Ellen Byron

Purging the Past.

Hi, Ellen here. See all the vintage cookbooks lining the top two shelves of one of our many bookshelves?

Here’s what used to occupy them…

You’ll notice the bags and boxes are filled with nothing but scripts. Scripts from forty-plus years ago. They were once so important to me that they made the journey across the country when I moved from New York to Los Angeles, even though my acting career lasted all of a few years. When fellow petite brunette Holly Hunter keeps winning all the roles you go up for, it’s time to find a new career. Which I did. I relegated my acting itch to working with improv companies and segued into a writing career.

Husband Jer and I moved into our Studio City house in 1998. The scripts came with me from my former apartment. I’ve stared at them for years, knowing their time was long gone. Yet I did nothing about bidding them goodbye until a week ago. What finally inspired this purge of my past? My dear mom’s death. As soon as I learned she’d passed, I got on a plane to New York. I arrived at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. By 8 a.m. Saturday morning, my brothers and I were tasked with cleaning out her condo to go on the market. For two weeks, we emptied closets and drawers and bookcases, hauling untold boxes and bags to Goodwill. I didn’t have time to grieve. I still haven’t.

I call our house in L.A. “the storage facility” because it’s so packed with crap. I wrote a whole subplot about Döstädning – Swedish decluttering, aka Swedish death cleaning – into Fatal Cajun Festival while my own home had a bad case of C.H.A.O.S. – Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. But the experience dealing with Mom’s condo, which will drag on for months, made me vow to do a better job of shedding my own belongings.

When I got back from New York, I eyed those shelves of scripts and acknowledged it was time to move on. I feared my emotions when unloading them, but to quote a song from A Chorus Line that wonderfully represents my old acting days, I felt nothing. Most of the scripts went to our local library sale. Others too annotated to be of use to anyone went into the recycle bin. I kept the plays of my muse, Tennessee Williams, along with a couple of Shakespeare’s plays and my book of sonnets. Luckily, my twenty-five-year TV career didn’t create the kind of ephemera that my theatre career did. There are some very dated tokens, like this VHS tape…

But if I ever have the urge to revisit my sitcom past, I can still find an episode of Wings playing somewhere in the universe.

There’s a good chance Jer and I will kick the bucket before completing our de-clutter. But we have to make a hefty dent in the mess because I know one thing for sure. Telling our daughter, “When we die, just take a match to the place” is not the best approach to estate planning.

Readers, what have you purged or what are you procrastinating from purging?

40 thoughts on “Purging the Past.”

  1. I so understand this. I’ve been on the purging side of many friends and family meberrs, so I periodically purge here so my child won’t have that predicament.
    I don’t want him to open a drawer or closet and mumble oh Mom, why on earth did you keep this!

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  2. Hestia here.
    I occasionally go on a purge binge. I get rid of books I won’t read again, clothes that I’ll never fit into again, games I’ve bought but never got played.
    But the hubbs is a packrat, and I can’t get rid of anything of his. He still has Christmas gifts he asked for over 5 years ago that are still in the boxes, like a vhs converter. He has a huge box of vhs takes with no way to play them. Or the soda water machine that he’s only used once.
    And my daughter moved to Colorado 3 years ago, and her junk is still in the spare room.
    The one thing I should get rid of that I can’t? A metal egg shipping crate from the 1940s that I know I can figure out something to turn it into someday,

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  4. Both of our kids moved out within the past few months, so there has been a fair amount of purging of their “stuff.” Between older kiddo’s comics and younger kiddo’s music instruments, we still have a way to go, but progress is being made.

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      1. To be fair to your daughter, older kiddo is 27, so it took a lot of patience (and a lot of wine)!
        Sending your kiddo best wishes. It’s so hard to land a decent first job.

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  5. Last year, hubby and I made the decision to downsize and move to a retirement community. Because of health issues, the two level home and a two plus acre yard was getting too much. We bought a 2 bedroom apartment, with the intent of making the second bedroom a den/office. But we were faced with the task of choosing what we would be taking from our 8 room house and fit into 4. We did it!!!! With the help of 3 of our grown children, and a downsizing company that is working with the community we moved to. The hardest thing for me to part with was my 490 coffee mugs. I pulled out the ones I could not part with, about 50. They are now in my hutch. The kids took what they wanted, I sold a few, and donated the rest along with the 7 floor to ceiling rotating racks I displayed them on. It was a hard summer, but now, looking at our new space, I smile and am very glad we did this.
    Carol

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    1. Carol, I’m so impressed! I honestly wish there was a retirement community nearby we could move to. My parents did downsize over the years but even so, you’d be amazing how much there still is in a 2 BR condo.

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  6. I’ve got a ton of CDs that we never watch since the advent of streaming. We did take a load of those to Goodwill and there’s more to go.

    And dare I say it – books!

    Tom Burns

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  8. I’m not a packrat. I don’t function well with too much clutter. For 30 years before my dad died, he told us to put sticky notes on anything of his we wanted. He had a painting I liked so I told him I wanted it. “You can’t have that! It’s valuable!” Made me laugh. So I don’t have a lot of stuff, but I do have stuff that is dear to me for various reasons. The last time all the kids were home, I forced them to take a tour of the house with me. I pointed out all the stuff important to me and told them the story behind it. The bowl I got in Ireland on the trip with my dad. The antique table my mom rescued. My tea set from England. My little nun doll. “The Preacher” painting. And dozens of other things. It won’t bother me if they don’t want any of it when it comes time for me to part with it, but I want them to know why I kept it. Maybe the story will resonate with them and they’ll want it. And maybe they’ll tell the story to someone else and pass it along.

