Last summer, as a way to procrastinate the house packing, Steve and I sold some shit from the attic on eBay and made some money with it. A box full of old VHS tapes? Really? At the same time, we also got hooked on some History Channel shows like American Pickers and Pawn Stars. So, it was a short step towards our new hobby – going to Estate Sales.
During the week, I scan the ads for the sales and then show up bright and early Saturday morning with the kids occupied by video games in the car. We're in a good area of the country for estate sales. Lots of old people who have been in their homes collecting shit for generations.
At 9:00, a crowd starts waiting on a line outside the house. My fellow shoppers are a mixed crew. Illegal aliens looking for old clothes and egg beaters. Mechanics looking for tools. Serious collectors who will beat you senseless over a mid-century chair with good lines.
The homes are in various states of dishevelment. And they reek of death. Like the booster seat on the toilet.
I suppose that hardened Estate Sales goers have distanced themselves from the idea that a person actually lived in this home and died here, but Steve and I are newbies.
The homes are often one step away from the wrecking ball. Water damaged floors and peeling paint. Kitchen cabinet doors hang from one screw. As I walk through the home, it takes a while to focus on individual things, because I can't get over the fact that a person, a real live person, lived in there.
And then there's the mad collections of stuff. The weird things that people cling to. Magazines from the 1970s. Mis-matched mugs. Old TV sets piled up in the basement.
What kills me the most is the deeply personal stuff that was left behind. Family photos and papers documenting military service. Did nobody in the family want this stuff? Where was the family? Why had they let the old dude expire like this and let this pit bull from the estate selling company auction off the valuables?
Sandra Tsing Loh writes about the difficulties caring for her 90 year old father.
My folks are, thankfully, still relatively young – 70 is the new 50! – and are healthy. However, my mom got stuck holding the bag caring for old people who aren't even relatives. She would love to walk away from that burden, but without my mom's help managing the health care workers and processing the bills, these old ladies would have ended up over-medicated, propped up in a wheel chair in an old age home. Actually, they would have died five years ago.
I'm not sure what the solution to all this is. Loh doesn't provide any help. Clearly, the health care bureaucracy needs to have clearer, fairer rules. Nursing homes need more oversight. Yet, there is a limit to what government can do here. This is one burden that can never be outsourced completely. In the meantime, old people need to go into those final years with grace and composure.
Old age and elder care is such a bummer of a topic that the tendency is to put off thinking about this. With Baby Boomers hitting that 70 year old mark, we can't put this topic on ice forever.
Apt. 11d 
“My folks are, thankfully, still relatively young – 70 is the new 50! – and are healthy.”
There’s something to be said for earlier childbearing. I’m only 13 years younger than Loh, but her father is the same age as my grandfather. That means that in case of serious problems, my family has two generations available to do stuff, whereas Loh’s family only has one. Also, my grandparents’ children have all raised their families at this point, so they are not sandwiched between the needs of elderly parents and dependent children as Loh is.
Loh’s dad owns a house in Malibu, so the financial side will be OK.
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We’re actively planning on this right now. No matter how mild the impairments so far, Alzheimer’s is what it is. Plan A is working fine right now, but isn’t certain enough to not have Plan B ready.
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My parents — approaching 70 as well — recently added an extension in which to house a large chunk of their lifetime of accumulated stuff.
If is currently generally “nice” stuff — not junk — but “nice” is a far cry from “valuable” in the sense of worth money in an estate sale. Leather bound books from the Easton Press. Numbered prints from Georgia O’Keeffe that sold for $2,000 new. High-end tchotchkes from the gift shop at Radio City Music Hall, at $150 retail. Judaica or unknown provenance. Will it all still be nice in 20 years? Will I have room for any of it in my house then, seeing as how my house is now filled to the brim with my stuff?
There’s not a lot in the way of heirlooms that I would want to keep, and I think it is making the Ragdad sad that I will just get rid of 99% of it.
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My parents are also in their 70’s, and active and healthy. They’re not really hoarders and so don’t have a lot of stuff. But, like ragtime, we occasionally have conversations where the parents reflect some distress over the idea that their treasures won’t be kept with us. But, all my treasured tchokes are inherited ones (spouses parents aren’t around anymore, and we have some of their things; spouse’s aunt is an anti-hoarder and tells people to take the family candlesticks or menorah or antique mirror or she’ll get rid of it).
But, we haven’t actively developed Plan A’s or B’s for eventual changes in their health.
I think that the planning is particularly fraught because people who will one day be old (and potentially unable to manage their affairs) are now fully capable adults. Unless they make decisions to plan for the future, there’s little that someone else can do.
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“But, like ragtime, we occasionally have conversations where the parents reflect some distress over the idea that their treasures won’t be kept with us.”
Back in the late 90s, my husband and I visited his now deceased grandma in Warsaw. Like many Central Europeans, she had a vast collection of china and crystal and was trying to get my husband and me to take it. We had a very busy itinerary (suburbs of Munich, Vienna, Warsaw, Lublin, Czestochowa, Krakow, Warsaw again, suburbs of Munich again) that we were doing by train, and even if we had wanted the stuff (which we didn’t), there was no way that we could have safely transported it on and off half a dozen trains and then across the Atlantic and then through three or four more moves. A few years after that visit, my husband’s Warsaw grandma died. Her apartment turned out to have large quantities of defunct Polish currency stashed all over, not unlike in the movie Goodbye, Lenin! There was also some gold (pre-Revolutionary Russian coins and the occasional US gold coin) and some usable currency stashed here and there. (When dealing with old people’s stuff, you have to be pretty careful looking through it, because a lot of them squirrel valuables away in unexpected places.)
