We moved last week. Unlike the moves of young adulthood—a carload of boxed clothes, records and books—this was an epic engagement. Cleaning was a monumental task, undertaken with lots of help. Saying goodbye to the land was painfully dislocating. But what really killed me was sorting through boxes.

We moved a lot when I was a kid, six times in my first seven years. So I became someone who kept things: my dad’s sweater with holes in the elbows, bottomless cane-bottomed chairs from my great grandparents, my grandma’s pretty saucers, minus the broken teacups that went with them. Decades of my mother’s letters. The chipped and mended platter of childhood Thanksgivings. Old sketchbooks. Almost fifty years of journals.

I really tried to let things go this time. The journals that witnessed the last half century were taken apart and consigned to the recycling bins. Books once loved were passed on. Two soup pots, a Dutch oven, some wonderful clothes, dishes and teapots, all found a new home. Favorite furnishings that didn’t fit in the new, downsized space were given away or sent with regrets to the transfer station. 

Yet the chairs and sweater, the letters and platter stayed. Which made me wonder, “Why do I hang on to broken things?”

A visual answer popped into my mind today: a friend’s painting entitled “Tethered Freedom.” This subdued study of a figure ascending into the sky but still bound to earth was this artist’s way of expressing her father’s drawn-out dying. But I think that it also expressed what it was like for her to care for him during his last years: longing for release combined with gratitude for connection.

I’ve written before about those human attachments that inspire our commitment of time and capacity to others. But as I sorted through all those boxes, I recognized that even when humans are gone, they still invite our attention. Their belongings can tether us. I find my mother’s old bathrobe, and there she is, a cup of coffee in one hand, her prayer book in the other. I shelve my dad’s Pogo books and hear him belly laughing on the couch. There’s a particular mug in the cupboard that brings to mind my brother Mark, a vase on the sideboard that calls back my brother Mike. I want these reminders of who and where I’ve come from. 

So I still keep some of those broken things, simply because they invoke the memory of those I love. Yes, I recognize that when I’m gone, they won’t mean anything to anyone else. They will have no intrinsic value and may not even be functional. Yet they crack me open, and I need that.

So while I was willing to let many things go this move, it wasn’t everything. I’m not there yet, and I’m not apologizing for these bits of clutter. My time of “unconditional acceptance of the inevitable” is coming, I know. But until then, I’ll keep a few broken and worn-out things hiding in my closets, tethers to the other side.