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      1. It’s not really a DOLL doll, but about 6 inches tall, in full black habit complete with long rope belt, atop hidden pipe cleaner legs attached to a metal base. She has a fabric head the size of a moth ball, with spare features in black ink consisting only of single curved lines for eyebrows, single curved lines with downward lashes to signify closed eyes, and a tiny red dot for a mouth. I didn’t play with it, but, as a good Catholic girl, treated it reverentially. She stands in my hutch atop the note I wrote for my kids about her. In part it says, “When I was little, one of the things my parents did as members of Holy Trinity Church was drive nuns to the church from where they lived at Mount Saint Francis. I tagged along on one of these trips and one of the nuns gave me the doll.” I don’t remember getting her, but I’ve loved her my entire life.

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  9. Oh, boy, do I feel for you, El. Cleaning out my parents’ house–which they moved into in 1965, bringing with them all their possessions from their previous home–was not only a pain in the butt, but it made me an emotional wreck. It still does, when I think about it.

    But am I getting rid of my own junk–I mean, invaluable treasures? Not much. Though Robin begs me to do so. For now, she’s tolerant. Barely. But the deal is, I have to do the dusting of all the knickknacks.

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  10. What a great account of your life and sad, too, that you had to say goodbye to your mom. But that step in life we all must take. While the gap never closes, it opens our eyes to how we can live our remaining days. My purging has been a total awakening. My husband and I feel free of so many worries. Many mundane, but they wear you out. We started a few years before the pandemic hit, knowing we wanted to downsize. Work, work, work for a great house but….then a knock on the door, someone offered to buy our home. June to October we purged, some things we loved went in the fire pit…we loved, not anyone else. A huge relief…little by little, we started feeling like ‘us’ again. Now, 3 years later, we are in ‘hog heaven’…don’t own a thing except what’s in our apartment. Love every minute, like each other more because there is no ‘get this or that done’…Freedom…take advantage. What you love is junk to most people…Freedom from ‘stuff’ is all you need.

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  11. I share your sentiments. It was only when my mom died and my sister and I had to clean out the house (the memories were great, but what she had saved from her and our late father was more than we had imagined), that I realized I can’t do that to my children. Of course, when we last downsized, I took things that I shouldn’t have, too.

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  13. There was The Great Purge of 2004 when my mom moved into a retirement community, then The Purge Part Deux in 2012 when she passed away. The first time uncovered multiple (and complete) sets of patio furniture(?!!!) and a China shop’s worth of tea cups. The second was more of a mini-purge, which revealed treasures about her daily life. Grocery lists. Prayer lists. Cards purchased and not sent. Turns out the little things are everything. ❤

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  14. I suffered through purging trauma last summer which included sending away thirty boxes of books! With my husband’s retirement, we did a downsizing move to a house with plenty of windows but little shelf space. I’m still recovering and need an angel/demon to scold me if I start collecting again!

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  15. Ellen, When I moved two years ago I had one month to clear out 39 years of stuff from our home. Sometimes it just takes a dramatic life change to do this. Still you probably know the drill…start with a small corner or drawer and make that the project of the day and then do the same the next day. It’s easier in small chunks of time.–Fran Vella

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  16. Oh Ellen, I wish I had known as some of those scripts would have found a good home in my movie memorabilia collection. Ah well, I have too much stuff and collections that I want to display. I have gone through and purged a lot of stuff that is newer from around the house that I don’t want–exercise stuff, books, clothing, etc. Filled up the back of the SUV and now on to the Thrift Store. Some for the Food Pantry. Still have a Bose Sound system and a few other things to get rid of for now. I wish I had never given away my Polaroid SX 70 camera, my Olivetti-Underwood Electric Typewriter and a Mexican Armadillo Purse that was a gift. So, I have to be careful now. Those three items still upset me. Ah well.

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      1. It was and it was from the 1950s. A friend gave it to me for Christmas, but I thought that it was scary ugly and got rid of it. They sell on eBay for about $85+. Now I think they are cool.

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        1. I take that back. They are from the 1940s and are the whole armadillo. There are three on eBay from $109.00 with issues to $750.00. The one that I had was perfect. Slap my forehead!

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  17. Gosh. I’m so sorry about your mom’s passing, El. Don’t be too hard on yourself re: insta-purging. It can be a long process. And Marie Kondo has been unusually quiet lately. I’m the family historian/closet, ha. Our house is filled with my parents’ mid-century furniture and stuff from my grandparents and even my great-grandmother’s tiny horsehair rocker. (My grandmother’s bisque doll from 1916 fits on it nicely. I have a photo of my 16 yo nana with that doll. When she grew up, she did a great job of captioning photos in her albums–white ink (looked like fine-point white out) on black pages, with the little decorative corner holders). She even pressed her corsage from my mom’s Navy wedding day into one (red-white-and-blue ribbons). What I have no problem discarding? New stuff, that doesn’t last anyway.

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