The basement storage room in question
Such a morbid headline today, and the second time in a month I've written something that makes it sound like I'm at death's door.
Thankfully, that is not the case. I'm only 56 years old and in pretty good health. Neither Terry nor I plan on going anywhere any time soon.
BUT...we are also of the age where we have lost all four of our parents. In each case, we were involved in the job of cleaning out their houses after they passed.
When you find yourself renting a dumpster and spending hours and hours combing through boxes in Mom and Dad's attic trying to figure out what to save and what to toss, you become conscious of the need to spare your own kids that same laborious task.
So Terry and I have committed to a program of getting rid of the extraneous stuff in our house over time.
When I say "over time," I admit that means we're not exactly in a rush. If we were both hit by a bus today, our children would have a heck of a time cleaning out the basement storage room, not to mention the rest of the house.
It's just that 34 years of marriage and five kids mean you accumulate a lot of possessions, some of which you want to keep.
Those boxes of baby clothes? We store them for grandkids, knowing full well they take up a whole lot of space in the meantime.
That wall of Christmas decorations? Hey, we're festive people!
High school memory bins? We've admittedly trimmed those down over time, but we still have yellowing newspaper articles and varsity jacket letters that will simply be thrown away when we've moved on from this life.
Speaking of newspaper articles, in that storage room are a few large bins of three-ring binders stuffed with copies of virtually every story I ever wrote for The News-Herald and the Plain Dealer when I was a sports journalist.
That's thanks to my dad, who meticulously cut out each one and taped them onto scrapbook pages for long-term preservation.
A year ago I came this close to throwing those binders away, but I just couldn't do it. It felt like I would be dishonoring years of Dad's work and turning a blind eye to how proud he was of his sports writer son.
So instead I vowed to digitize them all before I throw away the hard copies.
Which, of course, will take some time.
Time I assume I have.
Kids, my sincere apologies if I never actually get around to it.
