The Stuff Files: Bill Kole
A longtime friend, the author of a new book on 'super-aging', considers how to navigate the stuff that departing generations leave behind — from tchotchkes to grief.
AS READERS OF THIS SPACE know well, in “Unsorted but Significant” I often attempt to make sense of the things that my parents left behind in a house where they spent almost 50 years — and where I now live. But in a larger sense, it’s also an effort to navigate the relationship with the previous generation after it's gone. Such things can be both rewarding and fraught.
In the United States, we are only a couple generations into what might be considered an era of mass ownership. The amount of stuff has multiplied as the rise of the disposable society continues unabated. Hoarding has become a known pathology. Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles die and leave behind huge amounts of stuff — enough that there is an entire TV genre chronicling what’s unearthed in old buildings and neglected storage spaces.
I worked with Bill Kole for 30 years, across continents and, occasionally, across desks. He’s a journalist because he’s a thoughtful guy, rather than the opposite. When he told me he was writing a book on longevity, I was fascinated not only because I had helped shepherd my own parents into what my father called their “decrepitude,” but because I was interested in his take on stuff — the accumulated miscellany of 21st-century life — and the role it plays in the relationship between generations.
Bill was kind enough to sit down with me from his Providence, RI, home and chat about it this month after the release of “The Big 100: The New World of Super-Aging.” The questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.
In your travels and research, you must have encountered situations where people are trying to navigate the tangible parts of the end of someone's life, their houses, their worldly goods — the things that they carried, if you will.
Clearly, there's comfort in the things that surround us and the things that we treasure. I found in conversations with centenarians that they had these little treasures — objects that meant something to them that were on display and often within reach. These things tend to be emblems of achievement. There were medals. One centenarian I talked to had a World War II medal right in an open curio cabinet where he could just grab it and touch it. Something almost totemic. These things, they remind us of our life story. And when our lives are continuing and sometimes it feels like the story may have ended or the story is winding down — that’s harsh, but that’s how some people feel — they’re saying, “I'm still alive. I'm still breathing. I still have a pulse. But do I really have purpose, and who am I? What will become of me?” Some of those questions, I think — like “who have I been?” — those objects can be really powerful in answering them.
“These things, they remind us of our life story. And when our lives are continuing and sometimes it feels like the story may have ended or the story is winding down … objects can be really powerful.”
Do you think they also can be a memory aid — a way to take people to the moments that they most cherished?
They very much can be. I didn't include this in my book, but I did run across a few studies that went into some depth on the use of objects like that — in therapy with dementia patients, for example. They used things like a box of curios or hand-me-downs — things that had been passed from generation to generation — to make connections with people who had lost something of themselves. There was a study in Britain done using what I think they call “heritage objects.” There's something about a tangible item that can awaken something in someone. That's why we have photos on the wall, right? This is a photo of my my grandmother. She lived to almost 104. That's a picture of her when she was around 21 right around 1920. She was a dancer. She went on to be a pianist for the silent movies not long after that photo was taken. And there's something about that that just makes me go a little weak in the knees. It is so powerful to me that my grandmother played the piano live, you know, almost in the way that people used to play in Major League ballparks.
I want to pause on that for a second because that notion of continuity is so powerful. I wrote a few years ago that one of the things in the middle of the pandemic’s uncertainty that could give us grace was that the grandson of John Tyler — the 10th president — was (and is) still alive. Think about that: Someone born in 1790 has a grandson who is alive today. Why is continuity important as we age?
It gives us a sense of place. In the United States, we don't really have as good a grasp on this notion of continuity as maybe some Asian cultures or African cultures might have. We're so ruggedly individualistic, almost obnoxiously individualistic. We measure ourselves with the yardstick of what we have done, not our place within the family. I have a Bible. It's written in Dutch, typeset in Dutch. It dates to the 1600s and it's one of my prized possessions. It's been passed down in my family for generations from firstborn to firstborn, and I will give it to my son. It's got inscriptions in the front of it of each firstborn and the date that they were born and the day they died. It’s all faded; you can barely see it. But it gives me pause because I realize I'm just another piece of the puzzle. Before me there was Willem Kole, you know, and he was in Zeeland in the Netherlands and he was a farmer, and there were other Willem Koles and Johannes Koles and all these other Koles. It roots me.
