From Grief to Grace: The Day I Finally Faced My Grandmother’s Heirlooms
My grandmother passed away when I was 27. I had just lost my father five years earlier, and I had still not dealt with his passing. So having to deal with my grandmother’s passing on top of that was trying… to say the least. Anne and I were in charge of her estate, which meant cleaning out a huge farmhouse that had stored over 50 years of life. It has stored a beautiful family and a lot of love. I wasn’t ready. Honestly, neither Anne nor I was equipped emotionally to do this, but sometimes we don’t get to choose the events that take place in our lives. So we powered through, as we had been taught, and trudged through layers upon layers of emotional baggage, the best we could. With every antique we loaded onto the moving truck, I pushed my brain to stop thinking and my feet to keep moving. It’s just what has to be done sometimes.
All of my grandparents’ belongings were put in a storage unit. Many people asked us to have an estate sale and said, “Just get rid of it all, sell it.” But after such losses in life, you hold on to what you can. Neither of us was ready to get rid of anything, we already felt enough had been taken.
Fast forward 15 years…yep….15 years and it was time to open the storage unit. As you can tell, “avoidance” was a real thing for me. It was easier for me to build a life than to remember one. For those years, I devoted all my energy to building a career, a business, and a home. Of course, I knew that the storage unit was still there, but I wasn’t ready. I just couldn’t make myself drive the 12 miles down the road and open that door to the past. A past that I dearly loved but just couldn’t emotionally go back to.
Last year, Anne and I said, “This weekend we’re going to storage.” I don’t even know what sparked it, but we just knew it was time. I asked my husband to go with us, and he said he would love to go. We loaded up in the truck and headed down the road to the past. My hands were shaking and my heart was about to beat out of my chest. I was worried about what we would find. Would it all be ruined? Would it be overly emotional? Would I be upset with myself for avoiding this for so long?
When we opened up the big garage door on the storage unit, Anne and I just stared at it all for a moment. Then my husband said, “Wow, what is this?” and pointed to an old antique wood cook stove that my grandmother kept in her dining room. Immediately, the energy shifted. He had never seen any of these things, and Anne and I got to explain all the memories behind every piece. It was cathartic and something we should have done years ago. We had so much fun going through the stuff that we were laughing and smiling all the way home.
Isn’t it wild that the very thing you dread…is the very thing you need? I needed to go through her stuff and I needed to have it around me. I was putting off the very thing that my soul needed me to do.
Life can be hard sometimes, and no one gets out of here unscathed, but it has been my experience that it’s the hard times that build us. If you keep going, the lessons on the other side are abundant. I no longer avoid the hard. I’m not perfect and I’ll always be a work in progress, but I have found that life is a joyful, painful, beautiful thing and there is real happiness in experiencing it all.
Last week, my husband hung all my grandmother’s cast iron skillets in our kitchen. I can still see them on the wall in her big farmhouse and now they are home with me….where they should be.
This story was originally featured in a 2021 issue of Front Porch Life magazine. Subscribe today and never miss an issue! 💗
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