Don’t downsize – expand your life instead

Some people in our modern western world buy a house, then when they have more money or equity in their property, they buy another, and then another, each one bigger than the one before it. They might have children – and then, eventually, those children leave home. Now those people, getting older, downsize, perhaps to a smaller house, or an apartment in the city. They get rid of many of their belongings, to fit the space. What remains of their kid’s possessions and memories are thrown out too: the reminders of all those experiences they once shared.

When my grandfather died of emphysema, after 60 years of smoking and six years of sitting in a chair using oxygen bottles to breath, my grandmother started to downsize too. The first thing she did was get his greenhouse pulled down. He used to grow tomatoes and cucumbers in it, and chrysanthemums too. I can still remember the taste of those home grown tomatoes, as well as the smell of the tomato plants as I wandered into the warm hug of that greenhouse. I can smell those chrysanthemums too when I travel back in time. Some were yellow. Others were pink. But my grandmother had no use for tomatoes and cucumbers and pretty flowers.

Then she had his garden pond filled in. She had no interest in goldfish. As for me, I had watched some of them grow from tiny fry in a nearby fish tank as a young teen, after I’d collected the eggs from the pond and watched them hatch. I fed them, and watched them grow, until they were big enough to join their parents in that garden pond.

Then my grandmother shut up the rooms upstairs in their simple two-storey house, which they had managed to finally pay off just before my grandfather retired. Once, I worked out that if neither of them had smoked they would have been able to buy the house to the right of their own, and the one to the left too. After shutting up the rooms upstairs my grandmother confined herself to her comfy chair, and occasionally the kitchen, where she warmed up food from the freezer in the microwave. She had no one else to cook for, so the oven was no use to her. The pantry, which in the past was stocked with packets and tins, and usually a huge sack of potatoes, was now almost bare.

Not long before she died her brain shut down her ability to remember. She couldn’t remember her last dog. She had developed dementia. Then she couldn’t remember who I was. Soon she had no idea who she was either. In the end she had downsized to almost nothing. She was an almost forgotten memory of herself.

The moral of this story: expand your life. Don’t make your life smaller. Make it bigger. Surround yourself with things that bring back memories. Read. Explore. Live as many lives as you can. Don’t close things down. Keep goldfish and grow tomatoes. Learn new things while you can. And above all, don’t smoke.  Eventually, there’s the ultimate downsizing: your coffin, or your funeral urn. So there’s no rush.

Image credit: Liz West/flickr