Our neighbor is gone. It was out of the blue, so sudden we were still attempting to carry on email conversations with her. Her silence made no sense until one of her sons appeared at our door to inform us she had suddenly died. I immediately thought of her and the many conversations we’ve had over the course of two decades. When passing by her front door, I glimpsed through her windows and saw the trappings of her home, still there exactly as she had left them, waiting for her return.
Because we live so close to her, I got to witness a chilling pantomime play out. First, her sons appeared to look around her home and discuss what to do next. A bit later, the daughters-in-law and grandchildren arrived. It sounded like what could have been a typical family gathering, except her voice was missing. At times, I heard laughter punctuating discussions, likely about who wanted what.
Over the course of the following weeks, her family came in and out, taking what they valued from her life. What was left, regardless of its value to our neighbor, was to them, only “stuff.” The stuff was dealt with. At first, individuals interested in particular items arrived to take or buy them. But as time pressed on, the sons resorted to a “haul it” service to take all of the rest of the stuff away – as soon as possible.
With all of her possessions gone, a series of contractors came in to turn her empty home into an empty house, ready to be sold again. The painters appeared and worked. The window and sidewalk cleaners appeared and worked. The house cleaners appeared and worked. At the end, our neighbor’s home, which had been filled with a lifetime’s worth of cherished possessions and heirlooms, became just an empty house, ready to be staged and put on the market. I looked in the windows again. All shelves and counters were bare and seemingly untouched. Walls opposed walls with nothing in between. The light of the setting sun streamed in through the west windows, reflecting off polished floors where her footsteps had been only six weeks earlier. The house was an empty shell of the life of the woman we had known. I got the strange sensation of wondering if she had ever been there at all.
Who of us hasn’t taken a last look in the house we were leaving, looked across vacant rooms, and seen the ghosts of memories? It’s hard to not feel some sadness. And yet, the trappings of years in that house come with us to our new house, bringing the familiarity and continuity that make a house a home. But, the empty house that comes at the end of life is profoundly different. The physical familiarity of home is scattered in all directions, ruthlessly filtered by descendants to the few items they are willing to take, leaving the rest to pass through the inheritance sieve to donations, salvage, and most commonly, the dump.
What is the value of “stuff?” To answer, we have to first understand what the word means. Merriam-Webster’s most salient definition refers to it as “an unspecified material substance or aggregate of matter.” In this context, the colloquial meaning is “a person’s possessions, miscellaneous items, and unspecified materials, without naming them specifically.” Like weeds in a garden, leftover “stuff” in the home of a deceased relative refers to the unnamed items no one wants. If something isn’t wanted, is it devoid of value?
In thinking about the question, I turned to our own home and trappings we’ve acquired over many decades. After having engaged in the “Konmari” process multiple times, we still have many possessions and few left we think of as “stuff.” Marie Kondo tells us to look at each item and ask ourselves if it “sparks joy.” As a lifelong member of Western culture, I translate the expression to “does it have value to you?” What we have in our home does have value – even irreplaceable personal value. And we are not alone in this. Across our community of senior citizens, I have yet to see a home among our friends indicative of the current trend of sparse, minimalist interior decorating. Furniture, china, artwork, family photographs, heirlooms, collections, holiday decorations, and various personal objects abound, all acquired and enjoyed over many decades. They are cherished and infused with deep personal meaning. If to many others these items would be just “stuff” (including to our adult children), why are they not to us?
This question led me back to the BBC show Long Lost Family. In one particular episode, a woman was searching for the brother she had never met, the first child of her father. The show’s researchers succeeded in finding him. Like many adopted children, he longed to know why he was given up and, in this case, if his father was a good man. His sister was so overjoyed to find him, she wanted to give him a gift when they were reunited. She chose a toy airplane her father had played with as a child. When she met him, she reassured her brother — their father was a good man. She gave him the gift. When her brother held the toy in his hands, she said to him, “I wanted to give this to you because he touched it.” He was overwhelmed.
In witnessing this emotional interaction between a brother and sister, I am struck by how far beyond being a piece of stuff that toy airplane is. It was touched by their father, then touched by the daughter, and then by the son who never knew him. It became an object infused with a metaphysical connection to their long-deceased father. I now walk through our home and see the objects in our lives and wonder who has touched them before. How often and how long did they touch them? What did it mean to them? What metaphysical connection is present in them, connecting me and Sheryl to the now gone beloved members of our family? Certainly, when we touch the objects, we remember our loved ones. But, if we think about them touching the objects, cherishing the objects, are we doing more? Are we momentarily escaping the arrow of time and, through love, reconnecting with their souls?
