LJWorld.com

Alice Murphy used to live in a 4,000-square-foot Victorian barnhouse.

She used to have all four floors crammed with stuff. She used to have the house filled with children: her son and daughter, nieces there visiting, two foster children.

She used to be content there, but after the children grew up and left and the house was too much to take care of, she decided she needed to move. And to go through all her stuff.

Murphy is part of the Household Moves Project, a study conducted by researchers at the Life Span Institute at Kansas University. The study, which started about a year ago, investigates how people 65 and older eliminate possessions when they downsize their living space. The study will eventually include 100 already-moved households and 50 households going through the process in the Lawrence, Kansas City and Detroit areas.

David Ekerdt, director of the Gerontology Center at KU and head researcher on the Household Moves Project, says the study’s goal is to find out how people get rid of their possessions and how they feel about it.

“It’s not easy to do,” he says. “People have kept these things all these years for a reason.”

He says people use many different methods to narrow down their collections, including giving belongings to family members and using estate sellers. He says it’s hard for the elderly to maintain large collections of belongings, especially because they often own thousands of items.

“It’s widely believed that people are imprisoned by their stuff later in life,” Ekerdt says.

Murphy’s children and nieces helped her go through her belongings. They made lists for every room and pitched a lot of items.

“We were throwing chairs out the window,” she says.

She picked out what she wanted to keep, like the tall black bookcase that holds political books in her new, smaller Lawrence residence at Clinton Place Apartments. She even found new things, like a French figure of St. Teresa from 1957 that she’d never seen before. Then she started giving things away to the family.

“I told everyone to pick out what they wanted,” she says.

More was put in three storage units, and then the remaining items were picked up by an estate seller.

Ekerdt says people often look for a good home for their belongings and put different values on different things.

“Family members can be an enormous help by absorbing possessions into their collections,” he says.

Families also play another role in moving the elderly — Ekerdt says they are instrumental in motivating the process. People tend to move closer to family, which is what Murphy did by moving to Lawrence, where her daughter lives.

First, though, she got used to living in a small space. For six months, she traveled the country, living with different nieces. Two months in Alaska with one. Six weeks in Minneapolis with another. Six weeks in California with a third. She spent five months living in small bedrooms to get used to the limited space.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to have to adjust from all this space to an apartment again,’” she says.

Clinton Place Apartments ended up being the perfect fit for Murphy. She picked her unit, one with a pretty view of a tree that has birds singing regularly. She has friends in the building, and always finds something to do.

“I can’t believe how busy my days are,” she says.

Murphy goes to the lake or performances in town, and goes to dinner often with her daughter, Catherine Bird, her husband Todd and their kids Ashley, Michael and Trevor. She can sit on the tree-shaded patio of the apartments, where oregano, thyme and other herbs grow. She plans to volunteer soon, especially for political causes. She saw JFK in 1960, and her political passion continues. She helped work Obama’s headquarters in town.

But she misses her friends from South Dakota. They keep in touch through e-mail and the phone. There’s one thing she doesn’t miss, though.

“I don’t miss the stuff.”