Imagine this: your grandfather just passed away. After the funeral, you head over to his house, unfold the boxes, line the bottoms with tape, and begin to pack away the contents of his life. You sift through old records, browned silverware, the silly baseball cap he used to wear to family picnics every year. You open the drawer to pull out his clothing some to keep, some to donate but... hold on...
WHAT IN THE WORLD?
Yeah, you've found it. Your grandpa's collection of anal beads.
As much as it makes you cringe to envision the deepest regions of your Grandpa's butthole, you smile just a little. Yeah, my Grandpa still had it goin' on.
Thanks to the awesome folks at Reddit who contributed their answers to this question. Some answers are silly, some are sad, some are even infuriating. In the end, these are the stories that make us all human. Enjoy!
1/30. A meter long bright pink floppy vibrating snake dildo
2/30. Not a grandparent but a great-aunt. She died in her 80s. Clearing out her kitchen cupboards and we found, in a pile of plastic bags, a loaded Smith and Wesson pistol. We're in the UK. We had to call the police who took it away and disposed of it.
3/30. Not so much shocking, but sad.
My great-aunt had a leather jacket, photos and letters this boy she liked had given her.
I'd heard the story in pieces from her over the years. She was banned from seeing him because he was a Catholic. Her parents hauled her off to Singapore to stop her from seeing him. He died in the war, and her father died during the Fall of Singapore. Her mother re-married, and she spent her whole life living in their house, looking after them until they died.
I never realised she'd kept all his things.
4/30. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, my great grandfather died. After the funeral everybody was invited to go back to his house and go through his belongings. My great grandmother had died the year before, and my grandfather's will stated he wanted all of his possessions to be given to his family. I went upstairs with my mom to my grandfathers room. Upon going through his closet, we discovered a small chest with my grandfather's Klu Klux Klan robe, along with a ton of photos of him at clan meetings. That was also the day I first found out what racism was.
5/30. When my dad died I found a file on his computer that listed all the women he had had sex with. He wrote it in cypher but he's the one who taught me to solve cryptograms so it wasn't too difficult to figure it out. Twenty six women, despite being married for all but two years of his adult life.
6/30. After my uncle passed away in October, we were quite surprised to find that, despite his hermetic lifestyle and shoddy abode, he had over half a million in cash.
[deleted]
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7/30. A sap. It's the lead weighted, leather wrapped club favored by tough guys and mobsters in the 20's and 30's. My grandfather had it in the door pocket of his white ford taurus.
My grandfather was six five, a big man, I have a ring of his you can fit a quarter through. Even at 75 he was not to be fucked with.
I also inherited a pocket sized .25 caliber pistol from him.
8/30. When my grandmother passed, my mom, sister, and I went through the house - top to bottom. Aside from some cool photographs showing my grandmother as a teen/young adult I found some letters between my grandfather and her. In one letter, presumably building off of something she said, he asked if she'd been raped. I only had his correspondence, so I don't know the answer. I stopped reading at that anyway. My mom also found her journal. It was full of comments from a very depressed, tired woman.
Moral of the story: even after death, leave loved ones' letters and journals alone.
9/30. When my uncle died I went and helped clean his place out and I ended up finding his stash of pot. I just threw it away so my grandmother didn't have to see since she was already upset enough.
10/30. After my grandad died we found out that his dad (my great grandad) was a deputy chief Templar in India. We found a photograph and certificate - though now my mother has them (we don't talk, so now I guess I'll never be able to investigate further). We're all from England and had absolutely no idea. Weird.
11/30. After my grandma died I was going through her belongings, and hidden in the very top corner of her closet I found a box containing a "personal massager" from the 70's.
12/30. His porn. I'm not talking about a few DVDs and mags, I'm talking Costco volumes. Oh, and his guide to sado-mashocism, with bookmarks.
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13/30. I discovered that my Great Great Great Grandfather's brother won a Nobel prize.
[deleted]
14/30. I was responsible for my great uncle's estate. I found a briefcase cleverly hidden beneath a drawer. It contained his porn on VHS, a sex-adventure book, and a LOT of possibly prescription pills imported from Europe. Everything else was totally standard.
