issue looms large in my family. My grandparents traveled the world in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and collected astonishingly large quantities of finely crafted art and heirlooms that they had been warehousing until they died. My parents' generation inherited literal housefuls of this stuff but much of it is of a nature that it would be criminal to dump it in the trash.
A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
When we bought our house, we offered to buy it as-is so the owners wouldn't have to sort through it. This may have helped our bid win even if it wasn't the highest. It was actually pretty interesting looking through the lives of the previous owners.
I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.
Very interesting read. As someone who inherited the ancestors house which is 90+ years old, its really a fascinating read.
I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it.
But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix.
So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse).
My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new.
Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself?
43 comments
[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] threadMy wife started collecting fine tea sets ever since her mother-in-law asked her how she prepares tea. ("I'll show you how we prepare tea...") My wife does not drink tea. I do.
I say don't be a slave to possessions. Enjoy what you have, and what you inherit. If they become a burden, let someone else enjoy them. Life is too short to worry about things.
Time to make myself another cup.
In a little more detail, I think that previous generations were time-rich and stuff-poor. Objects were laborious to make so people had few of them but also more time on their hands. That meant it was reasonable to obligate someone to spend a little time keeping and maintaining an object even if you weren't likely to use it often.
But now thanks to automation, globalization, and other stuff, physical objects are cheap. And thanks to an infinite number of media services who want to vacuum up every moment of our attention, time is costly. So objects come and go in our lives because it's not worth spending any time holding on to a thing you could just buy again when you need it later.
While I certainly take advantage of the convenience of cheap stuff, I don't think our current situation is really healthier.
I try not to collect things. But I noticed I have an increasing number of gaiwans. Somehow, I always find an excuse to acquire another one...
(Them gaiwans are of the "I won't be too sad if the kid breaks one" variety. Props to the kid for not having broken any yet, despite regularly enjoying a variety of oolongs/pu-erhs/greens...)
Worried what the ghost of granny will think? Ghosts don't exist.
A lot of 10 ipads from 2015, e-waste from her employer paying to get rid of them? I greedily ask for it and she indulges me but with a warning that I have six months to find utility.
Funny. I'm the one who played so many strategy games where buildings have carrying cost. Less is more. She is right of course. It's what we do with the thing that matters more than what it is. At the Goodwill Donation Centre when I falter she says "Take a picture and give it away". Good advice.
For the person that inherited it, they exist as a memento of childhood. Their parents big parties were only a small part. Keep a couple little pieces.
These also might have been, in some sense, insurance policies. Some of your ancestors might even have been second-class citizens in your country. The silverware might have been their best way of storing any value at all. I don’t know if I believe in spirits. But if you end up selling it off for what seems to you to be a trivial sum: that’s because your family was successful enough to not end up needing it. I think the spirits are proud.
That's a lovely thought!
Old China patterns are very hard to sell as well. Younger people have no interest in things which can’t go in a microwave and need to be hand washed.
So, yeah, it's a lot of mixed feelings. There are certain things that it's easy to know what to do with. For example, I inherited a box, which is worth maybe $1k at most on the market, but which was part of a story which has been passed down in my family for 800 years. It's really nice to be able to finish that story with "and we still have the box." So, yeah, its easy to know I'm never getting rid of that one.
But there are other things that I kinda wish I didn't have to take care of. Now I have at least four more colonial dressers than I have room for. Marie Kondo would say that if it doesn't give me joy, I should get rid of it. And they don't give me joy. But getting rid of something that has been in my family for 300 years just because it doesn't fit in my house right now, that would give me guilt. I'm not sure that's healthy, but it's true.
I grew up in a house that was a lot like a museum, full of antiques, don't touch, hey that's older than the US, don't play on that. My mother did too. I don't know if that was always the best environment for a kid, but it did teach me a reverence for the past and for history.
