From the box, October 2026
Stuff
Two dads, a lot of boxes, and a poem that was hiding in one of them.
I talked to my dad and my father-in-law on the same day this week. Neither one knew about the other call. Both of them ended up on the same subject: going through a parent's stuff.
Mounds of it
My dad has cleaned out two houses, one after each of his parents died. He doesn't describe it as a tender season of reflection. He describes mounds of stuff, and a real headache.
Four boxes
My father-in-law has been going through four boxes of his mom's papers. There are newspaper clippings. There are articles she meant to share with people, and then more copies of the same articles. A lot of it is just stuff.
And then, somewhere in the stack, one typed page. The title is "Stuff." The author is unknown. It reads, in part:
I separate the good stuff from the bad stuff, then I stuff the bad stuff anywhere the stuff is not too crowded, until I decide if I will need the bad stuff.
When the Lord calls me home, my children will want the good stuff, but the bad stuff, stuffed wherever there is room among all the other stuff, will be stuffed in bags and taken to the dump where all the other people's stuff has been taken.
My father-in-law and his brother got a good laugh out of their mom keeping a poem about stuff in a box full of stuff.
These opportunities to reflect on our parents' lives, their struggles, successes, and even comical idiosyncrasies are part of the joy of the process of unboxing.
The good stuff looks like the rest of it
The poem has it right. The children want the good stuff. The trouble is that the good stuff and the bad stuff sit in the same box, and from the outside they look the same. This was one page in four boxes. On a faster day, it goes out with the clippings.
A lot of us are at this stage, or close to it. A parent is gone, and what's left is a house, or a closet, or four boxes. You want to honor the person. You also have a pile to get through. Those two jobs get in each other's way.
Where Unboxed fits
This is the pile we're building for. You bring what you have, and messy is fine. We read all of it and put the people, the dates, and the places on one timeline. The page that sounds like her comes to the top, instead of staying under the fourth copy of a newspaper article.
Then the family gets something they will open. A timeline, a book, a place to ask a question and see the paper the answer came from.
After the good stuff is safe, what you do with the rest is up to you. Keep the letters. Let the duplicates go. We can't make the sorting painless, but we can make sure the poem doesn't end up at the dump.
Dan