Where I've Been, and What I've Been Carrying

On grief, the weight of our belongings, and learning that moving forward sometimes means leaving things behind.

I've been a little bit of everywhere lately, but I've also been in the same place for a very long time.

When I'm not traveling, teaching yoga, or trying to piece together what I want the next chapter of my life to look like, there's a good chance you'll find me in my basement or my storage unit. And if I'm not physically there, I'm probably thinking about being there.

The truth is, I've spent much of the last year managing the aftermath of my father's passing. And while I recognize that my life from the outside may look a certain way, there is an entire world of responsibility that exists behind the scenes.

Being an only child, and in many ways the inheritor of generations of family history, has presented me with a responsibility I don't think I could have fully understood until I was living it.

There are the obvious things that come with losing a parent. The grief. The paperwork. The financial and legal responsibilities. The seemingly endless decisions that suddenly become yours to make.

And then there are the things nobody really talks about.

The closets. The cabinets. The boxes of photographs. The furniture. The things that belonged to people who died long before you were born. The things your parents held on to because they belonged to their parents. The things that have no monetary value but somehow feel impossible to throw away.

An entire family's history, quietly accumulating over decades, suddenly becomes your responsibility to sort through.

And somehow, in the middle of all of that, you're supposed to figure out what to do with your own life.

For me, that question has been particularly complicated.

Over the last year, I've gone back and forth more times than I can count about whether to return to Maui, establish a more permanent life on the East Coast & buy a home, travel indefinitely or create some wild combination of all three.

I've entertained so many possibilities that, looking back, I wonder if many of them were ever really meant for me.

I was also navigating the end of a relationship that, at one point, had been deeply intertwined with my plans for the future.

What made that loss particularly difficult was that I hadn't just lost a relationship. I'd lost someone who had stepped into this enormous undertaking beside me. Someone who had taken genuine ownership of helping me sort through the physical and emotional weight of everything my family had left behind.

I can see that contribution much more clearly now than I could when everything was falling apart.

And with that hindsight comes a complicated kind of gratitude, and perhaps a little guilt, too.

There were moments when the project felt manageable because I wasn't carrying it alone. When that changed, I think a part of me became paralyzed by the sheer magnitude of what was left to do.

So I avoided it.

Not entirely, of course. Things got done. Responsibilities were handled. Life continued.

But there was always this lingering awareness of what remained unfinished.

A quiet, persistent voice reminding me that I should be doing more. That I should be further along by now. That somewhere, among all those boxes and belongings, was a version of my life I still needed to make sense of.

And the longer I waited, the heavier it became.

Until I decided, I was strong enough to do it on my own.

The Weight of Holding On

One of the most surprising things I've learned through this experience is how easily love can become entangled with possessions.

I've held on to things I didn't particularly like, things I would never use, and things I didn't even recognize, simply because they belonged to someone I loved.

Or someone they loved.

There is something incredibly tender about that instinct. The desire to preserve a family, to protect its history, to carry pieces of the people who came before us into whatever comes next.

Especially when you're an only child.

There is no sibling to divide the photographs with. No one else to inherit half the furniture or take a few boxes of memories home. No one who shares quite the same relationship with the people, places, and objects that shaped your childhood.

In some ways, you become the keeper of it all.

But I'm beginning to understand that being the keeper of my family's history does not mean I have to become the keeper of every object they ever owned.

I can honor my lineage without physically carrying all of it.

I can remember my grandfather without keeping every piece of furniture he purchased. I can love my father without preserving every item he tucked away in a drawer. I can appreciate the lives my family built without feeling obligated to build my own life around what they left behind.

Their stories live in me.

Their influence lives in the way I move through the world, the things I value, the traditions I maintain, and the person I continue becoming.

No storage unit could ever contain that.

And perhaps that's been one of the more profound lessons of this entire experience.

Sometimes letting go isn't an act of forgetting.

Sometimes it's an act of trust.

Trusting that what matters will remain with us, even when the physical evidence no longer does.

The Conversations We Don't Know We Need to Have

There's another part of this experience that I intend to write about in much greater detail as time goes on.

And that is the importance of preparing, practically and emotionally, for the eventual loss of a parent.

It's a subject most of us would rather avoid. Understandably so.

Nobody wants to sit across from someone they love and discuss what happens when they're no longer here.

But having lived through the alternative, I can tell you that there are conversations worth having while everyone is still around to participate in them.

There are questions worth asking. Documents worth understanding. Wishes worth clarifying. Family histories worth recording.

There are things you should know about your parents' lives, their belongings, their finances, and the decisions they would want made on their behalf.

And there are seemingly insignificant questions that can become impossibly complicated when the person who knew the answer is no longer here to give it.

Even something as simple as understanding which possessions actually mean something to someone can make an enormous difference.

What is sentimental? What is valuable? What is simply something that has been sitting in the same cabinet since 1987 because nobody ever got around to cleaning it out?

I say that last part with love, and a little bit of humor, because I have certainly encountered my fair share of it.

If your parents have decades' worth of belongings tucked into closets, basements, garages, or storage spaces, perhaps consider helping them go through some of it now.

Not because anyone is dying.

Not because you're anticipating something terrible.

But because creating space, getting organized, and being intentional about what we keep can be a beautiful thing to do together while we're living.

It can even become an opportunity to learn stories you might never have heard otherwise.

And someday, when the inevitable happens, perhaps you'll have a little less to manage and a little more room to simply grieve.

I wish I had understood more of this before I needed to.

And if sharing my experience can spare even one person a fraction of the overwhelm I've experienced, then I think there's something meaningful to be gained from all of it.

Making Room for What's Next

Lately, I've been making progress.

Not the glamorous kind. Not the kind that necessarily translates into photographs or exciting announcements.

The kind that involves garbage bags, storage bins, dusty photographs, and finally opening boxes I've been walking past for months.

The kind that requires making decisions I've spent a year postponing.

And strangely enough, it feels good.

There is a sense of movement returning to my life. A sense that I am no longer waiting for every possible version of my future to reveal itself before I allow myself to take the next step.

For so long, I think I was afraid to let go of things because I didn't know where I was going.

What if I moved back to Hawaii? What if I bought a house here? What if I needed that furniture someday? What if I changed my mind?

What if, what if, what if.

I've spent an extraordinary amount of time preserving possibilities.

And I'm beginning to realize that keeping every door open can sometimes prevent us from walking through any of them.

I don't need to know exactly where I'll be living five years from now to make decisions about what belongs in my life today.

I don't need to preserve an entire household for a home I haven't purchased.

And I certainly don't need to hold on to every physical reminder of the past to prove how deeply I loved the people who were part of it.

There is still so much to do. I won't pretend otherwise.

But for the first time in a while, the work feels less like an obligation I've been avoiding and more like an opportunity to reclaim some space in my own life.

And maybe that's where I've really been.

Somewhere between the life I inherited, the life I thought I was going to have, and the life I'm finally giving myself permission to create.

I'm still figuring out what that looks like.

But I'm making room for it.

And that feels like a pretty good place to begin.