Passing it On

Some families pass down a brooch or a necklace or even entire estates complete with guest homes to their loved ones. Mine is not one of those. Instead of jewelry or real estate, my family tends to hold onto more mundane items like twenty years’ worth of Newsweek magazines. At some time in the past, there may have been a brooch or even a treasured ring but it was probably lost or sold for hooch. Now most of what my family has kept seems to be the sorts of things people would associate with a low-end antique shop or a high-end hoarder.

My father passed away more than four years ago and I’m still sorting through the inheritance. “Inheritance” seems like a pretty grand term for the random assortment of odds and ends that are boxed up in my basement but it’s more appropriate than words like “legacy” or “heirlooms” which are even further off the mark.

This is, I should mention, the second round of sorting that’s occurred. The first took place by my youngest brother and stepmother who went through all of my father’s belongings and doled them out as they saw fit. It was quite the endeavor and one I feel fortunate to have dodged.

Given that my father passed away during the COVID epidemic when travel was restricted I wasn’t able to see him in his final moments but the situation did have an upside. My absence meant that I didn’t have to root through fifty years of my father’s tax returns or the 400 issues of National Geographic that he’d inherited from his father or God knows what else he’d manage to squirrel away.

The fact is that I’ve got quite a lot of crap already — a tendency I seem to have inherited from my father. I use the term “crap” affectionately of course. One man’s crap is another man’s… not exactly treasure, but not exactly trash. Whatever it is I can’t seem to throw much, if any of it away.

I’d always known my old man was a bit of a pack rat. As a kid, I remember sneaking into my parents’ bedroom closet and finding an ammo box from his tour in Vietnam labeled “Warranties” in my father’s handwriting. At that age, I didn’t know what a warranty was, but I imagined that it was probably pretty important even though I wasn’t sure why anyone would want to keep one for a Waring blender that we’d sold at a garage sale before I was born…

To read more just click through to Passing it On on Medium!

About the Author

derekbremer Prior to his life as a stay at home father Derek spent more than a decade performing public relations and marketing functions for financial consulting firms and found the job to be precisely as exciting as it sounds. When not tending to his wife or daughter Derek enjoys subjecting the public to his unique take on fatherhood, travel and animal husbandry. He has been published in Scary Mommy, Sammiches and Psych Meds, The Good Men Project, HowToBeADad, Red Tricycle, RAZED, HPP and the Anthology "It's Really Ten Months Special Delivery: A Collection of Stories from Girth to Birth.