It Was Never About the Couch

Dead and Gone… It Was Never About the Couch By Gary Payne, MBA Founder of Funeral Cost Ontario One of the stranger things families run into after someone dies is how quickly ordinary objects stop feeling ordinary. A chair nobody thought about much suddenly becomes “Dad’s chair.” An old jacket hanging by the back door feels difficult to move for reasons that don’t fully make sense even while you’re feeling them. Then there are the rooms nobody really wants to deal with yet. Basements. Garages. Closets that stayed untouched for years until suddenly somebody has to open them. I have spoken with people who were completely unprepared for how emotional it would feel to go through a parent’s belongings afterward. Usually it was not the expensive things that got to them. It was the small stuff. A grocery list in familiar handwriting. Reading glasses sitting beside the chair where someone always sat. A bathroom drawer full of half-used toothpaste, elastic bands, old batteries, pens that no longer worked. The kind of things nobody notices while a person is alive because they are just… there. Then one day they aren’t. And somehow the objects become heavier. I remember someone telling me they stood in their father’s garage for twenty minutes holding an old coffee tin filled with random screws and nails because they suddenly realized their dad had probably saved every one of them thinking they might come in handy someday. The screws themselves meant nothing. They knew that. Still, throwing them out felt awful in a way they hadn’t expected. Not devastating exactly. Just strangely final. That seems to happen a lot. People think sorting through belongings will mostly be a practical job, and part of it is. Boxes get labeled. Donation piles start forming. Somebody rents a dumpster eventually. But somewhere in the middle of all that, emotions sneak in sideways through objects nobody would have predicted beforehand. And families do not always react to those moments the same way. One person wants to keep almost everything because getting rid of it feels wrong. Another wants the house emptied quickly because being there has started hurting too much. Someone else quietly takes little things home without mentioning it because they are worried somebody else might throw them away first. Families can end up irritated with each other during this stage and not fully understand why. The arguments are rarely about the object itself anyway. At least I don’t think they are. I think people are often reacting to the uncomfortable feeling that a whole life is slowly being reduced to decisions about what stays, what goes, and what nobody has room for anymore. That can feel harsh when you actually stand inside a house full of somebody’s things. Especially if they lived there for thirty or forty years. You start opening drawers and realize how much of ordinary life people leave behind without ever thinking about it. Old receipts. Christmas decorations. Instructions for appliances nobody even owns anymore. Half-finished projects sitting on shelves waiting for time that never arrived. And eventually somebody has to decide what happens to all of it. If I were gone, I would not want my family feeling guilty for becoming emotional over small things that probably looked meaningless from the outside. But I also would not want them feeling guilty for letting most of it go either. Very few people can carry an entire lifetime of possessions forward with them, even if part of them wants to. I think that realization comes slowly. At first it can feel like throwing objects away means losing pieces of the person too. Then over time people begin understanding that the memories were never really sitting inside the objects themselves. The objects just happened to pull the memories forward for a while. Still… some things are harder to throw out than they probably should be. And honestly, I suspect most people do not fully understand that until they go through it themselves.