So, I try to be a good custodian of the past. Visitors to my house might not know much about Ras Gugsa, Mother Seton, or Boudwyn of Constantinople, but I have interesting items on display that often prompt questions, so I can then tell stories. It's the other things, the dressers and silver chafing dishes, that are a burden rather than a privilege to have. I'm not sure how to have one without the other.
One thing that I've noticed is that a lot of the more guilt-burdensome items, not just for me but for people in general, are those things that used to be valuable and prestigious but aren't anymore. In 1920, a top hat or silver chafing dish showed you had class. Now, those things don't signify anything. But their importance to our ancestors of a previous time lingers on a bit. We feel like even though they are worth little that they should be worth more somehow. I suspect that in a few generations our grandkids' generation will be stressing over what to do with our Rolex watches and Coach bags.
When my mother died she left behind a rather large collection of collectable dolls — not my thing, and not heirlooms for sure. (They represented I think the first time she finally had disposable income — at like age 60 or so. So she collected these things she liked.)
Regardless, I wasn't about to dump them at a local Goodwill. They meant something to her and I was quite sure she would want them to go to someone who would appreciate them as much as she did — to another doll collector I thought.
The thought of the tediousness of selling them though had me packing them up and storing them first in a storage unit in Morgan Hill for several years — even after I had moved with the wife back to the Midwaste.
A trip out to California in the van-turned-RV though and I finally brought them to Nebraska — first in my garage, then down into the basement. But again they sat for years.
This year I made a kind of resolution to "live more lightly" and so began the process of putting each doll up on eBay.
I came to learn about the dolls as I created little descriptions for the listings, tried to answer the odd question that a potential bidder had. In fact in the end I ended up keeping one of the dolls in memory of my mother. (One doll for some reason I kept coming back to look at — had a hard time imagining selling it because it was so ... stunning.) My daughters also each picked out a doll to keep in memory of grandma.
Yeah, heirlooms, etc. can be a kind of burden. As a parent myself now I make a point to let my girls know that they can toss anything of mine they wish to once I shrug off this mortal coil.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_death_cleaning
Do people call the United States midwest the "Midwaste" now? Is it meant to insult people because of where they live?
I live in the midwest and this is the first time I've seen/heard it.
1. buy treadmill from Amazon with one click, delivered to your door
2. put it in the living room corner
3. after a while, put it in the garage
4. more time passes, move it to the storage unit
5. take it to the dump
Amazon could do us all a favor, and have one-click send it directly to the dump.
In a fit of efficiency (when the ADHD meds kicked in, and after my wife and I getting fed up of having to squeeze past the boxes) I donated about 80% of them. And then three days ago I stumbled across a handwritten codicil to my grandmother's will where she described in painstaking detail the provenance of each piece, what it meant to her and an anecdote or two about it.
I was devastated, for a few different reasons, my grandmother specifically wanted these things to stay in the family and they'd been cherished and preserved, and I'd just given most of them away. These objects are somehow a repository of all these unprocessed feelings I have about family splits and the grief of losing family contact and continuity. And yet before I knew their stories I was judging them simply on how much I liked or didn't like them and how often I could see us using them.
If I'd discovered the codicil beforehand I'd have had a much harder time deciding what to do with it all. It sounds trite but that handwritten document is actually more of a treasure than the objects themselves.
The stuff? Just materials passing through time and space.
I fully agree. My mother was a compulsive buyer and holder.
My brothers and I literally had to sort, evaluate, sell, recycle thousands of items. I found stuff like a knife to cut a birthday cake with a button so that it plays the "happy birthday to you" song. Fake candles, with an electrical wire: she'd buy five identical boxes of those. Never saw them used once.
This served as a lesson to me: I'm not perfect but I'm working on it. Having lived in four different countries helped me understand minimalism too.
And, much more importantly, I definitely don't want my stuff to be a drain on my daughter. The first thing I told her: have zero regret, zero hesitation, about throwing out stuff that belonged to me. Anything that doesn't talk to you: throw it, sell it, give it. I don't care and you shouldn't either.
