You could call my grandmother a slight hoarder. She kept everything she saw any value in. Letters she received, notes she wrote in school, every award her children ever received, magazines stacked to the ceiling, toys no one had touched in decades, and more cloth than a fabric store. The volume of clutter was astounding, and I was doubting our ability to get it done in the few days I was staying over. Between sorting things to keep and the potential difficulties of parting with items that held sentimental value to my grandfather, I thought the road ahead was going to be long and difficult.

 

But as we began to sort, something surprised me. Instead of a slow careful process of deciding what to keep, my grandfather and I threw away anything that was not useful enough to give away.  

 

The moment that stuck with me most during this process, other than the smell of mouse droppings, was when we came across my grandmother’s wedding dress. It was yellow with age, fragile, yet I believed it still had beauty due to the person it represented. I thought for sure my grandfather would keep it. We stepped away, undecided, but just a few minutes later, without saying a word, my grandfather picked it up and threw it away. I was shocked but didn’t mention anything about it.

 

Later that day, he said something to me, a statement that he then repeated throughout the rest of my time there with some variation of delivery: “Life is too short to live in the past.”  

 

Those words stuck with me. I thought over the moment and his words quite a bit the rest of my time at his home. At first I thought throwing away those items meant losing the memories tied to them. But the more I thought it over, the more I realized: the memories aren’t in the things. They’re in us. Throwing away that wedding dress didn’t erase their marriage. It didn’t erase their love, the family they raised, the life they built together. It just showed his choice to keep living in the present, instead of holding on too tightly to the past.  

 

This situation got me thinking about how I approach my own life. How often do I – and all of us – cling to the past? To old mistakes, to regrets, or even just to the way things used to be? But if we spend all our time looking backwards, how can we ever move forward?

 

This experience with my grandfather showed me that our lives are not defined by what we own or hold onto, they’re defined by the people we love, and the experiences that we create with them. My grandmother does not live through a dress sitting in my grandfather’s basement. She lives on through the family dinners, the laughter, the lessons, and the love she gave to my family and her friends.

 

That’s what I want for my own life and something I believe we should all aspire to. Not to measure our lives by what we have collected, but who we have loved, how we have grown and the experiences we share along the way.