Hi there. I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner.
This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question,
and I get to help you find an answer.
Now, today's question comes from a woman whose mother just passed away.
And she lives in a very small apartment.
Her mother lived in a house.
And she's trying to figure out, "How do I bring all my mother's stuff from her house
into my tiny apartment?
There's just no room, and I don't want to dishonor my mother by not bringing home all
of her things.
What am I supposed to do?"
All right, that is an excellent question.
And it comes down to what we call grief hoarding.
Now, grief hoarding is the concept where, when someone we love, that we are emotionally
attached to, and we have feelings for, they pass away, and we hoard all of their stuff
as if us hanging onto their belongings stretches our memories
and our good feelings for that person.
The truth of the matter is that the feelings that we have towards that person
are towards that person.
It's not towards their stuff.
And it's easy to assume, "This was really important to my mother.
Therefore, it must be really important to me."
And you want to honor that memory by holding onto it very dearly.
Now, before we go any further, let me tell you about the frogs.
Right after I got married, as a wedding present, one of my husband's sisters gave us a frog.
Don't ask me why; I have no idea what the meaning was.
But, it was about a two and a half foot statue of a frog reading a book.
It was kind of cute.
He was made of ceramic and copper, and it looked like it was a really expensive statue.
Now, psychology 101 tells us that the behavior we reward is the behavior that will be repeated.
And I was not paying attention, and when I receive this frog, I was so dumbfounded by
the frog that I gave it a lot of attention.
I was like, "Oh my goodness, look at this frog.
Wow, this is so amazing.
It's cute," yada, yada.
And then, I put it on the centerpiece of my fireplace, right there at the base of my fireplace
so that every time his sister would come over, she would see this frog, and she would know
that I appreciated her gesture.
All right. Well, what happened was, because I rewarded that behavior, then the next birthday, and
the next Christmas, and every time there was to be a gift exchange, she would bring me
another next best frog.
And then, all the family members started jumping in on this, thinking,
"Well, she must love frogs."
And so, before I knew it, I had all kinds of frog statues.
I had glass ceramic frog figurines.
I had frog dishes.
I had daily calendars with frog pictures on them.
I had all kinds of frog statues that were out in my garden and my yard.
And everybody, neighbors, friends, family, relatives, people that came to visit would
say, "Wow!
I did not know that Angela collected frogs.
Wow!
We've learned something new about Angela."
And then, they would bring, and gift me frogs.
The truth of the matter is, I didn't have anything to do with the frogs.
I never wanted the frogs in the first place.
They were nice, but I didn't have any emotional attachment whatsoever to the frogs.
They were just frogs.
They were gifts people gave me, and I was trying to be polite.
But, the fact of the matter is, if you would have asked me, "Do you want more frogs?"
I would have said, "No frogs.
Not more frogs.
For me, this is just other things I have to dust, and keep up with, and store."
Right?
"I don't want any frogs."
And when I sold my house, I actually sold all the frogs with the house.
And I told the lady that bought the house, "These frogs will bring you good luck.
I'm going to let all the frogs stay with the house.
It breaks my heart, but they're yours now."
And I gave her all the frogs.
Right?
I don't want any more frogs.
And then, I sent a memo to all the family members, and said, "Hey, guys; no more frogs."
The truth is, I never wanted the frogs.
But, the reason I tell you this story about the frogs is this; if you flash froze that
moment in time, if I had died, and my family that lives 2,500 miles away came to visit,
and they saw my entire house full of frogs, they would have said,
"Wow, we didn't know this about Angela. Wow! We've learned something new.
Frogs were really important to Angela."
And so, in order to honor that memory of me, they would have drop shipped all these frogs
back to Oregon.
All right, so guess what; I never liked the frogs in the first place.
That would have been a really costly mistake.
So, there are people in our lives that we love, that we want to pay honor to, but maybe
the stuff that we are hoarding after they've died is stuff they didn't want at all.
I found out later that my grandmother, who collected thousands of these little glass
figurines; she didn't ever want them either.
Somebody had given them to her, and then other family members, seeing that she collected
them ... And she displayed them in a lovely china cabinet.
Everybody kept buying her these little figurines.
They didn't mean anything to her either.
She never wanted them.
Yet, there we were, trying to save them, and dust them, and take care of them because we
thought they meant something to grandma.
Truth of the matter is this; your memories are with the person, not with their stuff.
And it's going to take some time to grieve.
And so, if you're going through the grieving process, and you feel that you need to hold
onto that stuff in order that will stretch the memory of your mother a little bit longer,
then here's my suggestion to you; pick three items.
Three items that you want to bring home to your house, that are a good representation
of the memories you shared with your mother.
It could have been something like you were in the kitchen when you were growing up, and
mother was always baking, and she always wore, for 20 years, this particular apron.
All right, so that would be an item you both shared; you both have sentimental value to
that apron.
So, bring the apron home.
Pick three times that you want, that mean something to you as well as something to your
mother, so that you have something to share.
And then, take all the rest of mom's stuff and put it in a storage unit, and pay a couple
of hundred dollars a month, and store the stuff in the storage unit, not at your house.
Okay?
You're storing your own memories at your house.
Then, put it on your calendar once a week, block out a two hour window, and go over to
the storage unit, and visit mom's stuff.
Touch the stuff.
Smell the stuff.
Hold onto it.
And remember the memories that you had with your mom.
Go through all the items in the storage unit, and spend time
enjoying those items at the storage unit.
And what will happen is you will get to a point where you'll say, "Well, I don't even
know why there's this vase.
I think like 13 or 14 years ago, Dad gave Mom some flowers for Valentine's Day, and
this was the vase."
And you'll realize that maybe that vase didn't have any significance to her at all; it was
the love from her husband on Valentine's Day that meant something to her,
not this glass vase.
And then, you can part with the vase.
And as you are done with items that are in the storage unit, then you can get rid of
those items.
And the day may come where you realize, "Wait a second; I'm spending a couple hundred bucks
a month and two hours of my week every single week with stuff that no longer belongs to
my mom.
And the memories of my mom will live forever, but this is just stuff," and then, you will
be free to let it go.
It may be that you visit Mom's stuff in the storage unit every week for 20 years.
That's fine.
But, it's not in your space.
It's not consuming your life.
It's a compartmentalized grief period where you're honoring your mother during that time.
So, grief hoarding is when you do bring everything home to your house, and it takes up all this
space in your own personal life, and now, you're trying to live someone else's life
in the reality of what is your own.
That is grief hoarding, and it becomes obnoxious, because you get resentful for storing all
this extra stuff, and you don't have space, and you don't know where anything goes, and
you don't know what value it brought to your mom.
If you have an entire apartment full of frogs, where you have no idea what the importance
of those frogs are to your mother, then what it comes down to is you are hoarding stuff
that was never important to her at all.
And so, the grief hoarding is because we care.
We want to care about this stuff.
And it's not about the stuff at all.
All right. I hope that helps just in the understanding a little bit about what grief hoarding is,
and therefore, you can make a choice in how you're going to deal with your mother's stuff.
Anyway, I'm very sorry that your mother died.
It's heartbreaking.
And I hope that this is an easy transition for you to work through.
All righty, and until we meet again,
leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.
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