What Can't Be Taken to the Dump

This week I filled the back of my pickup with the remains of my dad’s life. Well, not his body—he’s still alive, on hospice and nearing the end. But the physical remnants of his life needed to be cleared from his house and much of it hauled away.

It’s a sad and humbling experience sorting through the tangible markers of a life: the plaques and awards, the books he wrote, the evidence of a life both honored and complicated. And then, without ceremony, I drove to the dump.

I had a similar feeling last week when I sold his car for a small stack of $100 bills.

Life can feel so disposable. Send it off. Load it up. Haul it away.

It’s become cliché to say, Life isn’t about stuff, and of course it’s true. Even so, the objects we leave behind do tell a story—what and who we’ve loved, what we’ve struggled with, what we’ve lost and grieved and tried to hold onto.

Still, none of it lasts. It awakens my inner nihilist to discard a life like this.

But I remember something a friend at church shared recently. This man has suffered much in his life and the tears streaming down his cheek gave his words quiet credibility: “When someone dies, most people won’t know. Or they’ll ask vaguely, Is he still alive? But what we remember is how they made us feel—the love, the care, the quiet presence. That stays.”

We Quakers have a phrase: “This Friend speaks my mind.”

Almost everyone caring for Dad has mentioned how kind he is.

Maybe that’s the real legacy—not the things we write or collect, not our shadows or the efforts we make to overcome them, but the emotional imprint we leave on others. The attunement. The connection. The quiet dignity of having mattered to someone.

Those things can’t be taken to the dump.

So I grieve. But I also give thanks for what lasts.