15/30. After my grandad died I found boxes of lube and condoms. Weird cause he was really old and it was brand new lube.
16/30. Not a parent, but my wife left incredibly loving statements about me in her diary.
I still haven't been able to gut through reading the whole thing, but I did flip to the back and found where she wrote, "I knew you'd look back here. Thank you for slumming it with me all these years."
For the record, I've never "slummed" a day in my life.
17/30. After my grandmother passed we were packing up her clothes to give to charity when we found her purse (she had been sick for years and hadn't used it in a long time). Tucked inside her wallet was a love letter that she had been carrying for over 60 years. It was not from my grandfather. It was from a man she dated before grandpa who had gone off to fight in WWII. The letter was super steamy. He was writing to her from England just before D-Day. We assume he died shortly after.
18/30. I discovered that my Dad wrote sardonic and witty asides in the margins of many if his books, which were great to read as they were just so him.
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19/30. My mom was planning on divorcing my stepdad and kidnapping her friend's baby.
Her death was sudden - an aneurysm in her bran had ruptured. When she was in the hospital her lawyer called her cell phone, which is how I found out about the planned divorce. I never told my stepdad.
The kidnapping wasn't obvious, but we were able to piece it together when going through her belongings.
My mom adored her friend's baby. She had a room in the house for her with a dresser full of outfits. When we were cleaning up we discovered that this dresser was empty, save for a few diapers. Her luggage was also missing. It was odd, but we didn't think too much about it until we found contact information for the landlord of the house she was renting in the next state. A house which she had rented under her maiden name. A house where we found suitcases with my mom's and the baby's clothes.
It sounds terrible, but we were lucky she died when she did.
20/30. After my mom passed, my dad discovered she had been carrying on an affair for years while going through her email account. It's messed him up pretty bad and now he's obsessed with the idea of getting revenge on the guy. I wish I had never found out because it's almost ruined the image of my mom in my head.
21/30. Not my parent, but had a friend disappear 2 years ago and his body was found several states away about 4 months later.
After he had gone missing, his parents got into his apartment and he'd packed up most of his stuff into boxes giving them to different people. His parents each got one, brother, sister, a few friends and I got a small box. He included a note to please honor his request to not open the boxes and give them to the people they were for. They held the boxes until his body was found.
His parents dropped my box by my house after the funeral and we talked for a bit. He'd had some mental issues and they were glad he felt he was finally at peace even though it ended this way.
Going through the box, he gave me ...
some PSone games we'd played together, a small lego set of a car I'd given him for christmas when we were 13 or 14. the last thing in the box was a note book. I opened it and it was a bunch of short stories he'd written. I paged through it and the stories started getting violent and scarey. The last few pages were drawings of dismembered people and animals. It looked very much like Patrick Bateman's planner at the end of American Psycho.
He'd always been a little off and taken medicine for it as long as I'd known him. We would talk 2-3 times a month, but I didn't know it had gotten as bad as it did for him.
I miss him and am sad he's gone, but I'm more sad he thought this was the only thing he could do.
22/30. When my grandma died 8 years ago, my aunts and uncles (my mum has 5 siblings to make a total of 6) found a box. Inside was a black and white photo of a baby boy and a name, date of birth and hospital name scribbled on it. Turns out my gran gave up a baby for adoption after she...
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had my mum, so there's a long lost uncle somewhere out there. As far as I know, no one has tried to track him down yet.
23/30. My grandfather hated cats. Couldn't stand them Wouldn't have them in his house, any time we talked about wanting a cat he'd harrumph and ramble about dogs.
A few years after he passed, my grandmother was moving out to live in a retirement apartment, so she didn't have to deal with stairs or worry about having another fall. As we cleaned, we started going through a lot of my grandfather's stuff. We found, in a box in the basement, a framed picture of my grandfather as a young child, holding a cat. On the back of the picture, lightly in pencil, is the cat's name. No one knows a thing about it, and we can only speculate. But clearly, at one point, he loved that cat.
24/30. When my grandfather died I found an old medal. There were two man on a motorcycle, one of them was driving and the other one was standing up on his seat. I asked by dad about it and it turns out that
my grandfather used to be a motorcycle acrobat. Seriously, how rare was that? How many motorcycle acrobats used to be in middle Europe around 1960/70?
