The Six Stages of Cleaning OutSelling your parents’ house? Here’s what to expect.
First published at Slate
Sorting through a lifetime’s worth of your parents’ possessions is a rite of passage deserving its own stages of emotional tumult. Sure, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—hold up as a road map to mourning. But the good doctor stopped too soon when she overlooked a task most of us face as we struggle to surface from the grief of losing our parents. Perhaps because she lived at a time when people typically owned far fewer things, she forgot to address the stages of emotional tumult experienced while emptying the ancestral house. Her road map needs updating.
Since my siblings and I are in the throes of removing everything from the place where we grew up, the place Mom and Dad lived for 62 years, I’m picking up where Kübler-Ross left off. As you sort through every tangible possession from your parents’ lives, I guarantee you’ll pass through these stages: Sentimentality, calculation, avoidance, disappointment, totem, and dumpster. Through all six stages, grief and guilt are a given.
Sentimentality begins just as you’re surfacing from the first wave of grief long enough to catch your breath and think you’ve found acceptance. This is the stage where siblings gather in the lifeless house and say things like “Mom used these dishes every Passover.” It’s where a brother might say, “I remember when Dad bought this watch.” It’s where every sweeping gaze lands on an item that triggers a memory, and it’s impossible to imagine life without the enameled box sitting on Mom’s vanity, the painting they picked out on their honeymoon, the ice-bucket trophy from a 1954 tennis tournament. Nothing gets done during this phase other than a lot of walking through rooms, sitting and sighing, and occasional tearing up. Every trinket holds memories, and holding on to each thing feels like a way to keep the full realization of a parent’s death at bay. Loving Dad means keeping every Inuit carved musk ox he collected, even though we teased him, in life, for his odd obsession with these lumbering creatures.
Calculation creeps up with stealth and changes the tenor of the process. It’s first detected when the sister who admired the dishes suddenly starts waxing poetic about the sterling silver. Or when the brother who remembered when Dad bought the watch suddenly recalls being with him when he bought the gold cuff links. Calculation is in full and heady tilt when someone mentions they’ve been Googling Steinway pianos, and it looks like Mom and Dad’s 1932 Duo-Art Player Grand Piano in dark walnut is listed on some sites for as much as $75,000. During the calculation stage, the sentimentality of recalling Mom playing Brahms’ “Hungarian Dance No. 5” while we danced in the living room loses some of its grip, and selling the Steinway starts to feel like a good idea. The prospect of cash money blankets the weepy sentimentality. It turns siblings into accountants. It reminds everyone of the greedy aunt who helped herself to our grandmother’s diamond ring before Grandma was cold. It doesn’t feel good, but suddenly we understand. Internal shame accompanies this stage, because wanting what’s valuable in the free market distracts us from remembering that our parents are no longer on this earth.
Avoidance can be a long phase because of the mixture of greed, shame, and the realization that however the contents of the house are divided, it’s going to take a lot of work to move them from where they are to wherever they’re going. This is a phase when both the sentimental value and the calculated value of items diminishes. How do you sell a Steinway? Is there a market for carved musk oxen? Sure, Mom’s dishes are perfect for serving matzo-ball soup, but who wants to store 12 double-handled soup bowls? During the avoidance stage, heirlooms morph from being treasures into just being stuff. Fond memories of growing up in a house with a silver tea service turn into wondering who lives like this anymore, which reminds you the people who did are gone. During avoidance, grief resurfaces as the dancing partner to the work of emptying the house. The dance is overwhelming.
Disappointment is a crushing phase. Disappointment comes in the form of an appraiser, or an estate sale expert, or additional Google searches. It’s when you and your siblings begin to understand no one cares about Rosenthal china anymore. The ice bucket is silverplate. The upholstered furniture can be donated, but only if you pay for the truck. Disappointment is best summed up by pianos. It is almost impossible to unload a piano, even when it’s a Steinway. Nobody buys them. Nobody wants them. That $75,000 listing on eBay? It’s like a mirage in the desert. You see the $75,000, but you can’t reach it, which makes it feel like you lost it. During the disappointment stage, logic seeps out of your brain. During the disappointment stage, the internal calculations of what your thought your parents’ things were worth are shot to hell.
Nothing is worth what everyone calculated. Not the china. Not the watch. Not even the piano. It takes a while, but eventually everyone comes around to the realization that in the free market, everything’s a Steinway.
The blunt force of accepting everything’s a Steinway hurts. It not only negates the insidious calculations of monetary value everyone’s been making, but also somehow diminishes the sentimental value you clung to at the start of the process. How could your family have cherished so many things now deemed worthless? Disappointment is confusing. It conflates the value of possessions with the value of life. It doesn’t make sense. You loved your parents. You loved their things. Shouldn’t both be imbued with worth?
Totem marks a turning point. It starts when you sit down and make the hard decisions about what to keep. If you’re an only child, have at it. If, like me, you’re among siblings, this is the lottery phase. It’s when you draw numbers out of a hat and take turns. It’s when you think, really think, what it is you want versus what it is you need versus what it is that matters. Marie Kondo would ask what sparks joy, but that’s not the right question. At the totem phase, the better question is: What is it that fosters memory? If you’re anything like me and my siblings, this brings clarity about what to hold on to and what to let go of. For us it meant dividing up the musk ox collection we’d made fun of our entire lives. For me, it’s meant passing through my dining room, seeing the lone musk ox standing on the buffet, and remembering how much Dad loved it. Remembering how much I loved him.
Dumpster is the final stage of emptying a home. It’s inconceivable in the beginning, and undeniable once there’s acceptance that when it comes to material possessions, everything’s a Steinway. By the time everyone gets to the dumpster stage, they’ve usually taken enough from the ancestral home to feel most of it now serves no other purpose than cluttering their own homes. By the time a dumpster arrives in your parents’ driveway, it’s not unheard of to drive over one last time to Mom and Dad’s and throw a few things in, including stuff from your own house you’ve decided to get rid of. It’s when you accept that stuff is stuff, and none of it brings you what you really want. None of it brings your parents back.
It’s a relief to reach the dumpster phase. It marks release from the five stages preceding it. It marks another closure in saying goodbye.
Like the acceptance at the end of Kübler-Ross’ stages, there’s a gentle solace when you reach the end of emptying your parents’ home. It marks closure to the work of moving through the world your parents inhabited.
It brings a quiet surge of hope that whoever buys your parents’ house might want the piano, which you’ll throw in with the sale, like a gift with purchase. If you’re lucky, it brings the belief that whoever buys the house will raise loud, wild children there, bringing new life where old lives once danced.
