Recently two of our neighbors passed away. Oddly, in the few years we have lived in Cheraw, SC, we have lost four of our neighbors. My husband and I are not the sort to go out of our way to chat with the neighbors, but we do keep an eye out for them and their home.

Since we moved, the house down the street from us has had a statue of a little black dog sitting outside its front door. My daughter, who was around eight at the time, thought it was a real dog, and asked why they wouldn’t let the poor dog inside. It became a running joke in our family ever since.

A few weeks ago, we noticed a parade of funeral wreaths appearing on the front door, a new one every few days. If you have any experience in the floral world as my husband and I do, you can recognize a funeral wreath from a mile away. Various family members have been there cleaning out the house and the other day the statue of the little black dog disappeared, hopefully finally allowed inside at long last.

Our other neighbor’s wife passed and soon after he did as well, leaving everything to their only child. An auction was held and everything inside and outside the home was sold. The house and property are currently up for sale.

It is a sobering fact that every life eventually does come to an end, and you cannot take your treasures with you.

I have quilts and furniture passed down through my family, items that mean the world to me but that I know will just be “things” to my children. Though they are still young, neither of them takes the same interest in history as me, family or otherwise.

I am a reasonably sentimental person in that I will hang onto things that I feel have value to me. I’m not ashamed to admit hidden away in boxes are all 13 of my soccer trophies, six gold medals, and numerous plaques commemorating past season and state tournament wins. I’m not ashamed to still have my science fair ribbons from every year of elementary school I placed in the top three or my fashionable Barbie Doll Mansion from the eighties complete with pool.

Unfortunately, Rainbow Bright, the Get Along Gang, Cabbage Patch dolls, and my glow-in-the-dark Moon Dreamer figurines survived me but met their match in my kids. We don’t even want to talk about my baseball card collection or Hot Wheels cars.

My mom is the sort that will hang onto everything: age yellowed magazines, patterns for clothes popular in the 50’s and 60’s, ECT., while my dad is more like me. Though if you were to ask him, he’d tell you I throw everything away. My much older sister is the least sentimental, even though she cares more about things than people and that really isn’t saying much.

When my grandmother passed away and we were dealt the grim task of emptying her home, it was amazing to us the little trinkets from our childhoods she kept. Things my mother made when she was little, the little papier mache clown I made in fourth grade, and my sister’s third grade Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas ornament. Items as much a story of our life as it was hers.

In the end, what connects me to my family isn’t the 100-year-old stitches in quilts made by my great-grandmother or my grandmother. It is in our genetics. The real gift we pass down to every subsequent generation after us — the life written in our shared DNA.

The things you love, the things you cherish, do not make a person. Who you are, what you believed, your actions are what will be remembered.