My kids don't want my decades' worth of stuff. Here's how I'm learning to let go of it.

By Robert Powell

Maybe pictures can be worth a thousand words

Decluttering can be an emotional job, but it's better you do it sooner rather than later.

When I told David Ekerdt, a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, that throwing away my old mementos, which are scattered throughout my house from the basement up to the attic, made me feel like I was tearing out a piece of my soul, he told me I needed an attitude adjustment.

He wasn't being unkind. My wife has said roughly the same thing to me, minus the professional credentials.

But Ekerdt has spent years studying household downsizing, and he's heard some version of my problem many times before.

It started while I was helping my son search the attic for his life jacket. I came across a briefcase I hadn't opened in I don't know how long. Inside were my elementary school report cards, two programs from concerts I played as a percussionist with the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, and other assorted evidence of a childhood.

It reminded me of all the other stuff in my house. In the basement: what I believe are my first pair of hockey skates, a broken papier-mâché Groucho Marx puppet, and a Green Bay Packers helmet I hand-painted in fourth grade. In my office: an Underwood No. 5 typewriter and a hockey puck in a Plexiglas case - the actual puck from the only goal I ever scored playing college hockey, in 1977.

Now, I know that no one will ever build a museum for my stuff. And I know there's no James Boswell coming to write my biography.

My wife and children will have no trouble tossing all of my memories into a dumpster someday. None of it will mean to them what it means to me.

So why can't I get rid of any of it, including the report cards I'd rather no one ever see? And what's the resolution to all this?

I posed those questions to two researchers who study why people get attached to their possessions: Ekerdt and Karen Winterich, a professor at Penn State's Smeal College of Business.

Objects as 'extended self'

My orchestra program isn't just paper. It's evidence of the eighth-grader who played percussion. "There's this fear, not that it's necessarily conscious, that we're losing a part of ourselves when we get rid of that," Winterich said. "The program is the prompt, like the reminder of, 'Yeah, I did this thing.'"

Ekerdt pointed me to a 1988 paper by consumer researcher Russell Belk, who coined the term "extended self" to describe this phenomenon. We choose objects because they reflect who we believe we are, and over time, the objects shape how we see ourselves.

It gets complicated fast. Ekerdt estimates most homes hold tens of thousands of things, each with its own meaning, and once you add a spouse's things into the mix, sovereignty over what stays and what goes gets even murkier.

Why we hold on

There are roughly a dozen distinct motives for keeping things, Ekerdt said, and they break down into two broad camps: things that are useful and things that are symbolic.

The useful motive is the one everyone thinks of first: I need that potato peeler.

Winterich says sometimes we hold on to things we're not currently using because of waste aversion. We have a fear that a thing might someday be functionally useful.

The symbolic reasons are more varied: an object might be worth money, might simply give us pleasure to look at (like my puck or the Underwood), might signal something about us to other people, or might represent what Ekerdt calls the "possible self," the person we imagine we'll still become.

"I keep hobby materials because I will become a painter," he said. "I keep a piano because finally, finally, finally, I'm going to learn to play the piano."

That, apparently, is why I still have the Dremel tool I've been meaning to use to make sea-glass jewelry. Discarding things like my Dremel tool can require admitting that a hoped-for future may never arrive.

Proof that your life happened

Winterich says each object is a "cue to remembering." Even moving something from one box to another triggers a brief encounter with the past. "If we don't have that cue, then we lose that part of ourselves," she said. "You may never remember it again."

Take the puck on my desk. It's physical evidence that I scored that goal in college, and what I remember is that my teammates jumped over the boards to pile on top of me afterward, genuinely happy for me. A replacement puck wouldn't do that job.

Ekerdt had a similar reaction to my orchestra program. "It's a real trophy," he said. A trophy doesn't have to be engraved. Sometimes it's just an ordinary object that bears witness to something that mattered.

The object and memory fuse together

Losing the object can feel like losing the memory itself.

Winterich told me about a pair of basketball shorts she kept from junior high. The elastic is long gone and the shorts are unwearable. But every time she sees them she's reminded of the season her team beat its rival. She doesn't need the shorts. She wants continued access to what they represent. "We all have that kind of object," she said. "It's the memory cue."

These objects become harder to part with as we age. They've already survived decades of moves, cleanouts and changing interests.

Moving on

If your things are part of your extended self, as you change, they may eventually stop matching up. Ekerdt described a woman he interviewed who had once hosted family dinners for 12 or 15 and kept enough dishes to serve everyone.

"I am so done with that," she told him.

After she downsized, she opened her cupboard and showed him four plates, four saucers, four cups and four bowls. "That's me now," she said, and she seemed happy about it.

An object, said Ekerdt, becomes easier to release when we can honestly say, "That's not me anymore."

He also cited the literary critic Stanley Fish, who gave away most of his library when he moved to a smaller home and explained it by saying, in effect, that those books represented arguments he was never going to pick up again.

Often, "we keep because we can," Ekerdt said. Larger homes, attics, basements, garages and spare bedrooms reduce the urgency to make choices. Space delays the decision. Downsizing forces it.

Winterich told me about her mother, who developed early-onset Alzheimer's. Winterich kept otherwise ordinary gifts - including a sunflower mug chosen because her mother knew yellow was her favorite color, because her mother would never give her another one. "I wanted to remember that my mom cared," she said. Such objects can become symbols of our relationships, Ekerdt said: "We keep things because they represent ties and reciprocity with other people."

My wife feels a similar attachment to her great-aunt's china, even though our children are unlikely to want it. When I mentioned it to Winterich, she suggested that a photograph of the family using the china at a holiday dinner might ultimately mean more to them than the dishes themselves. "That's the memory, that's the story, that's the narrative," she said, rather than, "Here's a physical plate I'm never going to use."

Objects can't tell the story

There's also a physical reason people don't remove cherished items from their past. About 40% of people in their 60s have some difficulty crouching, kneeling or stooping. That share climbs to roughly 70% by the time they're in their 80s. Lifting and carrying gets harder on the same curve. Decluttering an attic is not just an emotional project. At some point it's an increasingly difficult physical one.

That means your loved ones will likely be the ones to throw things away. And for them, that might be easier, since they don't have the same memories of the items that are taking up space.

"The physical possessions don't tell the story," Winterich said. "The story is your memory. It's in your head."

My children can see the orchestra program. But they can't see what I remember when I hold it: cymbals timed correctly during the performance, a gratified nod from the conductor after weeks of botching it in rehearsal.

Ekerdt said adult children often decline their parents' possessions for exactly this reason: They haven't lived with the object and they don't know the story attached to it. "The things are never particularly important," he said. "But it's the tie and the memory and the legacy that come with them."

What Winterich and Ekerdt told me to do

Neither Winterich nor Ekerdt suggested I keep everything, and neither suggested I throw it all out, either.

"It's not the physical object that you want to retain," Winterich said. "It's the memory that you want to retain."

Here's the plan I floated to both of them. I would photograph each object and write down the story behind it, like a mini autobiography: why I kept it, what it says about who I was at the time. Both thought the idea was sound.

Ekerdt supplied the framing: "My life in 100 things." The key, he said, is picking things that are genuinely iconic, or that "really open into something." Otherwise you've just traded physical clutter for digital clutter.

There's research behind the photography step, specifically. Winterich has found that photographing an object makes it easier to let go of. "It's the action of taking the picture that helps you feel like you're preserving that memory," she said. "We just need to feel like we could still remember it if we needed to."

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