Getting old is no fun, my mother used to tell me. It is something to be avoided at all costs

That isn’t practical for most of us. We are all going to age, slowly but inevitably. The question is, how do we handle it?

Denial (my favorite) doesn’t seem like a viable long-term option. My parents tried that.

It worked well for a few years, then suddenly they couldn’t stay in their house any longer due to safety concerns. It was a scramble to transition to the next stage of living. And hard on the children who had to empty the house of all their stuff.

Which is why my appearance in this space has been practically non-existent lately. My wife and I have downsized, moving from a house to an apartment. Much of my time has been spent making decisions as to what to keep and what to give away. It is time consuming and emotionally draining. It isn’t just the stuff, it is the memories.

The idea was to do it now, while we are (relatively) young and can make the decisions ourselves. Having had to move our parents, we didn’t want to dump that task on our children.

We got rid of a lot of things before moving to Germany in 2017, but we still kept the house, which we returned to in 2021. The cuts were deep but not painful. Now the purging has had to be extreme. Family heirlooms, not wanted by our children, have been heading out the door to new homes.

My music memorabilia is, for the most part, gone. I kept a lot of paper files, thinking some day I would write the definitive book on contemporary Christian music. I’ve come to terms with the fact that isn’t going to happen. I still have the interest, but if I am going to write, I should probably concentrate on books with a market. Maybe something on Donald Trump.

Very few people care about Christian music in the seventies and eighties. Somewhere there are probably historians appalled that I have trashed so much unique material. I get that – I’m appalled too. Sometimes hard choices have to be made.

I’m a book collector, and already didn’t have bookshelf space for what I owned. Hundreeds of books went out the door. It hurt, but that is what libraries are for – I’m sure I can find the books to read again, even if they aren’t on my shelf

The music is more problematic. Much of what I like is so obscure that streaming services don’t have it. And why should I pay a monthly fee to listen to something I own? Most of my vinyl is long gone, and I got rid of about 4,000 compact discs before the move to Germany. (I used to work in radio, I have a large music collection.) My hope was to pare that down to the thousand or so I don’t want to live without.

Perhaps more difficult were the family heirlooms. Times and tastes have changed. My children don’t want their grandparents’ stuff. They don’t want their parents’ stuff.

I understand that. But I still have emotional ties to some things. In 20 years the kids can toss it – I’ve done my part.

All of which explains the lack of time for writing here. This post was written more than a month ago, before the move and I am only now posting it now with the tenses changed.

Even after the move, I still have things that I have to go through, decisions that couldn’t be made until I was sure what would fit into the new place. My wife managed to do all her purging before the move – but I want to digitize some old media and that was too time consuming to finish in the time available. It will be an ongoing project.

Hopefully things have reached a new normal and I can be a bit more regular in this space. That’s my hope as this new month starts.