You Can't Take It With You

by Cassondra Murray

But if you could.....what would it be?

Let me back up just a bit....

Eight years ago we bought a house that was built in 1849. (I hear some of you groaning as you read this.)

Since we bought the house we've gutted most of it, (yes, old house lovers, we've preserved all we could of the original everything) moved some walls around (only in the new part though--the part that was built in 1900.) replumbed, rewired, re-kitchened, and almost everything else you can do to a house. We even jacked up the house, dug and poured footers, built a real foundation under it, and set the house back down on the real foundation. Before we bought it, the house had set, for 151 years, on pillars of stacked-up rocks.

And yes, WE, as in just my husband and me and whoever we could bribe with pizza, did all of this work.

Then we got tired. We hit a wall--a metaphoric wall--in this old house. We hit the end of our energy. And we stopped. We've had a bit of trouble getting going again.

Though we're not nearly done, we accomplished a lot before we hit the wall. We took the house from having big holes where the windows and doors should be (we moved those, or enlarged them) with all of the ceilings torn out, interior walls down to the studs, and no water or power, to a liveable structure. We live in it now. We've lived in it since early 2002.

What we have NOT accomplished yet is the creation of functional closets.

Two people, both creative, both with hobbies (and LOTS of paper) living in a house with no closets.

Oh, and there's a cat or two in here with us.

Can I just say that old-fashioned, furniture-style wardrobes go only so far?

Recently I've been trying, and failing, to clear stuff out. PILES of it. I need a certain level of Zen to be mentally healthy, and let me tell you, that level of Zen was breached a long time ago.

First my grandmother's house got sold. Guess what I got?

That's right. Stuff.

Then my Mother In Law passed away after a long illness.

Yup. More stuff.

The garage (not attached) is full. The henhouse (chickens have all gone to the Great Henhouse In The Sky) is full.

And the house is full.

The other night, as I lay on the couch with my husband, and stared at the glossy white beadboard ceiling (it's the only space in the house not piled up with STUFF) with the insulation poking through the hole where the ceiling fan should be, a couple of songs were running through my head--ones I'd heard on the car radio that day. One was a Brad Paisley song called "A Letter To Me."

You can hear "A Letter To Me" here if you want to see and hear. It's a cool video.

The other was a Tim McGraw song called Live Like You Were Dying.



Those songs melded with my wish for space and less stuff, and a question popped out, along with a heavy sigh.

What if I had to get rid of it? All of it? Almost.

That almost is what I'm after.

What if I knew that I had only three months remaining here, and I had to put my affairs in order, and get rid of everything EXCEPT a small cedar chest full of stuff? What would I keep?

You can't take it with you, but what if you could?

Let's suspend disbelief here for just a moment.

What if, when we die--or cross to another dimension, or go on to the next life, or whatever it is you believe we DO when we are no longer here, in these bodies--we were given the choice to take something with us....whether it's one significant item, or, let's say, a small chest of stuff of our choosing?

What would I take?

I've considered this at length, and I'm having trouble.

A picture of my dad? My scrapbooks--the visual record of my life? My manuscripts? Songs I've written? Chocolate, in case I am unfortunate enough to come back in a world where there isn't any?

My journals?

This is the big one. What about your journals? Your diaries?

I have bound notebooks going back about seventeen years--a page or two a day in longhand at most, with gaps of time in between when I didn't journal. Some of it angry, some of it heart-wrenching in its description of the emotional pain I was in at a given time. Some of it full of "I will never again...", some "I wish I hads." Incomplete perhaps, but there they are.

My guts. My pain. My joy. My life lessons.....my potential "letter to me" right there, all in thin, bound journals.

Should I take them? Would you?

The potentially good thing about dying is that it might allow us to "start over." Whether in Heaven, another life here, or some other existance. Fresh. New. No baggage.

And no wisdom.

And that's the trouble. If I take the journals, I get the wisdom. I get to know what I'd do differently and what I'd do the same. The proverbial "life instruction manual"--at least, for the person I was in THIS life.

But I also get the baggage and the pain of knowing the difficult times I went through here, in this life, as Cassondra. There's no way to separate it.

You know that saying..."Would you go back to being 21 again?" Most of us would say, "Not unless I can take my 40-year-old brain!"

Pretend for a moment, that when you die, you get to go to Rivendell. To be with the elves, the way Frodo and Bilboa Baggins did when they grew old or weary. You get to go and start over, in a brand new life. You can take a small chest with you. In it, you can place whatever you choose NOW, to help you along in your life THEN.

Would you do it?

What, in this life, can you not live without? What could you give up and maybe be better off? Could you, as I wish to, travel lighter, and perhaps live more fully?

If you knew that three months from now you were going to "poof" out of this dimension and into that one, you would be brand new again and wouldn't remember ANYTHING, what would you do?

Would you take something with you from this one?

Would you want to know who you were here? What you accomplished? Who you loved?

Would you want to know what you'd do differently, and what you'd do all over again? To learn from this life's mistakes?

Or would you want to take your chances with the world and all it throws at you--with no instruction book--no hints at all--just like you did this time?