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By Robert C. Koehler

Forty years.
That’s how long I’ve been here — quietly bonding with this old house, becoming it, you might say, as I clunk up the stairs every day with a cup of coffee and plop down in front of my computer.

My wife and I had been married two years when we bought the place. For the previous year we’d been trying unsuccessfully to make a baby, but she got pregnant maybe a month after we moved in. We raised our daughter here, trekking joyfully through childhood with her. When she was 11, my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

She died here, in our bedroom, seven months later.

This old house. Oh my God. That was 25 years ago now. This is the basic context in which I now sit in my study, thinking about not simply the house but my whole life. I don’t know how to separate them. Nevertheless …

Ain’t gonna need this house no longer
Ain’t gonna need this house no more
Ain’t got time to fix the shingles
Ain’t got time to fix the floor
Ain’t got time to oil the hinges
Nor to mend the windowpane
Ain’t gonna need this house no longer
I’m gettin’ ready to meet the saints

Well, I’ll hold off on “meeting the saints” for a while, but otherwise that old song kinda hits it. I’ve decided, with the encouragement of family members, to sell the house — or, from my perspective, leap feet-first into the emotional chaos of putting the house on the market (not immediately, but, uh, soon, soon). I’m no longer at ease walking — stumbling — up the stairs, thanks to arthritis in my knees. And the house needs a lot of work. And it’s a mess, full of the past — packed with (to put it vaguely) stuff.

Need any stuff? Let me know. I’ve got plenty.

Some of it is stuff I’m aware of and value — like copies of 1,200 columns, 184 journal volumes, a bunch of life-changing books (the ones I still remember), and much, much more. But the punch-in-the-nose of the present moment, which I can no longer avoid facing, is all the stuff packed away in rooms I now rarely enter. As I say, I’ve been here 40 years. There’s a fair amount of history here that I have intentionally stopped thinking about. But step one in selling the house is clearing out the chaos.

And this is where the process has instantly started getting crazy, as I look through old bags and boxes (mostly with my sister, who came to town to help me — actually, to get me started). Where did all this stuff come from? What should I just throw away and what should I donate?

Here are two boxes full of ’60s-era (and earlier) record albums. I’m stunned. Ancient albums, from Bach and Beethoven to Pavarotti to Leonard Bernstein to My Fair Lady. Oh, holy cow, here’s Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane (“White Rabbit,” “Somebody to Love”), Tom Paxton, Bukka White, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen — vinyl records. Now I want to spend all day listening to them, but “record players” don’t exist anymore. These discs might as well be relics from the Middle Ages — stacked and forgotten in my old house.

And there’s so much more: Here’s a box of stuff I no doubt rescued from my mom’s house after her death in 1983. It’s full of old newspaper front pages, dating back to, wow, World War I. “LUSITANIA TORPEDOED; ALL RESCUED.” This is dated May 7, 1915. “CHICAGO GANG TRAPPED AND EXECUTED BY RIVALS” — Feb. 14, 1929. This is the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “PARIS FALLS; PATRIOTS DRIVE OUT NAZIS IN 4-DAY BATTLE.” And then, on Oct. 4, 1946 (when I was not quite two months old): GOERING TO HANG.

I’m sure I had never stared at those headlines before. And look, here’s something called Basic Field Manual and Soldier’s Handbook — it was my dad’s, obviously. He served in World War II. Tucked into the manual is a small War Department brochure called Sex Hygiene and Venereal Disease. Careful, men! The brochure warns: “All soldiers should clearly understand that every woman who is loose is likely to be diseased, whether she takes money for her services or not.”

And this is just the minutiae. All those books! All the jackets and coats and clothing. Just throw them out? No, no, no — some of this is in good shape, still wearable. Donate, donate — but it has to be cleaned first. Boxes of CDs. Boxes of electronic equipment. An ancient Apple computer. Where did that come from?

And all of this is jammed in various storage rooms, amid old couches and dressers. There’s an old television set on the back porch that needs to be tossed out but is way too big for me to handle on my own, plus the porch steps are broken. And then there’s that piano — moved here from Mom’s house. It was for our daughter to take piano lessons, but after she no longer wanted to, it just sat there, pushing my frustration button every time I thought about it. I managed never to succeed at giving it away.

More, more, more. But moving out the unwanted stuff is just part one of this process. I have to get at least some repairs made — like fixing that hole in the roof. And eventually, I must also move out … myself.

Where would I go? I have loving family in Wisconsin. Should I go there? But I love Chicago — should I stay here? And if I do, should I consider a “senior citizen” place or some other living situation? An apartment? A condo? For some reason this feels beyond me. I haven’t made peace yet with the idea of exiting the last 40 years of my life — surrounded by my books, my file cabinets, the miscellany I may ignore but nonetheless feel connected to.

This is unprecedented for me, more fully unprecedented than any other period of change I can remember living through. The word “yikes” just never stops echoing in my soul.

*(Robert Koehler is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and artwork, Soul Fragments.)