So what about the next generation? Have you talked to any centenarians about the responsibility that they feel either about curating their stuff or making sure it doesn't all land on their children. For me, as grateful as I am for being able to make this journey, there is a lot of ballast that says, “I'm making these decisions about what to consign to the dustbin of history and what to preserve.” These feel like weighty decisions to me.
You're right. Of course, that whole line of thinking rests upon the supposition that people will “age in place” in their homes, and they will therefore still maintain a repository of stuff. All too often that's not happening, so people get to well before 100 and they have to leave their homes and need to go into assisted living. At that point, the stuff is hastily disposed of. Aging in place is the gold standard for those of us who are contemplating a triple-digit lifespan. We want to live out our days in the place where we have our memories and where we raised our children and where we did life. When we can't do that, it becomes so much more bleak. I personally almost hyperventilate whenever I drive by an estate sale and they have all this stuff out on the curb. I'm not a hoarder myself, and I don't even necessarily stop. But I sure as hell slow down. And I look and I think, “Oh, God, look at that piece of furniture.” There's so much meaning, and it's all just hauled to the curb. It's heartbreaking.
“We want to live out our days in the place where we have our memories and where we raised our children and where we did life. When we can't do that, it becomes so much more bleak.”
That has always struck me — the notion that an item can become unanchored from its its history.
That's the difference between a museum and a home. A museum is filled with these disembodied objects that are on display. They're very interesting to look at and they might have some texts that put them into perspective and context. But to walk into somebody's home and see those things in their natural setting is immeasurably more powerful for me. In my conversations with older people, they frequently have a sense of panic and dread that, '“Oh, my God, I’m being a burden to my kids already in so many ways, and on top of all of that, my stuff is going to be a burden.”
And that's a relatively new concept, isn't it?
I think so. We used to live in the same home across generations. I'm very interested in your experience in acquiring and living in the home where your parents raised you.
I was born here. This closet behind me, I used to hide in and play with my father’s office supplies when it was his study and I was little. Living like this, it's such a layered existence. You walk into a room and it's 1973 and 1981 and 1994 and 1999 and 2011 all at once. As I age, I feel it more and more. I'm starting to experience the things that my parents experienced when I was young, because they were in their 50s — they were older parents. And I'm experiencing it against the same backdrop, on the same canvas. Obviously I'm not at an advanced age yet — unless you ask our 16-year-old — but the notion of having the same things happen against the same backdrop is intriguing. I know this house so well; I could be blind and still navigate the steps from downstairs to upstairs. But ultimately the time came when my parents couldn't navigate those steps anymore. And I keep wondering every time I walk up those same steps and have a little twinge in my knee, you know, when does that happen to me?
Providence, where I live, is a very Latino-heavy community. And so people are doing life together across generations, which is really beautiful. In many ways, it certainly facilitates that aging in place, that goal we talked about — the idea that the grandparents are around to look after the little ones so that the parents can get to their jobs, and then later in life, you know, everybody's around to take care of abuelo. I find that very compelling,
What advice do you have for people who are starting to navigate the stuff of their elders, and who live in a society where people have accumulated a lot of things, some of which are significant and some of which are not? Sometimes the most compelling things I find are not heritage items, but a canceled check or a random 3x5 card with something written on it. What conversations should we have around figuring out what is important and what isn't?