25/30. My dad died a few years ago just before christmas. It was the first death in our family in a long time and it came out of nowhere so everyone was shocked. He still had packages coming in the mail for christmas so I would grab them because I wanted to wrap them up for the people and give them as a last gift from him.
I started opening the packages in my room and just dumping them on my bed. First one was a guitar wall mount, second one was some miscellaneous electronic components and the last one dumped out in slow motion. It was a cock ring, vibrator and some massage oils. I was mortified and just threw them back in the package.
I still have the box tucked on top of my closet because I have no idea wtf to do with it. I just can't give it to my mom because it'd be awkward and I can't use it myself because it'd be awkward so it just sits in my closet and every once in awhile I come across it and laugh.
26/30. My mom died of cancer a couple years ago. While I was going through her office I did some math and figured that she spent just shy of $200,000 on shamans, miracle cures and weird investments in South America during the last two years of her life.
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27/30. My grandfather took my grandmothers phone after she had passed. I had never called the number until 9 months later. Her voicemail was still set to her voice. It made me cry like a baby.
28/30. I found a folder of letters between my two grandmothers. My parents split when I was two, and my mother got together with a psycho when I was five. They were basically conspiring for my entire childhood to protect me as much as they could, and make sure that I had something of a childhood.
29/30.
30/30. After my grandpa died, I was scouring through his things and discovered a photo album and a few other documents hidden under one of the bases of the drawers in the dresser. It was him with his wife, him with his kids, him holding his grandchild. Except for they weren't my family. I did a little investigating and found an address in one of the photos. I went to the house, which led me to another house, which led me to my
grandfather's second wife. Not second as in the one he had after my Grandma. Like, simultaneous wife. We all knew that he was a huge business guy who was away a lot, but I never thought that it could be to go to his other life three towns away. To my family, he was known as Norm. To theirs, Teddy. I have no clue what his real name even was. I don't even know who he married first. I may have aunts, uncles, related blood family that I've never met, but after figuring it out I asked the woman to never try to contact me and I hightailed it out of there. Somehow I was able to gather all this information from this woman without letting her in on the secret, so I'm the only one that knows (to my knowledge). I don't plan on telling anyone. I don't want to be the reason for so many people's lives being ruined especially when they were all mourning his loss. Wherever you are, Grandpa, I still love you, and your secret's safe with me.
- Anonymous
External image source: Anonymous for Shutterstock
I'm best when I'm at my laziest. Ok, that's a lie, but I don't care.
Zzzz...
Donald Duck Sleeping GIFGiphy"On weekends I sleep for 12-14 hours. I usually wake up a few times but I dream so much during those long sleeps that it’s basically become a recreation type thing and I love it."
HouseOfZenith
Warm it up...
"When I use the microwave, I’ll heat food for 1:11 or 2:22 because I can’t be bothered to move my lazy fingers."
fysicks
"I figured out that my microwave's turntable rotates once every 12 seconds. So, everything I cook is on a multiple of 12 seconds so that it always ends up at the front of the microwave when it's done cooking, and I don't have to reach all the way to the back of the microwave to get my food out."
unittwentyfive
Bang
"When I was a kid on a school day, I had this routine where I'd stick my legs out of the bed and bang around on the floor so it sounded like I got out of bed and then just lie there for a few more minutes."
bewarethechameleon
"Did you also get your toothbrush wet and squirt a wee bit of toothpaste in your mouth rather than actually brush your teeth? If so I may be your mom and you weren’t fooling me or the dentist and you sure weren’t fooling the plaque that attacked."
TigerLily98226
Pockets
"Whenever I clean the house I put on my housecoat with really big pockets. I just walk from room to room and put things in my pocket that don’t belong in that room. Once my pockets are full I go to each room and empty my pockets putting what is from each room in that room."
kindhearttbc
"That's not lazy... that's productive AF."
throwaway92715
Toss It
Pippi Longstocking Chaos GIF by ZDFGiphy"I don’t fold the fitted sheet. Just ball it up and place it in the closet."
