Gina T. Ogorzaly
“Oh, you’re from Albuquerque? Do you have messies?”
“I’m not sure what you mean by messies. What is that?”
My partner and I were in a taxi cab in New York City, chatting with the driver on our way to the Moynihan train station. We thought maybe he was talking about Messi, the soccer player.
“See, here it is,” he said. “We are passing it now on the left.”
“Oh, Macy’s! Now I understand!”
For the rest of our vacation in New York, we laughed about the misunderstanding. But it was also food for thought. Life is messy. And we saw “messies” everywhere–from the beach to living rooms!
How do we stay on top of the daily mess of living, not to mention the preparation required for the ultimate letting go at one’s death. This past year I’ve witnessed a friend execute the estate of another friend. She knew her health was frail and yet she clung to her possessions until that final moment living in an environment that was a nightmare of potential falls. Her safe was locked and no one knew where the key was, which I found particularly poignant as a reflection of how closed she was in her life. She apparently thought she had a relationship with a lawyer’s office and yet they had no file on hand for her.
So many of us put off the tasks of preparing a will, choosing an executor, and signing a power of attorney thinking that there is time, but that is not guaranteed regardless of one’s state of health. This is especially relevant to those of us without children. My partner and I know each other’s wishes, but what if we died together? Unless we get our wishes written down, it will be anyone’s guess and they will have to do the best they can in surmising what our wishes were.
We have a seasonal practice of letting go of things, as we exchange summer clothes for fall and vice versa: weekly, if something new is brought in and the old is recycled or passed on, and daily when processing mail or accumulated papers. But I am starting to think about the next level of deeper cleansing in the hidden spaces of our homes. Party-ready is fine for a walk-through, but when I start to open drawers or cupboards, I realize there is work to be done!
I look in the medicine cabinet, which admittedly is capacious, and see an accumulation of twenty years of stuff from when we first moved into this home. It has a great capacity to take in more without any need to clear anything out. There are old, unfinished medications. I don’t want them to end up in our water system so they stay there. There are multiple facial masks that have been gifted to me over the years; not my thing. Lipsticks and nail polish that I’m quite sure are completely dead for lack of use. If I don’t address the medicine cabinet, the person who does will simply swipe everything into the garbage and fill the landfill to excess. That is not a legacy I want to leave behind! My waking thoughts are about taking care of Mother Earth and I want my dying thoughts to be so as well.
Holding on to things won’t keep death at bay. Nor does it fill the emptiness of lack of connection. At least once a week, a client will say to me “my kids don’t want any of my things,” expressing dismay and perhaps even a sense of grief that what has been important to them is not a shared experience with their children. Coming from a large family, I enjoy going to my siblings’ homes and seeing things that I grew up with, but I don’t necessarily want them in my home! I have a chest in my home from my parents that my oldest sister has no memory of. When it came to me, it was full of all the goofy gifts we had given my parents over the years, and I had great fun sending them to my siblings and their partners as hilarious white-elephant gifts. My point is that everything will find a home, just not necessarily the home my clients had hoped for.
In the meantime, I personally find that if I can let go of stuff, clutter, material things, energy is freed up, distractions are gone, and I can focus on pursuits that are meaningful to me, creating more joy in my life.
Gina T. Ogorzaly is a Chiropractor and Healer practicing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lover of Mother Earth.