Avoid undue haste. Sometimes we feel like we have to clear things away. We have this nonsensical idea that we have to throw things away, that things must spark immediate joy in order to be kept. What if they don't quite reveal themselves until later, and then we've already thrown them away? This is bad news for people who have hoarding tendencies, but maybe be careful about the things that you throw away. Because you may rue that decision. We are curators for the generations behind us. We're kind of the gatekeepers here. If we throw things out in haste, we deprive our children and their children of these treasures. It behooves us to just go carefully here. I'm shocked at how people just throw some things away. I wish I had more of my father's things. I have a thing here that is my treasure. This is a patch that he was given for working on the Apollo XVII mission. This was sewn into the back of his fly-fishing vest and it's going to be sewn onto the back of my fly-fishing vest this winter. But it’s a little thing. It could have easily been pitched.
“We are curators for the generations behind us. We're kind of the gatekeepers here. If we throw things out in haste, we deprive our children and their children of these treasures.”
What goes on in your head and your heart when you pick up that Apollo patch?
It immediately, tangibly connects me to my father's life work. My father was an engineer. I can't even wrap my mind around that as the English major and the ‘black sheep’, but I have enormous appreciation for it. I surge with pride when I pick this thing up and look at it because holy shit, you know, some of his work is on the lunar surface right now. He worked on the lunar module, a little dune buggy that was used to shuffle them around. This patch was given to everyone who worked on the mission. I've written about my father's fly rods. They just throb and hum with life, even though they're theoretically inanimate objects. They have life in them, you know? So it's a mystery.
I want to ask you something to wrap up and I want you to feel free not to answer it. But it's something that I've been thinking about with you. How did the death of your brother impact your relationship with your father and your mother after they're gone?
Oh, that's interesting,
Because I can't begin to imagine how you think about losing the previous generation when you’ve lost someone in your own generation.
It is a sobering thing to contemplate that your own sibling is gone. That mortality that you feel when you lose a parent, which is a normal human sentiment, is magnified. It's exponential when it's your own kid brother, because suddenly it's that much more real, you know? It caused me to quit drinking because I realized alcoholism runs in my family. I myself have had my struggles with it. COVID was not good for me — you know, working from home — and I made some some important choices for for me and for my family. And I don't regret them at all.
It just strikes me that when you think about living to 100 and you know that someone in your generation obviously did not, that’s got to impact your point of view on it.
I think when you suffer any loss in your family, you necessarily revisit all of your losses. At least, I did. I lost my brother and I grieved him and that got me to thinking again about my dad. And I was able to go a little deeper into that feeling. I don't like “closure” because I don't think it's actually a thing, you know, but you can find some measure of peace anyway. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the great Swiss-American psychiatrist who gave us the five stages of grief, something happened to her in the twilight of her life where she claimed to have had some kind of spiritual connections to the people she lost. And she almost disavowed the “acceptance” part of grief because she felt like her loved ones were still with her in some mystical way.
That's really interesting. I didn't know that.
She spent the last part of her life in some ways rethinking and re-arguing what grief looks like. We do still have these people in our lives as long as they're in our thoughts. I'd love to spend a day in a stream with my dad fishing for trout, and I can't do that anymore. But I have a wealth of memories of doing that and many other things.
And objects are one thing that can bring you nearer to that.
Absolutely. That's why when I say they are totemic, I really mean that. Sometimes, when I touch these objects and turn them over in my hands, I feel chills. That’s something to pay attention to.
“The Big 100: The New World of Super-Aging,” by William J. Kole. Diversion Books.
Thanks...Not sure where to pitch but have a few ideas.
Interesting --- but many people don't have kids to leave anything to, like me and my husband. I want to write about how intentional we thus have to be with art and photos (many of value), let alone a paid-off apartment. We are not close to nieces and nephews so our younger friends will likely benefit and we plan to ask them if they even want some of these things. Otherwise the good stuff goes to auction as my mother's did when she went into a nursing home from the hospital. I inherited 4 or 5 artworks, that's it. Very glad to have those familiar, lovely things in our home now.