“Prague never lets you go. This dear little mother has sharp claws,” wrote Franz Kafka
In the Kremlin’s annual news conference held in February 2004, a foreign journalist asked President Vladimir Putin about the state of freedom of speech in Russia. In response, Putin referenced the 1968 Italian film The Girl with a Pistol:
The main characters in a famous Italian film say “A real man must always try, and a genuine girl must always resist.” The same goes for the media and the authorities. The authorities have always tried to ensure their interests, reduce criticism, and so on, while the press and other media have always done everything possible to draw the attention of the authorities and society to the current government’s mistakes. (President of Russia 2004)
Putin’s use of this metaphor, likening the state authorities to a “real” man vying for a woman’s attention and the media to a “genuine girl” rebuffing this man, elicited laughter and applause from the audience. This reaction seemed to indicate approval of Putin’s political stance.
Fast forward to February 2022, 18 years later, and a similar rhetorical device was deployed. During a press conference following Russian–French talks, Putin commented on the Minsk agreements and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s stance toward them. He joked: “‘Like it or not – put up with it, my beauty.’ You have to follow the terms. There’s no other way” (Berdy 2022).
This phrase is notable for its usage in the song “Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin” by the former Soviet band Red Mold. It appears in the following lyrics: “The beauty sleeps in the coffin / I creep up and shag her / Like it or not, sleep my beauty!”
According to Putin, Ukraine is a “beauty” that must endure everything. Both in 2004 and 2022, the Russian president, through humor, used a metaphor that juxtaposes a weak, beautiful girl with a strong, robust, and “real” man, with the latter seeking female attention.
If you make it to age 65 in the US today, there’s a 50% chance you’ll make it past 85.
Chip Conley, ex Airbnb boss, has just written a book about redefining mid-life (!).
And I’ve added a few thoughts of my own as I enjoy the third half of what I’m hoping will be my century.
So here we go – six thoughts on why we should enjoy our back third.
- You know who your true friends are; you know who you can count on. You’ve weeded out the false friends.
- You know not everyone likes you. You also know not everyone matters. You can’t please everybody, so make sure you please yourself and make happy choices.
- You know stuff. Your ability to think holistically – crystallised intelligence, wisdom – improves with age and doesn’t peak until your 70’s. Knowledge, experience, patterns – we learn more every day.
- You know where your story’s going, and where it’s likely to end. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Don’t do dumb sh-t. And everything will be OK in the end – if it’s not OK, it’s not the end.
- We have realistic expectations. We know what we know. We do what we can. We believe. We’re not as good as we once were. But we’re as good once as we ever were.
- We step off the treadmill. We live life slow. We move from doing, teaching and making others do – to – letting others do.
And finally – everything becomes more interesting. Just like most sports matches and the last acts of a play – all the real excitement comes later on.
Clearing my father’s house after his death: ‘How do you dismantle the life of a person you love?’
Going through possessions left behind is heartbreaking — and bewildering. What is precious? What is rubbish? And when the professionals become involved, can the items hope for new life?
My sister and I are standing in our father’s sitting room. He died in the autumn, and we have met on a cold morning to tackle the clearing of his house. The date has been in the diary for weeks, and we’ve been briskly organised, sorting out childcare and worrying about whether the kettle will work. We have come with sandwiches, reams of white labels, brown tape and Sharpies. On the street outside, our two car boots are packed with flattened cardboard boxes. Removal vans are arriving at teatime; a house clearer is coming for the remnants tomorrow.
I can hear children in the school playground on the corner, but it is profoundly quiet inside this terraced house in west London. We are standing in silence in my father’s yellow sitting room, with its worn Persian carpet and rust-coloured sofa. The small upright piano has some sheet music on its stand, and its lid is open, as if he has just stepped away. There are ghosts here.
Neither of us dares touch anything. “How are we going to do this?” my sister asks. I look around the book-lined room, the tiny objects and postcards lining the mantelpiece, undisturbed. I don’t know.
How do you dismantle the life of a person you love, piece by piece? Many of us will have to do it at some point. Someone will do it after you die. Clearing possessions after the death of a loved one is a human act so ordinary and commonplace, and yet few of us feel prepared when we’re faced with it. Two stressful parts of life — moving house and bereavement — spliced together; you must gather up the whole life of a person, disperse it out into the world, while being fair to the surviving family, and honouring the dead.
“A loved one’s possessions are deeply imbued with memories,” says psychotherapist Julia Samuel. “If you clear a house too soon it can feel like they have died all over again. Possessions are touchstones to the memory of the person.”
My sister and I start with the low-hanging fruit and wrap the paintings. They’re easy because they’ve already been allocated. My older brother had devised a scrupulously fair system in which we, us five siblings, have taken turns to choose one, and then the order switched. We try to tackle a room at a time, and stick together so no one bins or takes home something the other person loves.
But it is bewildering. Our father kept a tidy house, but with every room, cupboard and drawer, we peel back through the layers of a life: a straw boater from prep school; years of neatly filed paperwork: love letters, gas bills and divorce proceedings. A hundred ties, coffee cups, a biscuit tin of picture hooks. My sister opens a box to find his pocket-sized notebooks, scores of them, a meticulous record of his time on earth: films watched, shopping lists, fragments of dreams. What is precious? What is rubbish? Which objects speak of him, and need to be kept? Do we keep it all? Do we keep nothing? We discuss putting it all in storage and deciding later, but: no.
Like many of us who lose their parents as adults, my four siblings and I already have houses full of our own stuff. Two live in California. My younger brother says he only really wants a CD he made for Dad in 1995. So most of it will have to go. We solemnly pack into boxes and bin bags most of my father’s worldly goods — bottles of bleach, books, pillowcases, sheet music, socks — and leave it for the house clearers.
