What do we leave behind?

[TinaBina]

I'm cleaning out my parent's house. They both died this year.

My dad, for whatever reason (hoarder, slob, WWII, too sick to clean, rescuerer of tossed treasures) had not thrown away any mail since at least 1997, and had boxes and boxes containing scraps of his life, his families lives, decades' worth, stacked in mostly every room.

A sampling...
My school bag from 25 years ago.
A letter from the IRS to me, from 1996.
Cards from his wife.
His contact lenses, dried out, tiny hard circles... in the same box they came in back in the 1950s.
The molds of his teeth. Three versions.
His mom's W-2 from 1956.
An old dried out Black Walnut fruit from the tree around the block.
A dozen broken pairs of glasses.
A book of poetry (written on file folders stapled together) by my sister in 1979.
Every bottle of insulin that he had taken in the past 8 years.
Every pill bottle from every prescription he every was prescribed since the 1980s.
10 fans. In one room.
Phone memos from his job - from 30 years ago.
Carefully rescued nails and tacks in coffee cans.
Old car parts, in the boxes of their newer counterparts.
Et Cetera
Et Cetera
Et Cetera

Some items he saved are precious and some are sentimental
- and I will cling to those things and save them, too. And thank him for holding onto them...

But some are complete junk.
Some are repulsive garbage.

Yet ALL was rescued, saved, clung to, piled up, protected...

And all these decades of rescuing, saving, fixing, piling, protecting...were met with the instant that I opened the garbage bag. All that effort, worry, thought, all that trouble he took to gather, collect, store... in an instant is gone, and is now in 12 contractor size garbage bags on the curb. And I still have not made a dent in "the treasure".

So when we die, what do we leave behind? What is the point of the stuff we have? The stuff we cling to? What purpose does it serve?

What is truly important is the impression we leave, the people we touch, the memory we instill in others about us, about life.

I didn't know my dad all that well... he was a mystery to me for most of his life, even though he was always just in the next room while I grew up. Is filtering through all this stuff going to bring me a better understanding of him? Will it tell me a story? One that I will understand? One that I want to know?