My friend and fellow author Dallas Taylor recently posted about how we relate to the objects in our lives, all the things we cart around and store and display and sometimes get rid of. It’s a touching essay because he is talking about an aspect of sentimentality that grievers are very familiar with: the need to hold on to the things that once belonged to someone we love, and the eventual choices we have to make about whether to keep holding on, or to let go.

As he says:

But most of it is stuff I’ve kept for sentimental reasons, mostly things I took from my mother’s place after she passed away that I just wasn’t ready to be rid of quite yet.  And that’s where things start getting sticky, because not only does it remind me of my dead mother, much of it also reminds me of my own childhood.
…
These largely useless objects serve to connect me in very real (to me) ways to my own past, and not only that, but to a past that is passed, gone, and can only be touched through the medium of memory.  They are cues to those subjective historical states of my own persistence through time, and the release of them back into the world, where their subjective significance will essentially reset to zero (in the eyes of the people who will use and perceive them), requires not only a severing of my attachment to the object itself, but, in a very real, if subjective, sense, to those times and states of being in my own history of which they are both symbols and talismans.

It is not a very long essay but it is heartfelt and I think readers of this blog (the few! the proud!) would enjoy Dallas’s thoughtful, introspective observations on the act of letting go.

Check out Dallas’s essay:
The Deep and Occasionally Problematic Significance of Stuff and Things

#