You have to clear out the house of your parent who has died.
Take this situation apart. Each piece goes in one box: yours, or not yours. There is no third box, and almost nothing falls in one piece.
Yours
- The pace you set yourself.There is no legal term for grief and rarely a real one for the house. The speed at which you do this is a choice, even when it feels like an instruction.
- Whether you postpone your grief until the clearing is done.Here is the trap of this territory. Working on feels like the only available thing to do, and it is often also a way of not having to feel something. Whether you give yourself an hour on the way is yours.
- Whether you keep one thing that serves no purpose at all.Entirely yours, and probably the wisest thing you do that day. Not everything has to have a function in order to be allowed to stay.
Not yours
- That the house has to be emptied.A given, with a key that has to be handed back. Arguing with that fact costs energy you will need further along.
- That certain objects bring a wave the moment you pick them up.A smell, a handwriting, a coat. You do not choose that they arrive; they come with the fact that you loved someone.
- What your brother or sister wants to keep.His attachment is not your attachment and his choice is not yours. You can talk about it and you cannot assign him what moves him.
The reasoning. Loss is the territory where the teaching sounds hardest and is meant most gently. The Stoics did not deny the grief; they only said that the wave and the judgment are two things. What the cut does here is make the day manageable: the house has to be emptied, that is fixed, but the pace, the pauses and the one useless object are in your column.
- Never say of anything that you have lost it, but that you have given it back.Epictetus
Nearby situations
More on this topic: Loss and fate