Well, not really cleaning out an attic, but my grandparent’s apartment in this case. 

Here’s a photo of an old silver dime I found in the collection that’s now part of my set of random momentos.

More musing after the cut.

This saturday was the second to last day of cleaning out the remnants of two people’s lives. 

The first few times we were cleaning, it felt like we were vultures picking out a dead body, in this case a body made up of papers, photos, dust mites,  odd bits of history, and the occasional forgotten skeleton.  By the end, you start to feel like you’re just doing another job.

If there’s multiple people doing it, the pressure and tension undulates — because each person has different memories that they want preserved, and there’s rarely in complete synch.   Gatherings of the family to continue the task are mixed bags, sometimes ending in a good time and sometimes bringing to life the underlying differences between family members.

At the start, there’s an incredible amount of detail and thought that goes into whether or not you throw something out.   After months of chugging, the amount of time spent becomes exponentially less.  The subsequent guilt when you realize you’re possibly throwing away a pivotal moment of a person’s life drops too — because you eventually acknowledge that there’s just no way to preserve it all.

So you start to wonder — what makes the cut?  How does one preserve the legacy of one’s life, when each little bit might have been significant to that person?  How am I to know what this particular dime went through to end up in our family’s hands?  Perhaps my regret isn’t that each memory cannot be preserved, but that in some cases we don’t even know what the memory and history is to preserve it.

Anyhow, I think this ramble is aiming towards this simple point — don’t be afraid to share your experiences and memories.  With your friends, with your family, in a journal, or even dare I say it, an online blog.  What legacy will you leave behind?