During the past two years since that day, I’ve often wondered what happened to it all. I have sometimes felt a wave of grief when I think of things I left there — things which may have been precious to him. His books, particularly, play on my mind. Did they get sold, or are they in landfill somewhere, far away, slowly turning into dust? What happens to the things we leave behind? I want to find out.
I arrive at a house clearance depot in North Wiltshire as two burly men are unloading a white van. Debbie Thompson runs a house clearance business (@_oldsarumfurniture). She carries the Upper Tier waste carrier licence, so her team will strip a house to its bare bones: antiques, but also broken TVs, carpets, underlay, everything. The commercial and industrial collections sector, into which house clearance falls, is worth around £6mn per annum, according to Dan Cooke of the Chartered Institution of Wastes Management. The number may be small, but the business is fiercely competitive. Thompson says there are “at least 10” companies working the same patch as her.
Thompson, a warm, friendly 60-year-old, leads me into her warehouse, a vast, 4,500-square-foot hangar. We squeeze down narrow corridors between mountains of possessions sorted into categories. There is a mezzanine floor consisting only of wooden dining chairs, hundreds of them, stacked 20ft high. There are dressers, record players, shelves of glassware, tea sets, trophies, piles of curtains and, at the back, a room of clothes: men’s overcoats, a 1970s party dress. The warehouse is open to the public on Saturday mornings, when a queue of bargain hunters arrive. Turnover is fast.
Thompson’s main profit, as for most house clearers, is in selling the stuff on. She tells me about a Georgian manor house she cleared recently where she charged a bereaved family a nominal fee because she could make a good profit on the contents. She will be called in once the family and, in many cases, an auction house, has taken what they want. Her aim is that “absolutely nothing” ends up in landfill. Not all her competitors are so scrupulous.
I watch as she begins to sift by hand through the newly arrived van-load. There is a Victorian chest of drawers, a wheelchair, a mattress, boxes of empty jam jars someone has carefully kept. Anything not sellable is sorted for recycling, which Thompson will pay to be processed. Metals go to a dealer, wood another; in-date food goes to a food bank. I ask her what happens to all the books. “Leather-bound or antique books will be sold by the yard,” she tells me. “There’s no market for modern second-hand books; they’ll all be pulped.” What happens to the pulp? “It goes to make new books.”
Thompson understands how sensitive the subject matter is. “You need empathy in this job,” she says. “There is a lot of trust involved. But mostly people are just relieved when it’s done, when you can make something simple for them. I say, look, I’ll take it all, you don’t need to worry.” Some clients want to know what will happen to their loved one’s possessions. “I’m very open about it if they want to know,” she says. “Some don’t want to think about it again, which I understand, too.”
“Clearing the home of a loved one after they die can be painful,” says psychologist Sarah Davies. “Items can bring back wonderful, but also challenging, memories and stir up a range of emotions.” Tidying away a life of a parent can dig up buried feelings, resentments and hurt. As grief counsellor Jill Cohen puts it, “The process can be full of surprises. You will be faced with questions for which you will never get answers.”
Perhaps it is part of an English sensibility to not want to think about this stuff too much. In the US, the mood around clearing houses feels different. Estate sales happen every day of every week across the country; most take place in the home of the dead, often organised by the bereaved family, who might even be present. Amy Byer is a go-to estate sale organiser.
“The family give me the keys and I handle everything,” she says. Byer and her team will spend days styling and merchandising the house, bringing in fresh flowers, moving furniture. “We basically make it feel like a store.” Every item is labelled with a price, and once the address is released to her subscribers at 6am on the morning of the sale, queues form. There is no stigma around buying the possessions of the dead, right there from their home. “I think we celebrate it,” says Byer. “An estate sale is a joyful thing, a grand finale of sorts.”
In the UK, a surge in interest in buying second-hand online has meant a new breed of house clearer has emerged, offering a fast, efficient service. Natalia Rawley’s business, Natalia Violet, clears both country houses and Mayfair apartments and sells everything — up to 100 items a day — via her Instagram page (@nataliavioletantiques). “I have degrees in art history and in therapy,” she says. “I want to help people.”
Rawley, an energetic mother of four in her forties, will visit the house and, right there and then, upload items for sale. Prices are low and things often sell within seconds. Her feed is wildly varied, as she shifts everything from brass beds to ball gowns to Paddington Bear books — a person’s whole life. “Anything I can’t sell would be electricals or things for the dump.” Proceeds are split 50/50 with the family.
“I often see bereaved families who are struggling to get rid of things, but the truth is it’s not possible to keep everything, and I don’t think people realise there’s money to be made in the small things.” She is there to hold a client’s hand, and she is skilled at gauging when it’s simply too painful to let go of something.
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As for me, I left my father’s house that day with a few small pieces of furniture, a salad bowl and some saucepans. I took his National Gallery fridge magnets, some poetry books and a time-bleached framed photograph of me in school uniform, aged nine. Out of context, most of his possessions have lost their power. His desk lamp doesn’t remind me of him at all, with its new lampshade. I sometimes think I can feel the spirit of him when I use his potato peeler, its wooden handle worn by the curves of his hand.
But they’re only things. It is in my memory that he exists most fully, not in any mystical objects. And I can travel back there, to his house. In my mind I can walk the rooms and corridors. I can run my fingers along the wallpapered hallway, dark blue and covered in stars. I can smell books, coffee and Gitanes cigarettes. I can hear the clock ticking, and the piano being played behind a closed door. And all his possessions, his precious things, are back in their place, where they belong.
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