I forgot to take the before-and-after pictures, but I’m happy to report that I’ve lost 400 pounds and simplified my life.

I don’t credit any miracle formulas for this. No Ultra-Slim concoctions. No daily trips to my local Subway.

The glory goes to a mobile shredding company and its hulking grinding monster of a truck I scheduled to pull up in my driveway last week.

“Have your stuff ready and we’ll bring it up from the basement,” instructed the Certified Secure Destruction Specialist on the other end of the phone. I’d called him practically on the eve of some surgery when – in an act reminiscent of my late parents – I decided it would be “the right thing to do,” to organize my affairs to the nines, just in case things didn’t go well.

“I wouldn’t want to leave you in a mess,” my mom used to say. Even when her cache of earthly possessions had dwindled, she routinely handed me every unused shred of clothing so I wouldn’t have to bother with it later. “Here,” she’d say. “Drop it by the Goodwill.”

With my dad, there was never a long-distance trip or medical event as minor as a cataract procedure that did not trigger “the talk” about unforeseen circumstances and a walk through his set of honed-down meticulously organized files.

It was not surprising that in the 400 pounds of obsolete papers I rounded up, were several checklists he’d authored well before his death in 1998, letting me know where the silver was hidden and how to reach Gladys at Social Security to cancel his benefits. In an ironic twist, among the 400 pounds, were the meticulous files themselves – which I saved for a dozen years because, after all, he’d thought they were important enough to hang onto.

But last week, the hanging on stopped. The genetic “urge to purge” coupled with a shredding service that could eat paper by the pound in my driveway became an unstoppable force that had me barreling through old records till 2, the morning the truck was to arrive.

I filled laundry baskets with cancelled checks from 1977, my parents’ utility bills from 1998, legal pads filled with my late husband’s unintelligible scratching, and back-up tax documentation from the long-deceased and their long-deceased relatives.
By morning, the floor was strewn with enough dog-eared file folders and paperclips to start a small business, and I was ready to meet the shredder and have “the talk” – complete with written instructions – with my daughter.

“Thank you for doing this,” she said politely.

“You know that anything I didn’t shred must be important,” I told her, and proceeded to show her how beautifully I had labeled everything.

She rolled her eyes impatiently. “I know, I know,” she said.

I should probably have mentioned she can throw out the utility bills.

Copyright 2011 Pat Snyder