Pro tip: if one wants to collect stuff, at least collect things that are going to last. For example instead of collecting Labubu dolls, collect gold coins instead. Gold doesn't rust. And at least you'll pass down something valuable to your kid(s). Focus your compulsive hoarding tendencies on something that'll teach you something (gold coins are very good at teaching history). Gold has value since, literally, thousands of years. Can't afford a 1 oz coin? Save and buy a 1/10th oz instead.
I still have too much stuff. For example a real vintage arcade cab: this thing still works. Movers do actually swear when they have to move it. But at least I still play once in a while a game on it. And so does my daughter. This one is probably my worst offender but, well, it still brings me some joy so there's that.
You don't need all these items: don't be a wandering hyper-consumerist soul.
So much of this should never have been acquired.
That can be said about so much...
Here’s my plan - you’re welcome to copy it:
1. Make a video documenting each piece and its story while she’s still alive. Get her to tell the family history, where items came from, what they meant to her. This preserves what actually matters.
2. Set aside exactly three pieces that genuinely speak to me. Not “might be useful someday” - just three things I actually want.
3. At the funeral, announce anyone can take anything they want to remember her by. Let family self-select what has meaning to them.
4. Donate the rest wholesale to charity. Tax deduction should be around $25k - likely more financial benefit than selling piece by piece, with infinitely less hassle.
This honors the emotional value without inheriting the burden. The video preserves family history better than storing unused objects. And it avoids the soul-crushing experience of discovering your inheritance is worth less than a tank of gas.
The wild thing is that “what actually matters” likely becomes “what doesn’t matter” after one more generation when people who never met the person in the video inherit the video.
We are all just here for a brief time and yet we (myself certainly included!) cling so hard to attempting to leave a mark.
Most people we know only think about us for a month or so after we’re gone. Only our closest family and friends think about us longer and even then maybe not so many years later.
What charity wants these antiques? Less hassle for you, I'm sure, but now a charity is going to have to deal with the stuff. Will they just throw it in the trash?
They've been frank with us - they love their stuff, none of it is worth the time and effort it would take appraise and sell it, and we should pick anything we like and donate the rests.
I think it was kindly done. You don't have to give away your cherished possessions as long as you free your heirs from the guilt of getting rid of it. I love my shelves full of books, but they are meaningful only to me. The kids can take them to the charity or the library or the recycling place as far as I'm concerned.
Both parents in a care home, together and I am working to be able to take them back to the house for day trips, so installing a wheelchair bathroom, and a "day suite" off the kitchen selling whatever is worth cash, and has no real sentimental value to pay for it all.
A unique challenge of our case is the legal status of some of these goods. For example, we have enough very fine elephant ivory artwork to fill entire storage units.
I dread having to sift through my parents house. My mom also loved her silver and China - polishing it was a chore that we could pick up as kids to earn a few bucks. The furniture especially is still in pretty good condition and is also just so much better made, with much better wood, but is in the completely the wrong style for our home.
I have often observed that my dad's sisters and himself don't care enough about a lot of things that are old in our house. Mostly because they grew up seeing it or grew up with their parents obsessing over it.
But I wonder, what would the author's younger generation think about it? Because we didn't grew up with it. Everything around us is disposable. Lifeless. Valueless. We dispose the plates that we eat and things we have like we watch a new movie in Netflix.
So maybe her younger generation sees it from a different light? Cos every other night, they eat from disposable plates. Her generation can't buy the finesse the old generation things has (for things that are heirloom worth ofcourse).
My dad reads his newspaper in a chair which was auctioned out by the British after world war 2 financial troubles. My great grandfather bought it. And I sleep in in my great grandfather's bed. Both not things to care or is valued by my mom and dad. But very surreal whenever I think about it. We don't always have to go new.
Maybe give another generation chance to connect. Tell the stories about it to them. They maybe fascinated cos it's new with history to them while it was a day to day thing for the author herself?
Interesting read! Thank you.