My son has been helping me sift through the stacks of boxes of my mother’s stuff, mostly clothes and kitchen stuff. He has a lot of energy and is good at keeping me on track. He brought one box at a time out of the store room and had me go through the things. He set up three boxes to sort into: throw aways, give aways and keepers. He then divided the keepers into two piles: storage and immediately useful.
I put together a storage box and piled up turtlenecks, shirts and sweaters that I wanted to wear. My son is over forty, but still sometimes manages to make the word Mom into four syllables. He looked at the storage box that I asked him to put into the loft and said, “Mom, I’m going to put that box into storage and then when you die it will still be there and I’ll have to go through it.”
Next he looked at the pile of clothes that I was taking into the house to put away. “Are you going to wear your Mom’s clothes? That’s gross!” I looked down at the turtleneck and flannel shirt that I was wearing. “I’m wearing her clothes now. It’s not weird. It might be weird if you wanted to wear her clothes though.”
I can’t imagine doing a job this hard without him. We are blessed with our children. I know my mother felt the same way. I’m grateful for the gift of laughter that she left us with.