It's Not Just Stuff

It's ok to grieve for lost things. It's ok to be attached.

Photo by Krystle van der Salm on Unsplash

In Los Angeles, more than 100,000 people have evacuated and more than 12,000 structures have burned down by still-uncontrolled fires: Homes, businesses, libraries, beloved public spaces. Thousands of Angelenos left their houses and will never see them, or anything left in them, again.

The right thing to say if you’re in a situation like this is: “It’s just stuff.” And that’s true: The stuff is not as important as the people and pets inside the house. If all of the living creatures got out safely, that’s a win.

But also: It’s not just stuff. The stuff of our lives matters. A sense of perspective matters too, of course. But the stuff is worth grieving.

A little over a year ago, I moved to Hong Kong with my husband, two cats, and a few suitcases of clothes. I brought a few special things: The ceramic dish a dear friend gave us as a wedding present; my most beloved pieces of jewelry; a bottle of wine made by a elderly man in Georgia that I really need to drink. And I’ve acquired a few treasured things: A vintage rug I dragged back from Morocco; a print of a twisty tree that my close friend, a photographer, took in Congo. But for the most part, we left our stuff back in New York. The same night the fires began blazing across Los Angeles, a farm across the street from our house in upstate New York went up in flames. Firefighters worried it could torch the whole town, and embers were falling on our porch. Luckily, they got it under control, and while it was devastating for the farm, it didn’t destroy the rest of our village — we got lucky.

Our house, with its basement full of our stuff, survived. Had it not, I am sure I would have been relieved if everyone was physically safe. But I would have been heartbroken, too, over the stuff: The sleek mid-century furniture, actually made in the middle of last century, inherited from my husband’s grandmother. The hand-carved wooden mirror my husband bought me as a birthday present one year, made on our favorite island off the Kenyan coast. The zebra photograph I bought in Cape Town and hung onto despite an attempted mugging as I was walking home with it (rolled up, it was a makeshift weapon to swing at the attacker before I sprinted away). An entire library worth of books, including books full of the photographs we’ve taken over the years. A decade’s worth of love letters and tiny hand-written notes from my husband, which I keep safe in a special box. These things make a memory map, a portal back in time. They situate me in my life.

Human memories are not neatly filed Dewey-decimal-style in the brain, each equally and eternally accessible. They are triggered, evoked, and reformulated — by story-telling, but also by tastes and sounds and smells and sights and tangible things. By stuff.

When I look at the vintage pink Moroccan carpet in my tiny Hong Kong flat, I think of the old man in Essaouira who sold it to me, of the new friend I was with who helped me choose it, of buying a cheap suitcase and cramming the rug into it and getting lost on the way out of the medina, of who might have owned it in the many decades before me. It, to put it in a Marie Kondo-ism, sparks joy — but it also brings me back to a particular place and time, to particular people, to a particular spot in the world. I can zoom out and consider what falls within that wider frame: Being in Morocco because I was hosting a yoga and writing retreat, and how wild and wonderful it is that this is part of my job, how at 20 or even 30 I would never in a million years have seen that (or most of the rest of my life) coming; being with my business parter, who was my teacher for so many years, who has become a cherished friend and a personal and professional inspiration; being on one journey of so many where I’ve forged enduring friendships, been constructively challenged, and observed different and fascinating ways of doing life; going from being a kid who had never left North America to an adult who has had the great privilege of living in and traveling to so many different places. This carpet, assuming it survives my two cats who keep scratching and puking on it, will travel with me to the next place, and it will always be the carpet that brought a little bit of color to my tiny Hong Kong flat during this first year when I was still getting my feet under me in a new place.

None of that would go away if the carpet went up in flames. But there would be one less trigger for those memories, that context.

I think often of this Taffy Brodesser-Akner profile of Marie Kondo. Do read it to the very end. Perhaps you, like me, sometimes feel like you have too much stuff. Perhaps you, like me, are both a keeper of precious things and a regular purger of the extraneous (throwing and giving stuff away, I love it). Perhaps you, like me, can look around your home and see not just stuff, but the story of a life.

In Los Angeles, people are losing their stuff. They’re losing their homes. And communities are losing something even bigger: Shared spaces, shared histories, shared memories. There’s no price you can put on that loss. Of course it’s not as devastating as losing human life, and of course it’s nothing short of a miracle that so few lives have been lost, considering the scope of the damage. Of course every life lost is a tragedy; of course one is too many. But there is no “just” when it comes to the stuff, the homes, the neighborhoods. It’s not just stuff. It’s memory, individual and collective. It’s the way places are more interesting when they are layered: The old upon the older, the newer upon the new, the way that gives a texture that you don’t feel in those places where everything was erected identically and all at once. There are things being destroyed in this fire that will never be claimed on insurance forms, that may not even make the list of items their owners remember were lost, until years later — the missing of things will come in waves. Some precious things that would have been noticed had they continued to exist may never be missed at all (if a thing isn’t remembered, has it even really gone missing?).

It has long been trendy, and perhaps wise, to be unattached to the temporal. People who are really good at non-attachment surely fair better in the aftermath of thing-loss than those, like me, who form deep attachments (Los Angeles, luckily, has a lot of Buddhists). But there is also something raw and gorgeous about loving things not because they are expensive or status-signifying but because they are imbued with meaning and memory, because they make our internal and emotional lives richer. Maybe they are things we imagine passing down, that mean we may be remembered not just as existing, but for our unique taste and sense of being (I treasure my grandmother’s ring and my husband’s grandmother’s necklace not just because of who they belonged to, but because of how they embody the style, in some ways the essence, of the women, they belonged to). There is much justified about grieving when those meaning-full and memory-triggering things are lost. With them goes the future emotional space those things would have occupied, the recollections they would have brought up. Sometimes with them goes a little remnant of a beloved person. Sometimes with them goes our own imagined legacies and leavings-behind, what we pictured we might hand down for someone else to love.

Some stuff is indeed just stuff. Some stuff, though, is a whole life.

(Here’s a link to Mutual Aid Los Angeles).

xx Jill