Talk to anyone who has lost a beloved spouse. For the surviving spouse, the stuff in a home can become emotional talismans. The house feels overwhelmingly quiet, hollow, and foreign without the familiar sounds that person made, often connected to objects that now linger. Clothes retain the distinct physical scent of the person, which can bring sudden, overwhelming waves of both comfort and devastation. A close friend of mine described how doing an innocuous everyday activity with an object suddenly reduced her to tears – subtle connections to the husband she lost months before. There’s no question the presence of our departed loved ones lingers in the stuff of home. Since seeing our friend’s empty house, I now wonder if it only goes one way.
The old saying goes, “you can’t take it with you.” Or can you? The answer may depend on what you consider “it” to be. We perceive an object as solid, even though it is not. It’s comprised of particles within particles that create volume through sheer energy. Einstein’s most famous equation, E=mc2, posits the energy in an object is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, an incomprehensibly large number. Those objects in the home each contain an enormous amount of concentrated energy.
As human beings, we are comprised of cells that live, reproduce, and die, which comprise biological organisms within us that live, are renewed, and can die. And through this complex combination of cells, organs, and biological systems, we miraculously become entities with consciousness, the subconscious within, and the universal concept of the soul. All of this is energy.
In the early 20th Century, the foundational figures of the new discipline of Quantum Physics, Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg, established the theory that matter is “dynamic and relational” at the quantum level. Quantum Physics posits that what something is depends heavily on interactions, probabilities, fields, and relationships with other systems.3 Quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which two or more particles become inextricably linked, regardless of the distance separating them, has been documented by modern physicists.4 Some philosophers and spiritual thinkers interpret these discoveries to mean: reality is fundamentally interconnected, relationships are more basic than separate things, and the universe is participatory rather than purely mechanical.5
Is it possible a cherished object in our home may be metaphysically different than other solid objects largely ignored? Could the reality of an object having been touched and cherished by a person, at some fundamental level, connect that object to that person? Could part of the energy of that person become part of the energy of that object? If so, is it not reasonable to believe our loved ones, now long gone, took with them energy from the objects which have personal meaning to them? When we touch and cherish an object a loved one touched and cherished, are we are connecting to our loved one – to their soul?
Clearly, this would not apply to every object in a home. But, some objects, like the anniversary gift, the souvenir of a meaningful event, the wedding dress, the thing your mother or father always wore – these things carry such an infusion of emotional connection, we just can’t part with them even when they’re obsolete or worn out. And some objects span generations. We still have an old wooden table Sheryl’s great, great grandmother had shipped to California around the treacherous horn of South America. I still have my grandmother’s cobalt blue glass vase which sat on her parlor table next to a paperweight photograph of her late husband, the grandfather I never had the chance to know.
I’m not saying we should embrace hoarding or, for that matter, not part with vast amounts of stuff we collect over a lifetime. Sheryl and I have done many sessions of “deaccessioning,” as she calls them – and for good reasons. But, I have become intrigued by the small idiosyncratic collection of objects that remain with us through what feels like a mystical bond. We pick them up, touch them, and put them back to their place in the home as established heirloom talismans of our lives.
What becomes of their fate in the aftermath of the empty house? As a physical object, they likely will still exist. They could be languishing in some antique store as a curio of someone’s life, acquired by a stranger who has no knowledge of its history and meaning, or buried with tons of refuge in a landfill. But, if not kept and cherished by descendants, are they, as talismans, doomed to oblivion? I suggest it’s possible spiritual forces infused in these objects gives them a presence to the people who touched and cherished them, even though those people have passed on. If so, it redefines the concepts of survival and continuance.
Why are human beings so obsessed with believing all life on our earth must go on? The very question is considered blasphemy by modern day standards. Yet, it is a question that cannot be avoided. Reality is uncompromising. Even if human beings, through their most benevolent efforts and powerful technologies avoid destroying life on earth from within, life will eventually be destroyed from outside forces beyond our control. Astronomers estimate that in one billion years, our sun will metamorphize into a red giant, destroying all life as we know it on earth. This distant reality has inspired many science fiction stories that ennoble mankind’s successful colonization of other worlds. With the recent fervor over the perceived threat of climate change, such stories have exploded on to the big screen – fanciful tales of generations-long epic journeys in massive spinning starships that serve as an “arc” to save life on earth, which must go on, somewhere, somehow.
