Dismantling the Family Home with Peace

I think taking apart the family home after the death of parents is for most people a pretty grueling experience. And yet it doesn't have to be.  It can still have its moments of sadness and poignancy, and Lord knows what do you do with those dour oil paintings of unknown relatives from the 1800's, but it doesn't have to be an excruciating experience.  How do you get through it with peace? How have I?

I have come to see this process as natural, normal, part of the never-ending flow of life.  It is easy to see our parents homes and lives and possessions as inviolable, as something that should never be "broken down", as something solid and enduring and of a piece.  But everything that belongs to them now (and has for a long time), once belonged to someone else you probably never knew, who might or might not have been related to you.  And at one point, it had not yet been created, whether that was 15 years ago or 500. Just because something has existed "forever" for us, doesn't mean it has existed forever. This idea of our parents homes as permanent entities is an illusion.

I think of two items in my parents house that an antique dealer discussed with me. One was a piece of china and another was a painting from the early 1900's of a Civil War doctor.  The piece of china, to me, has always been "ours".  I think of it as quite old and perhaps rather rare. Yet I learned that at one time, a couple of hundred years ago, this china was as plentiful as towels are at Walmart today, so plentiful in fact they were used as ballast in the sailing ships coming to America.  Think how many hands that piece of china went through before it arrived at my parents house!  And it will go on to pass through other hands, or people who will come to know and appreciate it all over again.

As for the Civil War painting, I had only known it (or him) as the man who stared silently out from our living room walls my whole life.  Like the street outside, I had never known a time when he wasn't "just there".  I never gave him a second thought.  But the other day as I was deciding what should become of the painting, I sat and looked at it and thought "how strange that you and I are here now, who would have thought?"  When he was being painted, I was years from being born.  Our destinies were foreign and apart and yet would become intimately connected in that moment he and I met to determine his future.  At some point I would decide where he was to go next.  How many other people, whom I never knew, had done the same? 

All households that have ever come together did so because other households before them came apart.  Everything that seems so permanent really was so for only a short while. This piece of china or silver, or that, has become a "permanent" piece of many households through the years, first here, now there.  Seeing my process as only one of many processes that have come before me, and will come after, as natural and ordained in the way of life, makes it not a heartbreak, but a passage.

Now, as the house is being emptied and repainted, it is coming to look once more like the empty, awaiting place I moved into in 40 years ago.  It is like the beginning all over again, only this time it will begin for someone else. 

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