Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Estate sale tells tale of earthly possessions

There's an "estate sale" going on down the block from our house. No, it's not a garage sale. A garage sale implies the owner of the house is alive and well and is getting rid of his or her surplus.

An estate sale means the owner of the house is dead, and his or her relatives are selling what remains of what was once a family.

In this case, it's truly that. The couple who lived in the house died, one after the other in the space of a couple of years. She died suddenly, leaving him alone in the house, crippled with arthritis. He hung on for a year or so and then he, too, passed on.

The couple had children, but they don't live nearby anymore. But they did come back to get rid of what was in the house. They didn't keep much. Most of it was sold to strangers.

On the day of the sale, I stopped by. There were the usual things: old furniture and kitchen utensils, some appliances, pictures, all the items that meant a lot of the people who lived in the house, but which didn't mean much to their children.

I found that immensely sad.

It set me to thinking about my own house, because I was impressed with the amount of possessions we accumulate in a lifetime.

We live, especially in the United States, with many things, things that were part of the sale: furniture, pictures, appliances--especially appliances--books, a whole list of things we think we need, items whose sum total is a large part of the sum total of what we are.

But when we're removed from the center of these things, they become meaningless. We're no longer there to give them any focus, to recount how we got them, to tell each of the stories that go with them.

For instance, I have a wall of books. They've been acquired over a lifetime. It's a strange collection. Some of them date back to my youth. Others are recently bought, acquired for some specific reason, my own reason understood only by me and important only to me.

Without me to tell why I got each volume, they're only books looking for a new owner. And even if they get a new owner, he or she will have bought the book for a reason different than mine.

Above the books is a shelf of color slides in boxes. They record the trips we've taken together. We've done a lot of traveling, so there are a lot of slides--25 boxes, if my count is correct.

My wife and I can share in the enjoyment of the slides because we made all those trips together, but they don't mean anything to anyone else. The slides just don't awake the same memories in others.

Without us, they're meaningless pieces of film. I can't conceive of their being of value to anyone else.

In the same way the pictures on the walls of our house, even as the pictures at the estate sale, became possessions for some specific reason. We bought some at art shows. A couple were painted by a friend. Others represent some place we love to visit, like our second home in the Sierra Nevada.

But who knows that besides us? When we've been removed from their center, when we've left our books and our slides and our clothes and our appliances behind, there is no recourse but for others to sell or give them away.

The appliances, the mixers, food processors, toasters, electric knives, television sets and VCRs probably have the most value to others because they can serve a utilitarian life to whoever owns them next.

But the pictures, the books, the slides, even the furniture are suddenly worthy of nothing more than dispersal. I suppose that's the real message of the estate sale.

The message is we enter life naked and we leave in the same way, stripped of all our earthly possessions and connections. We've had a lifetime to gather and enjoy what we've got, but we need to be reminded, as I was reminded by the estate sale, that our hold on them is only temporary, that they're only earthly possessions, things we can't take with us on our journey to wherever we're stopping next.

But it's also well to remember, I think, that by dropping them, by giving up what we can't take with us, we have been able to achieve a rebirth, we've been able to succeed at the hardest job: leaving this life.

There's only one more difficult, and that's the surrender of our memory.

For if our possessions are the outward sign of who we are, what we remember of how we have lived is the inward part of our loss. And giving that up, forgetting loved ones, forgoing the places where we've lived, saying goodbye to this interior self--the real core of who we are--is the hardest part of all estate sales.

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