One of the nicest things that an elderly person can do for their posterity is to not leave a hoard to be shoveled out.
Here’s one of my favorite blogs, which is about two daughters who are cleaning up after their car and tool-hoarding dad:
http://tetanusburger.blogspot.com/
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We’ve been looking at houses recently (having the freedom to wait for the right house) and I’ve been in a few that are obviously kids selling their dead/nursing home-bound parents’ houses. I love all the old stuff, too. Sometimes I pull out my iPod and take pics. I should post some of them on my blog.
70 may be the new 50, but I’ve lost a 67 year old father and a 63 year old MIL the past few years. 😦 My husband and sister just sold/gave away pretty much everything but the photos in their parents’ house. My mom is just now starting to give away my dad’s old clothes and stuff after 6 months.
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My mother died almost 10 years ago, when she was 63. My siblings (sister and brother) and I had her stuff professionally packed (hired movers) and stored the boxes while we worked out our grief. A little over a year later we started going through boxes. It took several weekends (probably more than a dozen) because the emotional drain was still powerful. We each took what we wanted and donated the rest. Of course this worked for us because we live in the same metro area.
I resolved not to leave my kids with that burden. The thing is, I am currently living with all kinds of stuff that I actually use-and that will be the burden they inherit. I’m not going to live small now just to save them some work! I want my yarn stash, my sewing patterns, all the baking pans–I use that stuff at least once a year. And the decorative stuff is what I like in my surroundings. On the other hand, I won’t be offended if they throw it all away when I’m gone–because I’ll be dead, I won’t be using it.
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My mother is only 20 yrs older than me and something of a hoarder. Whenever I try to address the subject she actually says, “You’ll inherit it all. What do you care?” to which my response is, “I’ll be 75 yrs old. What will I want with it?” Aaahhh.. mothers and daughters.
More seriously, I’m also an estate sale junkie, much to my husband’s chagrin. Enjoy the link. http://helaineolen.com/2008/05/06/theyre-selling-the-frozen-lambchops-in-the-freezer/
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One of my sets of relatives is living in a house choked with dead relatives’ furniture. The funny thing is, the dead relative who was the main source for this furniture did most of her own furniture shopping from other people’s discards (and not the good kind, either), so it’s essentially third-hand trash, rather than priceless family heirlooms.
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Is there any hope of re-popularizing the Viking funeral? Without the human sacrifice, of course.
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Trying not to make any in-law jokes. Trying really hard.
My parents moved house and a grandparent died in the same year. I spent the next four resisting any urges to acquire stuff, as I developed a horror of clutter. I also discovered that the most desired pieces were things we associated with our childhood. Monetary value was not nearly as important as sentiment.
Previous generations in my father’s family held onto furniture from aunties. They had sheds, attics and basements full of Victorian wood. If you want to store something long term, use the attic. You might have some mouse or bat droppings, and summer heat will be a problem, but it’s much better than basements and sheds. Basements = water damage = mold. Barns = water, temperature extremes, and animals (squirrels, birds, skunks, etc.) Of course, my ancestors tried to save mattresses for decades in sheds. Taking them to the dump was a real treat for my aunt and uncle–they were never quite certain if the squirrels had left their abodes or not.
If you can’t use it, sell it. Your descendants should thank you.
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I’ve been spectacularly fortunate: my dad lived to 85 and died in full possession of his faculties after a relatively short and cheap illness; I am going home for a celebration of my mom’s 90th in a couple of months and the cheese has NOT slipped off her cracker thank-you-very-much. My parents offloaded a lot of their stuff as they downsized, so we won’t have a lot of stuff to worry about on Mom’s death.
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I guess this is one good thing about generations of city living. Both sets of my grandparents lived in cities, and both my parents and my wife’s parents lived in apartments their whole lives. (My wife’s grandparents’ story is more complicated, but suffice it to say, most of their stuff is back in Europe.) So we have an entirely manageable apartment-size collection of heirlooms, one or two of monetary value, the rest of sentimental, and when my father (the last living parent) dies, his apartment won’t be a major project.
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I live in the Cincinnati area where the online estate sale business is fully developed and competitive. I work with many women my age (50-60) who have parents or older relatives in other parts of the country that do not seem to have anything like this type of business model set up yet. Cannot figure out why, as the online estate sale we had for my father’s stuff was an absolute godsend. He was the last of 13 siblings, and had collected everyone else’s junk over the years; thought it was all valuable. The online folks came in, organized and photographed everything, including piles of stuff in the basement and garage that they sold as large lots. There was one preview day, then the online sale took place over about a 4 hour period. Pickup was a few days later and the entire house was emptied out. They kept 30%, we got 70% and a cleaned out home ready for sale. Competitive bidding got us a lot more for the stuff than I ever would have believed (Dad was right, some of it was valuable to someone). Bad news is now I’m hooked on the online sales, ensuring my kids will have plenty of stuff to get rid of too!
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Sandra’s article hit me pretty hard. I get to travel 1,000 miles this weekend to meet the 3 sibs (who are traveling between 5-10 hours) to have “the talk” with my 65-year-old father. What does he want to do if/when his girlfriend can’t take care of him anymore? He is losing his ability to move and his mind is slipping. I utterly broke down when an 82-year-old woman was killed in a train crash recently when the crossing arm apparently confused her – everyone else was commenting on what a tragedy it was. I was thinking “what a blessing to have a quick end.”
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