The art of letting go

My neighbour recently passed away and her family is clearing her house of its contents. I know this because when I pass by on my dog walks, her yellow bin is full.

I lift the lid and take a peek inside, feeling like a homeless person looking for food. I poke around in between broken pots, and hear the clink of what I discover later to be Stuart crystal vases, glasses and trinket bowls. There's a leather-bound book set of Daphne du Maurier and quirky garden ornaments (the plant in the shoe type).

The smell of childhood and celebrations, old paper and stale perfume wafts up to me. I find a photo from the 1960s showing her in the standard primary school pose with all her classmates, and an elegant one of her as a young woman.

Why wouldn't her family want to keep these mementos? What stories do they tell? I hardly knew her and yet I feel sad that her life has been discarded on the side of the road.

Many of the items are broken but some are not and I can't let them be thrown into the compactor garbage truck that comes by every second Sunday.

My inner saviour kicks in as I drag the bin back to my house, affronted at the wholesale disposal of a life.

The bin took me back to my mother's world of objects. She was an avid collector and maker. They were her passion and she had a close attachment to them no matter the monetary value.

Everything had its place.

She displayed her handpainted china plates on special stands. Her oil paintings covered most of the walls. I drowned in ceramic swans and cats. A Royal Doulton set held pride of place, only brought out for unique occasions when we would sit in awe of its beauty and legacy. I revered this set only because of the importance she gave it, not because I loved the colours or the pattern. Wedgewood plates, silver goblets and crystal glasses sat gathering dust, only to be admired.

To me, all her treasures were just clutter to be shifted when I wanted to sit down. Among all this adulation, our Corgi named Red ate off a special edition Royal Doulton plate and slept on an antique tapestry. For him, dinner still tasted the same.

What happens when possessions represent both love and burden? At least what you buy for yourself has meaning; gifts from others often do not.

She gave me many items that took space in my home. When it was time to move to a new city, most of it had to go, to secondhand shops or given away.

‘What happened to that Nefertiti head I painted for you?’ she asked me, looking over at the shelves. My throat tightened.

‘Oh it's in a box somewhere,’ I lied. I watched her face crumple with disappointment, and felt a jolt in my chest.

'And that gold cat? It's real gold...' Everything was valuable to her.

I wanted to tell her that I had too much, that I couldn't carry it, I understood but I was weighed down by possessions, smothered.

A long time later when she found out I’d given away most of her handpainted pots and statues, it was as if I’d given away her love. That love was buried deep inside the paint on those cats, and dissolved inside the goblets.

And she was passing this love to me.

Perhaps that was the case for her, but for me these things took up space, were dust collectors that multiplied every time she came round.

How could I explain to her that she could show love without giving me a physical thing, that to me it was suffocating, and I was just trying to breathe.

For the giver, the provenance of possessions relates to passing on love so when they outgrow the space they take up, something has to move on. The things are rationalised, culled, thrifted, listed online and eventually passed to strangers.

But in this culling, who has final say about what is worthless or what has value? Isn’t the value built into the relationship it brings? Or are objects expendable no matter their history? In the end, who decides? The eBay buyer, collectors – even the thrift stores know what to keep and what to discard.

After seeing my neighbour's belongings unceremoniously dumped in the bin, I took a look at my own shelves.

There are all those books I haven't read, new ones I've bought and more loaded onto my Kindle. Those ceramic Delft clogs and tiles from Holland, and the glittery jacket of a bullfighter from Spain, each nearing 30 years old. There are boxes for computers I no longer own, and that iconic drawer – every household has one – full of cords and earphones and adapters and mice that serviced devices long gone.

Why haven't I noticed that these can all go?

At one time, these were precious, but they had served their purpose, their use-by date passed. There were items that I no longer wanted to share my life with but they deserved a second life with other families.

Then there are the treasures that others might covet, for a price. Who knows whether there will be any financial gain but somehow the act of cataloguing, photographing, researching, describing and uploading each item gives it importance. It's as if I'm giving it some final respect in its ongoing legacy away from me.

I know why my neighbour's family didn't find homes for their mother's possessions. All this takes time and energy that they clearly did not have in abundance.

Who am I to judge what they have time for?

What is the point of collecting beloved items from overseas holidays, mementos from childhood, treasured crockery or those crystal glasses you were given on your wedding day? Now that I'm in the last third of my life, I appreciate the independence from objects, and the burden ownership can bring.

We are drowning in clothes barely worn, while more are created every day. The economy depends on us discarding, but what does that do to our sense of what matters?

I want to learn the art of letting go of objects that weigh us down, while keeping the precious few that hold memory and stories.

Possessions have weighed me down for a long time.

Do we really need them to remember the people we love? Or is memory enough?

But there is one thing I can't give away – the delicate bowl my mother painted in cobalt blue and edged with real gold.