A little hill made up of priceless, dispensable objects, gathered in the middle of the dimly lit living room. Expired chocolate bars pushed back in a kitchen cupboard. Different versions of the same discounted all-in-one remote control device lay unopened in their packaging. An opened, massive bottle of 1950s Brandy with an iron stand and a faucet - a symbol of unshared celebrations and a testament to a long-lost era - stood nearby. A lot of tableware, intended for formal occasions that never came, cluttered the space. Boxes full of multipacks of “natural” orange juice were stacked up, a bitter reminder of the elusive pirsuit of health.
In the formal living room, next to the balcony door, a baroque table and its matching chairs, once proud centerpieces, were now weighed down by stacks of newspapers and magazines that carried forgotten stories of a world left behind.
About two months before that, my godmother died of a heart attack in her sleep. My father went to visit her in the morning and found her sleeping peacefully.
She had been living alone for a few years after my uncle, her husband, passed away, leaving her to face an empty house, an emptier heart and a soul temporarily relieved from suffering. He was diagnosed with dementia, making his last years on earth very dark for all of us.
One of her favorite escapes was watching TV, especially the news and auction shows - the ones that preyed on the vulnerable, manipulating them into purchasing items they didn’t need. She, like many others, couldn’t spot the deceit and resist the relentless mind control that these programs wielded.
The picture of piled-up stuff caught me thinking and comparing myself to her, a thought I had been pondering since high school. What would happen to my belongings if I suddenly died? I imagined my relatives putting all my stuff in a pile in the middle of the room. How tall would my pile of regret be? What secrets would they uncover that I wished to keep hidden in life? Who would I be without all these things?
Slowly building this mindset over the years, my will grew stronger on the idea that I needed to get rid of stuff I didn’t know how it had found its way into my closet. By closing my eyes, I was able to visualize my belongings like a mind palace. I knew that things that made me happy wouldn’t be locked in a box. I wouldn’t fear that someone was going to steal them.
It’s unbelievable how many things can be squeezed into a cabinet and how much burden they carry. The more possessions we gather, the heavier the chains we bind ourselves with. E Except for the elite, who pay others to bear their shackles, or the middle class who work themselves to exhaustion, only to pay others to maintain the very belongings that steal their time.
My beloved aunt belonged to the lower class. She had a low pension and almost no fortune, except for this house. She was always a bit depressed and anxious about us - her only relatives - and the unfortunate events happening in the world. My father found a bunch of money in her bank account. She said she wanted to pay for her own funeral so she wouldn’t be a weight on anyone’s shoulders.
In the kitchen, next to the door, right on the top door of her new refrigerator (the one she had for 30 years had just failed a few months ago), some souvenir magnets I used to bring her as gifts from my trips around Europe sat silently. Each magnet represented a memory she never had the chance to have, visualized by our conversations about my travels. They were waiting for their turn to be placed on the top of the pile, in the center of the living room.