I was twenty-two when I drove to the storage unit where my best friend’s belongings were. She was also twenty-two, although unlike me, permanently twenty-two. It had been less than two months since her death, and already a new year. I was there to help her mom sort through her things and empty the unit. On the day we drove there to clear it out, the persistent rain had paused. It was the first day that week without torrential downpour.

We arrived that Friday afternoon at the All-Size to assess the situation. The building consisted of long hallways leading into doorways, a dark motel of belongings. Located on the second floor, the unit was positioned between what felt like endless rows of others. We had an hour before closing to enter the locker and plan our attack. If the storage unit wasn’t cleared out by the end of the month, the charges would continue. So we got to work.

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There are things you don’t consider when you are filling a storage unit. When you get to your designated space, after you are handed the key to the small closet apartment where you’ll be packing your things, you are only thinking about making sure everything fits in it. It’s almost as if storage units exist to be filled and forgotten. When loading the storage unit, you don’t consider the process of emptying it. If anything, the emptying is a process you intentionally ignore, a stressful eventually you will face when inevitable but not presently. When you stuff that crowded closet, pack it full of your life’s collected but not currently needed contents, you do not consider not returning to it. It’s a temporary space, this storage unit of yours, and someday soon you will be back to claim the items you are paying $112 monthly for to hold in a building that looks like it could be the set of a horror movie. You aren’t leaving the items for other people; You don’t think that someone else will be the one to empty it for you.

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The woman at the office desk told us it had to be cleared out entirely by Saturday, or the billing would proceed. Death wasn’t the excuse one might imagine it would be, I thought. I fumbled to open the lock I had never used; I wasn’t there when it was filled, only her mom and sister accompanied her initially. Today would be the day that the unit was finally confronted. I considered momentarily, suggesting that we leave the space as is and never face its mysterious contents, the prospect of indefinite payment seeming more desirable than having to sort through its insides. I fiddled with the lock until it opened.

Once inside, I approached the task without emotion. First, we would have to figure out how to remove the bed frame, then the mattress, the air conditioning unit. Bags full of clothes and boxes brimming with miscellany nearly blocked us from entering. All of the items had been moved there in a span of one day, a last-minute decision made in Abbey’s best interest to have her move back to the East Coast for the time being. Whether she returned 22 or 23, these things would be here for her when she did. As we came to find out, these things would still exist here, even when she didn’t.

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We would need help moving everything down and out of the building completely in a few days before the deadline, but for now we were there to sort and reminisce. A dead person’s belongings will reignite a process of heavy grief previously considered complete. Regardless of how long it’s been, or how well you think you have healed, a dead person’s things will reawaken whatever bereavement remains. There is something daunting about holding someone’s favorite sweatshirt in your hands, knowing that it will never again house their body in its fabric.

I didn’t know what I wanted to keep from the contents, if anything. Her mom and I checked every pocket as though she might have left a note for us: I’m coming back, or maybe, I never actually left. But there were no notes. Just what felt like endless trash bags of clothes, and broken room decor, and the occasional piece of jewelry. I had origin stories for many of the items. I held up a stuffed sloth, still tagged from her last birthday. “I got her this to match the one I have.” As we sorted through things, her mom sat down, taking a break to cry, and although I felt it too, the immeasurable weight of premature grief, I couldn’t find it in me to join in the emotional release. I patted her back until she stood up to wipe her eyes with her hands. “Back to work,” she announced.

Abbey was a collector: of photos, concert ticket stubs, birthday cards, fortunes from cookies—she kept it all. This made our job difficult.

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Following my grandmother’s death in January of 2018, I flew to her home outside of Detroit. The three-bedroom, two-bath was always big for her after my grandfather died more than ten years prior, but now it seemed infinitely large, the space stocked full of her belongings, tchochkes, and my grandfather’s. On more than one occasion during my childhood I had helped my mother clean out my Nana’s basement, which spanned almost the entire size of her home just beneath the primary level. I hated walking on the carpeted split stairs down to the cellar, always fearing a hand would reach out and grab my ankles. An antique couch stood facing the base of the stairs. On it sat a life-size plush of Fievel Mousekevitz, the Ashkenazi mouse and protagonist of the 1986 animated film An American Tail. He sat there for decades, the answer of how he got there, unknown to me. A few steps away stood the door that led to the dark cave of the unfinished portion of her basement. In it, a century’s worth of belongings: hers, her mothers, her mother’s mother’s. Records, coats, photos, moth-inhabited pieces of furniture. It was endless.

The day after her death and her funeral, myself, my mother, her two sisters and my cousin assembled to divide up the items we considered valuable. Among them was a collection of cashmere sweaters, jewelry, both fine and costume, untouched Estee Lauder compacts, her wedding album and her assorted Limoges. In a perfect world, my mother and her two sisters would have divided up things without conflict, but this is not a perfect world. For days they fought, arguing over which items they wanted to bring home with them. Nearly 5 years later, tensions surrounding the division still remain.

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Most of what was in my grandmother’s house ended up in donation boxes, but before they did, my mother tried to pawn just about everything off on me. Every item had a story. Every belonging was important to my grandmother and her legacy, or so my mother insisted.

My grandmother’s death was one of the first times I truly understood where my mother’s devotion to belongings came from. My mother places a tremendous amount of sentimental value on items. I do too. 

