You Can’t Take it With You.

And let’s be honest, no one else wants it.

I went fishing today after I dropped Donna off at work. This will surprise exactly zero people, but this particular fishing stop ended up lasting a lot longer than my normal 20 minutes of worm drowning. (OK, that’s not actually a good description, since I almost always fish with lures, not live bait. But “worm drowning” is such a clever way to describe fishing, it’s hard to resist in prose…)

An older man, probably in his 60s, was walking along the beach and struck up a conversation. It was the standard “two old men talking” banter for a bit, talking about fishing, lake access, etc, etc. Somehow the conversation turned to more serious things, and as I’m casting my Husky Jerk Rapala lure out into the lake (see? not as clever as “drowning worms”), we started talking about the junk humans tend to accumulate over a lifetime. He’d recently gone through the passing of several older family members, and the burden of sorting through possessions and such he experienced both first hand, and by watching his extended family deal with it as their parents died.

Yeah, we were talking about dying. But it wasn’t a depressing talk about it at all. Rather he managed to express a lesson he’d recently had driven home about getting rid of the stuff he owned. I have to give it to the man, whose name I never learned, it never once felt like a lecture or even a lesson he was trying to give me. Rather he was teaching in that most effective of methods: storytelling.

And he wasn’t even telling me a personal story, oddly enough. Just about the general frustration of dealing with probate after someone dies, and the stress, financial cost, and strain on relationships the process creates. Intellectually I’ve known that for a long time, but seeing him saddened by the recent experiences he’d lived and witnessed really drove it home. And it reminded me of what Donna went through when her father and his wife died a few years ago.

The only things Donna wanted from her dad were memories. A few trinkets that reminded her of him were nice, or an heirloom that had no monetary value, but was special to him. It’s easy to imagine your children or grandchildren will want you to leave them something of value. And sure, an inheritance is nice if it doesn’t come with lots of hoops to jump through. Honestly though, when someone you love dies, you just want to remember them.

It’s almost ironic that when someone dies, the “stuff” they leave behind is almost just a bitter reminder of how little the “stuff” in our lives matters. Again, there’s nothing wrong with leaving an inheritance behind, but I think it’s almost kinder to make sure you don’t leave behind a burden. Even burdens of value.

Let me say that again, mainly so I can hear it myself: It might be kinder to not leave behind a burden, even if that burden is a valuable one.

Donna and I have talked for decades about how we would like to have 3 different properties, so we could leave each of our children one when we go. But as we get older, and see what happens when loved ones die — leaving 3 properties seems almost silly. Why would we think our children would want properties to deal with suddenly? It’s unlikely our properties are something they’ll want to live in, especially not at whatever random part of their own lives we happen to die during. So they’re left with the burden of selling those properties, or keeping them as a way to try to keep our memories alive. What a terrible situation to put them into.

If we ever get a cabin on a lake somewhere, setting up a trust that makes the property available for all of them to share, without being an additional burden might be an option. But not just random properties they’ll have to sell and then feel guilty about selling.

The old man at the beach (the other guy, not me) wasn’t even most put out by those types of situations though. For him, it was the stuff left behind. Going through your parent’s stuff after they die is never fun. Those boxes of things in your closet that you haven’t needed for years, but you are keeping because someday you might need them? First off, you almost certainly won’t. But the people who have to sort through it when you die will certainly never need it.

I have a lot of stuff. I have a lot of valuable stuff. But I certainly don’t need the stuff I have, and its value is questionable at best, and nothing but a burden if I’m not here to think it’s worth keeping. I’m going to try to get rid of my stuff. I don’t plan to die any time soon, but when I do, I’d sure like to leave my family with little more than happy memories. Hopefully by then, my most valuable things will already be a part of them, and won’t be something they find in a box anyway.