The Stuff Files: Elaine DiMasi
Conversations with adult children navigating what their parents left behind. Today: Elaine DiMasi dismantles her late father's 'shop' in the basement of her childhood home.
I RECENTLY RECONNECTED with a high school classmate whom I wish I’d taken the time to know better back then. Happily, I have a second chance now.
Elaine DiMasi recently came back to our hometown outside Pittsburgh after the death of her father, Fred DiMasi. Her goal: to move her mother, Peggy, to another home a few miles away — and to go through the accumulations of her parents’ lives and close down the house where she grew up so it could be sold. A few days ago, she wrapped up three months of doing that and hit the road to drive cross-country back to her own home in California.
What’s intriguing to me about Elaine’s journey is that in many ways it is very similar to mine — parents with lots of stuff, a suburban childhood home that’s been in the family since the mid-1960s. And yet, being a very different person, she has approached things in very different ways. They’re ways that are very instructive to me as I wind my own way through years of family items and try to make sense of it all. (Her saga was also “timeboxed,” as they say in the corporate world these days. Unlike me, she did not move into the house; instead, she had to clear it out within a certain timeframe and return to her life.)
A few weeks ago, Elaine was kind enough to have me over as she wound up the culling and sorting and selling and wrapping up of her father’s life — and helping her mother settle into the new house. On a late Saturday afternoon in January, we descended into the basement of the four-bedroom Center Hall Colonial where she spent her childhood. There, literally, we talked shop — her father’s shop, where he spent a lot of his time and where she came of age watching him build and fix things. Fred DiMasi was an engineer and an enthusiastic builder and tinkerer, and the layers of his passions and interests were still evident even after many weeks of her clearing things out.
In the months that Elaine was here, she sold countless things from the shop online and gave away countless more as she explored its corners. She carted off lumber and sundry loads of metal. She came across a paper of hers from grad school that she had no idea he’d kept. Her brother found, socked away in the shop, a ribbon from his grade-school years that named him the “second-quietest” kid in the class.
At first, hearing her talk, I concluded that Elaine was not quite as sentimental as I am. A physicist, she’s a badass thinker whose brain power is both impressive and intimidating. The lead sentence of her self-description on LinkedIn goes like this: “At the heart of every scientist is a commitment to analysis and facts.” And the way she talked about her home-clearing task — this task that I frequently over-emote about as I figure it out — seemed very infused with unswerving common sense.
But as we chatted and looked through the corners of her father’s shop, I realized I was misreading her somewhat. Being sentimental takes many forms, and they all look very different. And Elaine (who is among many other things a musician, a songwriter and a onetime candidate for Congress), effects a wonderful balancing act between sentimentality and pragmatism that I admire and can only strive for.
What follows are pieces of a two-hour chat we had while walking around her house and looking at her dad’s shop. Some of the conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
On coming home during the years when her father was still alive, and her relationship with her parents after high school when she returned to the house where she grew up:
They saw a lot of us when we were in high school, and then not a lot after. We went to Penn State. We weren't home all that often. I think I was home the summer after freshman year only. I needed their support, I needed a little cash and I needed rides back and forth to help move to summer housing. But I didn't want to be here and be “the kid.”
So in a way I was frozen in place at 17 for them. Their image of what we were like and what we liked to do and how to give us treats and presents was kind of frozen in time. And I never hung around enough to really let them get used to me as a 30-year-old or a 40-year old or a 50-year-old. I came home a few times a year and did projects with them — “Hey, Dad, I want to build this table.” “Hey, Mom, I want to sew this curtain.” — so that we would have things to do together. But again, it's like, “We have to do this in the present because I want this tablecloth now.”
On the amount of stuff to go through, and how she and her mother handled that together:
It's overwhelming, a house with this many years of accumulation. As you know. And so I'd be like, “Well, I know what to do. I'm gonna go photograph the big machines and work out the Craigslist ads.” And Mom said, “Post them on my account.” And then she handled all the emails … Sometimes I was here to sell them. And sometimes she was. So Mom was a good partner, but at the same time she'd be like, “Ah, it's too much just throw the rest away. Stop working on this, I want you at the house to just, you know, sit and watch TV in the sewing room with me.” She didn't say those words, but that was what it was.
And I'm like, “I want to lay my hands on all these things.” That's my process. My dad's gone. I want to find what's in the drawers, right? Because I knew that I would want to feel them with my hands — that would be part of my feeling that I was interacting with the relationship, with my parents. Plus, they're nice tools. A tool should feel good in your hand. A good tool does feel good in your hand. It's kind of tailor-made to have that experience with it.
On how she started accumulating her father’s stuff gradually — and unwittingly — in her own shop:
Dad's been trying to empty his garage into mine for all of the last 20 years. I'll show you the pipe wrench drawer. I had moved from New York to California. I was letting my friends move in my New York house. I had to situate things. I had to sort my tools to figure out what I was bringing with me. So I go to get my pipe wrench. I start sorting, and I find I have seven pipe wrenches. Nobody needs seven pipe wrenches. Maybe three if you need every size. So when my brother and I were here in July, I said, when you find the pipe wrench drawer, let me know how many Dad has. There were four of them in here. I'm like, “How did Dad make it so that I have more pipe wrenches than him?” That's ridiculous.
On what she decided to take from the house and why:
There were some things I wanted to have with me. Dad made some of the furniture I have. Dad made a dining room table and chair set and buffet that I told Mom, “I don't know what it'll take to keep this but I don't want to let them go.” Nobody can pay me enough for these. I don't have a house that fits his dining set like that. I might never because of the way I live. And she's like, “I'll store it for you.” She actually put the buffet at her new house and she's storing the table and chairs.
I have to picture for my future self am I going to be glad this is sitting on my shelf smiling at me later. I did grab a few other things that were smaller. That will suit me better. I definitely took tools. I took tools not just because they were useful but because they were pretty.
On whether she gets “decision fatigue” having to make so many microdecisions about items that are potentially emotionally fraught:
That's my superpower. That's why my workplaces like me and need me so much. I'm not paralyzed by decisions. I'm not that worried that we will have regrets doing this. Why am I not worried that we’ll have regrets? Because I know we'll have some regrets. Actually, we cannot get out of this without some regrets. So I don't lose sleep over it. I'm expecting to get 80% perfect. I'm not expecting to get 100%. I might have already been kind of configured this way, but I definitely learned to be the person that says, “I'm to the point where I can make this different, but I cannot make it better.”
On how she’d describe the way she deals with being surrounded by all this stuff from her family’s yesterdays:
I like to be interacting with what's in front of me. The past is something I really can't utilize very well. So I ask, “What am I going to do now?” And that's kind of my style.