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Illustration by April Dela Noche Milne
After my grandmother’s funeral, my family of 18 gathered at her townhouse in small-town Ontario. We shared memories, absorbed each other’s love and ate pizza. But we were also here for another, more pragmatic reason: to strip my grandmother’s house of all her material belongings.
My dad and his siblings were preparing to put it on the market. This means that the once meticulously decorated and organized home must be gutted of all signs of my grandma’s existence so that it can be redecorated and reorganized by the realtor’s home staging crew.
All of her things – plates, jewellery, art, cutlery, office supplies, an expansive collection of rocking chairs – could be thrown in a trash bag or sold at the world’s most depressing garage sale. But wouldn’t it make more sense for these items to be redistributed to her family as each family member sees fit? This practical process is providing us all comfort as we file into Grandma’s house to begin the looting.
And so, this is how it begins.
Sixteen of us spread out among her open-concept kitchen/living room/dining area, we devised a plan. An old notebook that my grandma had once used to document her many travel adventures, lies open at a blank page on the dining room table between us. The youngest grandchild, a newly minted adult, sits with this notebook, drawing up a chart, with each column topped by the name of one of nine grandchildren. This is where we record the big ticket items, such as TVs, Lazyboy recliners, Dyson vacuums – that we feel we could get the most use out of at home.
My grandma, who was a kind and supportive woman, did just about anything for her grandchildren, and would be overjoyed to continue supporting them after her death.
Over the course of that afternoon, my family of mourners, including younger members with limited financial resources, picked through my grandma’s home for small pieces of her life that we may integrate into our own. We tiptoed awkwardly around my grandma’s bungalow in search of treasure.
I questioned what it means to grieve “correctly” and the consensus among my family was that what we were doing was weird and bordering on wrong. But the more I dwell on these feelings, the more I find myself challenging those initial reactions.
Traditional grieving processes are changing. “Celebrations of Life” replace funerals, comfortable formal wear replaces stuffy black clothing, looting your grandmother’s house while eating cheese pizza after she suddenly passes away replaces the organized and careful distribution of expensive objects and the trashing of the mundane. Here, we decide what is valuable. This is not decided by the price of the object or how much some lawyer thinks it’s worth. An extra cheese grater is much more valuable to someone setting up a kitchen on their own than a diamond ring.
We are deciding how to grieve our loved one, and doing so in a way that just so happens to be economically and environmentally friendly.
After all, the younger members of Grandma’s family grew up with an ever-increasing pressure to save our planet. And so, we do things differently. We take reduce, reuse, recycle, to new, and morbid, depths. We clear out the houses of our ancestors to keep us from the aisles of our local Dollarama. We borrow a preused pot from our grandmother’s house to ensure we don’t end up at Homesense, buying one made by tiny hands in the Global South and transported to us on a gargantuan, fuel-guzzling boat. As a family, we are adapting to new ways of living and to new ways of dying.
When I return to my own small condo in London, Ont., with small pieces of my grandma. I joke with my roommates that after raiding my grandma’s house, I’ve returned with some new décor for our own: a couple of houseplants, a side table, and a substantial handful of forks (of which we are always short). I laugh with my fellow penny-pinching peers about how we ended up with a new printer – a stockpile of ink included – for our office space. But I love how a small part of my grandma’s life melded into my own, in a sort of spiritual, postmortem sharing of material belongings.
While the absurdity of the situation is undeniable – my friend described it as “straight out of an episode of Modern Family” – I cannot deny that my life continues to be just a little bit better and that my grandma is to thank for that.
Ella Keogh lives in London, Ont.