Sorting Out My Father's House

It’s been three weeks since my father passed away. I cried profusely on the day of his funeral and the following day, but have since accepted his absence as a new fact of life and regained my composure.

Since even before my father’s death, my primary area of concern in recent years has been what to do with the house that I will inherit from him. Before I can even think about whether to sell it, rent it out, or even tear it down, my most pressing task is to tidy up the place so that I can figure out its real worth and potential, while identifying the areas that need fixing.

Neither my father nor my mother had ever been a neat person, and over the past few decades they accumulated piles and piles of things in the house. Some of them are of decent quality, but most of them are worthless junk. The sheer amount of stuff is overwhelming, so I’ll need to hire professional help to sort out the items to be retained or thrown away.

I have already disposed of almost all of my parents’ clothes. Books and pottery are relatively straightforward, so I should have no issues sorting them. The problem is what to do with their photo albums. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of photos in the house, and only my sister and I can decide which ones are worth keeping and which ones need to be thrown out. As such, we can’t rely on professional help for this particular task.

The same goes for documents—mainly the legal documents like the deeds of the house, but there are also hundreds of letters that my father wrote to me during the six years I spent away from home studying in a boarding school in Shanghai, China.

Being a testament to my father’s love, these letters are, of course, priceless for me. Unfortunately, I don’t have the space to safekeep them indefinitely. What I plan to do is to sort them in chronological order and scan them into picture files before throwing out the physical letters, much to my chagrin.

While I consider myself a relatively neat person now, for the better part of my life I’ve been very messy and disorganized. As previously mentioned, neither my father nor my mother was capable of keeping things tidy around the house, so I grew up being surrounded by clutter until I left for Shanghai at the age of 12.

Based on my first-hand experience, I can say definitively that living in a messy household ain’t no life at all. Despite the fact that both my parents were nice and kind-hearted people, I don’t look back on my childhood with fond memories, just because my house was so embarrassingly messy.

When I was growing up, I felt utterly depressed every time I came home to a messy and dirty household, especially when I had just been to my friend’s house where things were tidy and organized. I felt completely helpless as I didn’t know the fundamental cause of the mess in our house and how it could possibly be resolved.

Feeling suffocated by the clutter, I couldn’t concentrate on my studies. It affected my attention span so much that I literally couldn’t read through a single book, a major learning disability of mine that persisted until I was around 20.

It was certainly a slow and long journey for me to transform myself into a neat person. Spending time away from my parents at a young age turned out to be a blessing, allowing me to learn to look after myself in a dormitory room. Since then, I was no longer a messy child, and was able to maintain my room in a relatively organized state.

However, the real turning point came for me much later, in 2015, when I chanced upon the book titled “Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living” by Fumio Sasaki, a Japanese minimalist guru. It completely upended my thinking as regards acquiring and maintaining household items, and as a result I was able to let go of numerous things that I held onto in my apartment. It became a joy for me to have fewer things around me and my quality of life has improved immeasurably since then.

Now that I’m fully equipped with the ability to tidy things up, I’m no longer daunted by my impending task to clear things away from my father’s house. Granted, it’s not going to be a walk in the park, but I will address it calmly and in a way that’s respectful of my father’s memories. I’m sure Dad will cheer me on from heaven while I painstakingly clean up his house.