Treasure, Trash, and Trouble

Over the years, like many "good samaritans"...

...I have done my share of helping people move out of homes in preparation for those uncertain years that await us all. My first real experience was in helping my wife and her brother clean up "the old home place." My wife's mother had been called to her rest and now her dad was in poor health. So some of us descended on the farm with the purpose of disposing of fifty years of farm and household accumulations.

We had hay racks (wagons with flat beds about 9 x 20 feet in size) all over the farm yard. We had one for nuts and bolts, one for various lengths of bailing wire, one for old plows, harrows, rakes etc. Three others for household items like TVs, dishes, furniture, clothes and the list goes on. Fourteen hay racks all lined up in the yard like a mother duck and her thirteen ducklings on their way to the pond. We were getting ready for an old fashioned auction. Seven tractors and four pick ups and trucks stood over along the fence like silent sentries guarding the past.

I shall never forget my beloved father-in-law, on the day of that auction. He walked across the farm yard touching old tractors, feeling the rust on an old plow, toying with a favorite hammer and his trusty old pliers which he had carried in his hip pocket every day. Memory took him back across the decades and he was touching for the last time the treasures of the past.

The auction day came. The deal with the auctioneer was that everything had to go that day with cash on the barrel head. He said, "No problem." And of course, he knew there would be no problem. If he sold a pickup that was in good shape, the buyer automatically bought one that wasn't and it was his job to haul it off. If someone bought a refrigerator, they also bought four kegs of nails and screws and washers, rusted and bent or not. By sun down, the yard was empty, the money counted and fifty years of family farming was history. My son, who had helped through the whole process of stacking, sorting, and cleaning walked over to the fence by the now empty barn and cried. Memories of good times and fun times with Grandpa and Grandma were gone and boyhood memories seeped gently from his eyelids.

I think of another experience of helping a family move. About twenty of us descended on a home that housed a man and his wife and their fifty-eight years of accumulations. It was piled here and it was piled there. It was new. It was old. It was rusted, It was bent. It was broken. The husband came up behind me as I reached for three cartons of toilet paper stacked on the rafters in the garage. "My wife can't pass up a sale on toilet paper," he said. I found that also to be true of breakfast food, tomato soup, peanut butter, and fruit jars by the dozen. They had enough garden and yard tools to start a hardware store, and fertilizer enough to go back into farming, big time.

The couple had no children. Their health was as secure as Enroll stock. Their future as certain as a glacier in Death Valley. Their earthly treasures were all through the house. But now it was time to move on and what to do with all that stuff? Every closet was crammed full. Every drawer was packed. Every shelf bowed under its weight of overloaded boxes, picture albums valued only by the original owners, baskets, boxes, Christmas decorations. It was overwhelming. As I sipped a glass of cool water, I couldn't help but wonder why they had waited so long to take care of this life time accumulation. What's to harm with a little reality check? Why not talk it over and decide that it is time to dispose of all those good things and make it easier on those left behind to take care of?

I know a man who died one day on his way home from a vacation, but he was hundreds of miles from home. One of his children was notified by phone of her father's death. Instead of getting in her car or on a plane to rush to her mother's side, she jumped in her car and drove rapidly to her folk's house two hundred miles away. By the time her mother got home, numerous valued things were no longer there. The other children got what was left, but a wall was erected overnight between the greedy daughter and the rest of the family. The wall is there to this day.

Which is to say that what is treasure to you can be trouble to those you leave behind? What possible use can many of our personal things be to them? What need do they have of all those picture albums of trips you made to Yellowstone Park, to some Hidden Caves or Crystal Caverns? And those boxes and boxes of 35 mm slides? Who can decipher them? Who can identify them? Who wants to? It all becomes dumpster fodder! Why not save someone else the trouble?

Recycle the things you no longer want. The August 2003 issue of Reader's Digest, page 19 says, " We shipped $5.2 billion worth of scrap last year: $1.2 billion went to China. Waste paper— not cars, cotton or semiconductors— is now the largest export from the port of Los Angeles."

Trouble? It often starts right after the funeral, within hours, or even earlier. Like the daughter who dashed home before any one else could get there so she got to choose and take. The others took what was left.

May I suggest that you do some planning? Starting today isn't too early. Go through the house and your property. Buy a tablet. Make a list of what you have, and decide what you want to do with it and when. If it is furniture, pictures, clothes, cars, house, money, whatever. Identify who is to get what. Seek the guidance of some entity of the denomination. Communicate in a legal document those wishes to the family. Discover their feelings before it is too late.

Communicate everything to all of the family, preferably all at the same time so that all are treated equally. Any personal preferences can be ironed out easier when you are alive than after you are gone or no longer able to facilitate. If it isn't done in a timely and satisfactory manner, it is trouble ahead.

Your TREASURE becomes their TRASH and TROUBLE waits at the door.

PLAN AHEAD, IT WASN'T RAINING WHEN NOAH BUILT THE ARK