Why? Why do we assume we are entitled to always existing?
In this series on Anamnesis, I have explored many beliefs and theories on how our commitment to remembrance may connect us through the veil to our loved ones – on how it may be possible to escape the arrow of time. It’s nothing new. Over the course of millennia, almost every culture on earth has believed in these concepts. It’s only been in the last few centuries new beliefs have emerged.
While humanist philosophy dates back to antiquity, it only shed its connection to religion during the 19th Century, becoming “secularized” into the belief that reason, science, and human experience must guide morality instead of divine revelation. It has subsequently gained in popularity as a world view. Recent research reveals 2% of Americans think and act in full alignment with secular humanist tenets. 16% of U.S. adults (40 million people) make life choices and hold beliefs which reflect secular humanist principles, even if they do not adopt the label. They are part of the growing demographic known as “religious nones,” people who claim no religious affiliation, numbering as high as 29% of the U.S. adult population.7
Psychologists have studied how behavior and cognitive processing shift when individuals believe death is the absolute end of consciousness. Those who reject the existence of an afterlife and the veil between profoundly raise the stakes of their lives by defining existence solely between birth and death. Research published in journals like Innovation in Aging highlights how concepts like “bucket lists” are a direct psychological response to a constrained time horizon. When death is viewed as total annihilation, missed opportunities are perceived as permanently lost. FOMO (fear of missing out) becomes a driving force.8
By abandoning faith in something greater and more benevolent than ourselves, we forsake the humility faith demands of us. Were this to become the cultural norm, I believe it would lead us to becoming a people of hubris, convinced we can be or do anything our latest whim desires, regardless of the constraints of nature, regardless of any immoral means taken to achieve them. Having complete conviction humanity will achieve some kind of utopia through reason, science, and human experience is an attractive vision. But we also carry within us the monsters of the id, the forces of destruction in our subconscious that have always been with us. And while human reason is powerful enough to diagnose our own deep flaws, it is not powerful enough to completely cure them. We are not worthy of wearing the mantle of divine destiny.
Every culture needs its symbols. Prominent anthropologists like Clifford Geertz defined culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms through which people communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitudes toward life.9 Without symbols, humans cannot organize experience or assign meaning to existence. The cherished objects in our homes are the symbols of our lives and the lives of our ancestors. Without them, we forget our ancestors, where we came from, and who we are. Without them, we may have a full house, but also an empty home indicative of a house staged for the next buyer – neutral, moldable, impersonal.
Our times will come. Against all odds, some of our talismans may stay in our family for a few more generations. The stuff of our lives, both cherished and ordinary, will linger for a bit – and then be scattered. Our home will become another empty house. But, because we have engaged in Anamnesis over many years, I believe the talismans in our lives and their spiritual connections to those whom we love, including each other, will endure. Perhaps, just perhaps, our descendants will inherit one of them and sense our presence when they touch it. ❖
Author’s Notes
See the page sidebar at the top on the right regarding the entire series on Anamnesis. In the mobile view of this website, links to the series appear at the bottom.
Cover image: The empty house in this photograph is of the home of our friend and neighbor after she had suddenly died.
References
- ”Season 8, Episode 7,” Long Lost Family (UK), presented by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell, directed by David Clews, aired August 29, 2018, on ITV.
- Ernest Rutherford, “The Scattering of α and β Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom,” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 21, no. 125 (May 1911): 672.
- Werner Heisenberg, “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,” Zeitschrift für Physik 33 (1925): 879–893.
Niels Bohr, “The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory,” Nature 121, no. 3050 (1928): 580–590. - Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?” Physical Review 47, no. 10 (1935): 777–780.
Erwin Schrödinger, “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik,” Naturwissenschaften 23, no. 48 (1935): 807–812. - John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, ed. Wojciech H. Zurek (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 3–28.
- Passengers, directed by Morten Tyldum (Columbia Pictures, 2016), streaming screenshot, 0:02:15.
- Gregory A. Smith et al., “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off,” Pew Research Center, February 26, 2025, doi.org.
- Qiao Chu, Daniel Grühn, and Ashley Marie Holland, “Life is Short – Make a Bucket List: How Age and Time Horizon Impact Motivations,” Innovation in Aging 2, no. S1 (November 2018): 499, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6227399/.
Laura L. Carstensen, Derek M. Isaacowitz, and Susan T. Charles, “Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity,” American Psychologist 54, no. 3 (March 1999): 165, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10199217/.
Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, and Sheldon Solomon, “The Causes and Consequences of a Need for Self-Esteem: A Terror Management Theory,” in Public Self and Private Self, ed. Roy F. Baumeister (New York: Springer, 1986), 189. - Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 89.
- Plato, The Republic, trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library 237 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 359d–360b (bk. 2).
- “The Testament of Solomon,” in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. James H. Charlesworth, trans. D. C. Duling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983), 1:962
- Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1995), Skáldskaparmál, chap. 35.
- Gaius Julius Hyginus, The Myths of Hyginus
, ed. and trans. Mary Grant (Lawrence: University of Kansas Publications, 1960), 2.15. - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 450.
Further Reading and Resources
Long Lost Family
In Season 8, Episode 7, Maureen and Keith meet as brother and sister for the first time in 42 years. In this scene of their reunion, Maureen gives Keith the toy airplane their father touched.
Intergenerational Interstellar Travel
Science fiction aficionados, screen writers, and content creators appear to think little about what interstellar travel actually entails. It is just assumed to be yet another technological hurdle humanity has overcome through ingenuity and ambition. But, nature has no obligation to reward ingenuity or ambition. Physics and biology are unyielding and not easily swayed, I’ve not read or heard one astrophysicist who’s declared that interstellar travel is impossible. Many things considered impossible can be achieved given enough resources. The question is at what cost? What will it take to overcome the unforgiving “rocket equation” in a scenario in which human beings must exist in earth-like conditions or die? Once out of the earth’s protective magnetic shield, what will it take to protect a massive intergenerational starship from the great killers of space itself, interstellar dust, radiation and cosmic rays?
Then there are the great ethical questions. Physicists all agree that conventional chemical propulsion is too weak to propel us to another star. Even with the yet to be invented faster forms of propulsion, space is so unimaginably vast, generations would have to be born, live and die on the starship. What are the genetic implications of generations of people existing in a small closed system? How humans breed on a starship would have to be mandated, forcing people to give up who they choose as a life partner. There is no way to know if the destination planet will allow humanity to thrive or slowly go extinct until years after arrival. Is it ethical to ask people to do all of this on the slim hope that some destination planet will actually replace the ecosystem that supported it on earth?
The video linked below, constructed from cited research, is the most comprehensive explanation I could find of the enormous challenges involved. If you really want to understand it, it’s worth every minute.
https://youtu.be/UaekcRLbUdg?si=8Xt6crfYZfCVZy0u
Population Collapse
Despite the constant parroting in the media of Paul Ehrlich’s now disproved prediction that the world would overpopulate, the truth is the world is heading towards population collapse with dire economic and societal consequences hanging in the balance. Instead of seeking to colonize some distant world predicated on the false belief of overpopulation, we should be seeking to repopulate the world we have. Stephen Shaw cogently explains what is really happening here:
Our Ultimate Personal Talismans
Throughout human history, rings have appeared in legend, myth, and scripture as talismans. In Plato’s Republic, the Ring of Gyges grants its wearer the power of invisibility, exploring whether a person remains moral when completely unmasked and unaccountable. 10 The legendary Ring of Solomon was etched with a divine seal or hexagram, giving the king the power to speak with animals, know all things, and command spirits and demons. 11 In Norse mythology, Odin’s gold ring, Draupnir, acts as a talisman of infinite wealth because every ninth night it drips eight new rings of equal weight and value. 12 The Ring of Hermes, found in ancient grimoires like the Greek Magical Papyri, was considered a highly charged talismanic ring said to grant absolute knowledge, allow the wearer to read minds, and even possess the cosmic leverage to tear deities down from the heavens if they refused to comply. 12 And then there is J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous legendarium of the rings of power chronicled in the The Lord of the Rings. 14
I consider wedding rings to be the ultimate personal talismans. They signify the human bonds of love, evoked in the sacred ceremony of matrimony, and kept in constant contact of the hands of a married couple as the expression of their commitment to each other for life.
The closing image above of hands belong to Sheryl and me, showing the wedding rings we have worn for more than 37 years. They are rendered “ghostly,” except for the rings, in recognition of the rings surviving us after we are gone. They will become the talismans of us and of our love for each other.
"Your aged eyes will see in mine all they’ve still shown to you,
And mine and yours all they have seen since this old ring was new!
...Whatever, wife, the future brings, heart unto heart still true,
We’ll share as we have shared all else since this old ring was new."
– from The Worn Wedding Ring by William Cox Bennet