When my grandmother died, what I wanted most were the objects that had stories behind them, specifically, a gold lion paperweight that my great grandmother had shoplifted from a Saks Fifth Avenue when her Alzheimer’s started to set in. She gifted the paper weight to my grandmother only for her to realize later that it was stolen. Too embarrassed to return it to the store, the item stayed in the family for decades before becoming mine.

To put it bluntly, my mother is a hoarder, although she is not one of those hoarders you see sensationalized on TV. My mother is an organized hoarder, or at least a secretive one. The lock on her closet door lets me know with confirmation, that the interior is not something she wants me to see. I have tried to see it to no avail. Once, I got a quick glimpse inside before she shut the door; I couldn’t see the floor.

My mother has a deep attachment to things. Throughout her life, she has been a woman of many collections: Swarovski figurines, Limoges like the ones my grandmother had, art made by my childhood self, art by real artists, purses, and tiny decorative teapots. I will admit that I have inherited my mom’s fascination with and commitment to her belongings. Few things excite me as much as entering a store, seeing the endless possibilities of what you could bring home. New or old, I love it. I can spend hours perusing the aisles of antique stores, pleased by the chaotic messes of visual stimuli.

Like my mother, I am a collector, my spare bedroom houses Barbie, dolls in their boxes, shoes I don’t wear, movie ticket stubs, old notebooks, photos, lone socks I refuse to discard. Like my mother, I am a collector.

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Going through my grandmother’s belongings was mostly an enjoyable experience. She lived a full, beautiful long life, and when it ended, we got to see what was going to become ours.

Abbey’s belongings did not provide such catharsis. As I combed through the 5×10 locker, I felt sick with longing, for reprieve from the mess, an extra hand, an alternate future and her impossible return.

In the nights following my cleaning of the unit, the ability to sleep escaped me entirely. For weeks after, I tiptoed along the brink of psychosis, overwhelmed by the necessary but terribly exhausting role I played in sorting and disposing of what remained of her and the four years of life spent in California. The task seemed to torture me. I felt as though my entire college experience had been forced through a paper shredder. I didn’t want what remained. I wanted to move on, to forget, to return to a state without the heavy knowledge of deep grief I had never before had and now couldn’t shake. Her death itself had affected me greatly, but this made it real.

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I am often disturbed by my deep admiration for objects and the true joy that I feel they bring me. Looking at something I love can often feel akin to what I feel while looking at my husband, or my dog. The idea of having no belongings is romantic but is opposite of my true desires. I love things. I am my mother’s daughter, and my grandmother’s granddaughter, and I was once Abbey’s best friend. 

Abbey was a collector, I am a collector, and our collecting made us close. Together, we spent hours on weekends strolling through malls, shops, ogling window displays. We bought matching shirts, and jewelry. We bonded over our love for things, useless things, the consumerism that plagues our modern lives but also entertains it. We were bound by many things, and one of those things was the belonging that we felt from adding to our belongings.

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In the years following Abbey’s death, my collecting has become worse. It’s possible that I am wrestling with death in this way. There is comfort in knowing that I will be survived by my belongings, if no actual people. I try to be mindful of adding to my possessions, but even small things spark excitement: a red, red leaf i found on my back porch, a particular pearlescent seashell, one of my chicken’s abandoned feathers.

I want to be a person who is not owned by what she owns, but I am not that person. I am a person who is absolutely thrilled by a pair of colorful boots, who can spend an hour staring at a thrifted dress resting on its hanger. I run my hands over the texture of my favorite Christmas ornaments and repeatedly announce my obsession with the colorful rainbow parrot cookie jar I picked up from the side of the road. If the item has a story behind it, real or concocted, I love it even more. I want to share the things I love with the people I love.

When people come to my house, I am always tempted to take them on a tour of my cabinets. This is a miniature haunted Halloween library that glows in the dark. This is the Winnie the pooh menorah that’s been in my family since I was little. The honeypots are where you place the candles. Did you know that there’s a Barbie doll based off of Tippi Hedron’s character in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds? Andrew got it for me for my birthday last year. These are the six stuffed animals that I sleep with in my bed even though we have no room for them. This was Abbey’s. She was my best friend.

I don’t empathize with the person who outlives me, who will be forced to handle the distribution and disposal of my assets, if they can even be called assets.

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Abbey was twenty-two when she died. It’s a fact that will haunt her mother, me, and everyone who loved her for as long as we remain on this earth. With every year I add to my life, I mourn for the one she won’t. The belongings she left behind, evidence of her absence, put me face to face with the loss.

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I am cognizant of the fact that someday, a day that I hope is far from today, my mother will leave me with the evidence of her years. I plead with her to make the job easier for me by requesting she pare down. You’re not much better than me, she reminds me. She is right in some ways, although it doesn’t do much for the inevitable task. I worry most that I won’t be able to rid myself of her things, once her things are all I have. When my mother exists only in memory and memento, how will I be able to part with keepsakes? One day eventually, a day whose arrival I so deeply dread, everything she will have touched will be lined with gold.

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Along with what I took with me from my grandmother’s, I have a few of Abbey’s belongings in my possession. A photobooth print I found of us in the storage unit, a necklace she gifted me, a stuffed bat I keep on my bookshelf. I’m running out of room in my home for everything I want to hold on to, but I make room.

– Danielle Shorr