Downsizing: A second view

Stuff.

Question: How much did the deceased leave behind?

Answer: Everything.

Great social movements are put into practice one person, one factory, one moving van at a time. Individuals in the Baby Boom generation decide to retire, creating a giant turnover in America's workforce. People die and children inherit, one at a time, creating the world's greatest ever transfer of wealth. People who raised families in a home with multiple bedrooms, and space for extended family decide it's time to downsize. They each have their own reasons.

I received a flood of comments from yesterday's Guest Post about downsizing and putting away Christmas decorations. This one is from John Coster, my first cousin. He lives in the Seattle area and has just sold a large home and bought a smaller condo. He is still working, leading design teams doing construction projects for large energy users in the technology industry. He is a Christian. He has done hands-on missionary work in Asia and Africa for decades. Currently he is working with the Seattle-area homeless community. 

Guest Post by John Coster 

We might hold title to something for a time, but we never really own anything. I know it sounds obvious, like the fact that our lives on this Earth are finite, or that our great-grandchildren will neither know us, nor care about us. We know these things, but we are still surprised when we experience them firsthand.

In 1985 I designed and did much of the physical work on our first house. Our children were born there and after 12 years we outgrew it, and it was an easy exit.  We moved to a poorly built 20-year-old fixer that happened to be in a swanky, gated golf-course community. For the next 26 years, it became a labor of love – roof, windows, custom doors, masonry fireplace, remodeled kitchen, baths and laundry, millwork, hardwoods, structural, HVAC, seismic retrofitting, and landscaping that matured from shrubs to trees. Much of it was done with our own sweat.  

This was also a gathering place for friends and family with all the familiar mileposts of life. Births, marriages, graduations, birthdays, holidays, music lessons, and saying farewell to loved ones. Photo albums capture the evolution of the house as the seasons of life passed. I never had any romantic notions that this would be one of those Currier and Ives homesteads that would be some sort of enduring family heirloom or legacy.  We just fixed it up to make it nice for us, and perhaps the impulse to leave something better than we found it. Our children moved away and began families of their own – not too far, but far enough away that visits were far less frequent than we imagined. Our daughter regularly sent us real estate listings near her house and encouraged us to move closer. Of course, we no longer needed the big four-bedroom house and large lot, but we weren’t ready to just drop everything and move. When thinking about downsizing, I had always imagined retiring to a beach cottage on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington or a floating home on Lake Union in Seattle.   

A few months ago, while visiting my older (and wiser) cousin Peter, he mentioned how quickly our grandchildren were growing and said that if we wanted to be more than a distant fixture in their lives as they grew, then we needed to be closer than the 60-90-minute drive away. My wife and I knew he was right.  

So one Sunday we took a casual drive and toured a couple of places,  and came upon a modest two-bedroom condo about 20 minutes from our grandkids. Thirty days later we moved our essentials from the old house, and began selling or donating 38 years of stuff that simply would not fit in the new place. Did you know you can’t give away a piano? Even a nice one?  Roomfuls went to Goodwill and Habitat, and what they didn’t want went to the landfill. Truckloads of stuff. Stuff we didn’t even know we had, or why we had kept it. We joked that downsizing is the best gift we could ever give our children to save them the trouble.

Stuff other people wanted

Keepsakes to go to the landfill

In the last 60 days since we moved, we’ve seen our kids and grandkids more than we’d seen them in the last two years. The trade-off is more than worth it, but it came with a cost. It surprised me how my sense of identity was tied to the old place. I now understand how older people are especially reluctant to move, even when staying in place is completely illogical or unsafe. There is a kind of ambiguous loss that goes with leaving the long-familiar. I’m glad we didn’t wait until we had to. Adjustment like this is easier when you’re younger, I think. 

We kept very good records of all the changes and improvements we made at the old place, and I wrote up a sort of owner’s manual for the young buyers.  We never met them, but they wrote to say how much they appreciated the love and care that went into their new (old) house and they were honored to be stewards of it in the next season of its life. I’m glad they don’t plan to demolish it. But it is theirs to demolish if they choose and I needed to let go of my attachment.

We are making a few improvements in the new place (as you do), but I am well aware of the temporal nature of these things, and I hold them loosely, and think more about the people and moments I get to savor in this new chapter. It isn’t about stuff. But we knew that.