SpaghettiSquash33
I just see people human. Don't he so hard on yourselves.
12 Hours
Tired Fight Club GIFGiphy"I once watched 12 hours of the golf Network because the batteries were dead in my remote control. I don't know if that's lazy or depressed."
sadbirdfox
I swear I was...
"I was taught to make a bed properly as a child, I swear I was. Hospital corners and everything. I even know how to fold a fitted sheet, thanks to my auntie, who's an Air Force nurse and therefore doesn't consider little problems like 'non-Euclidean geometry' to be a reason not to do it properly. The second I found out about duvet covers, that was over. Sure, it doesn't look as tidy, but five minutes a week plus 10 seconds in the morning instead of 10 minutes a day? I can live with that."
katie-kaboom
The System
"I don't fold laundry anymore. I have a system of laundry baskets like this where clothes gets sorted by type (pants, t-shirts, sweaters, etc). Most of my clothes is wrinkle free, and for the few pieces that aren't I just throw them on a hanger in the bathroom while I take a steamy shower."
User deleted
Genius!!
"Before I get out of bed in the morning, I will grab the top corners of my sheets with my hands and prop up the bottom two with my feet and move it into place. Then I slide out of bed without ruffling anything. Just like that, my bed is made."
Markymark142
"My sister has to do this before she goes to bed at night, even is she made the bed that morning. It's an odd little quirk and mostly harmless."
mel2mdl
Yummy
andrew huang pots GIF by SoundflyGiphy"Just eating food straight out of the pan."
refrshmts_N_narcotcs
None of that sounds so bad. That sounds... like my life. Don't judge!!
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Did you check the forecast?
"We sure are having a lot of weather"- r_Ju_Tacular.
"As a British person, the conversation usually starts like this:"
“'You alright?'"
”Yeah you?”'
“'Yeah not too bad, weathers a bit sh*t innit?'”
“'Yeah”'.
"The end."- chelstippins
Cloud Storm GIF by Weather UndergroundGiphyWhy beat around the bush?
"Straight to politics and religion."- Turd_Ferguson009.
Just let it happen.
"Make an observation."
"Literally anything."It helps if it’s something about them like an article of clothing that catches your eye, something they’re doing, anything that you can relate to or are interested in but it doesn’t have to be."
"It can be something in the environment that is drawing both of your attention."
"People bullsh*t about the weather all the time."
"Make a comment about it, gauge their willingness to talk about it to you and build off of what you get from the response."
"If all you get is 'haha yeah', leave it."
"No shame in silence."
"Some people just don’t want to talk."
I"f you’re talking about the weather, 'Man it’s a great day out today!'"
“'Yeah absolutely! I drove here with my windows down all the way here!'”
"Boom, you’ve got something to latch onto."
"They probably enjoy getting outside for some fresh air. "
"They probably enjoy driving."
"Ask about their car."
"Ask if they go on drives a lot."
"Ask if they do outdoor stuff."
"What kind of outdoor stuff?"
"Once you’ve got something to work with, the key is to ask."
"Let them do the talking."
"People love talking about themselves."
"You learn some light hearted things about the stranger, they feel more comfortable, and you can add bits and bobs of your own experiences in response so they get to know you too."
"It works in literally any situation."
"From an elevator ride to a first date."
"It’s so easy to personalize small talk and it makes it so much less uncomfortable."- 1arrocknroll.
"But enough about me, what do you think about me?"
"Usually people love to talk about themselves, so a few questions about them and some follow up questions to their answers usually does it."- I_can_see_the_music.
For Me GIF by Liz HuettGiphy"Food, glorious food..."
"Food."
"People typically love food."
"I mention I’m new/newer to an area."
"And ask them what they like, where they eat out."
"Usually works and people have their choices validated and I always know where to find good local snacks."- TheProfWife.
Pluto Flyby GIFCan you believe it?
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"- housemuncher.
Nothing!
"As a Norwegian - we leave strangers alone."
"No need to bother them."- neihuffda.
No Idea Reaction GIF by BounceGiphyThe sky's the limit.
"So, do you like stuff?"- Bwon669.
All of these seem like surefire ways to get a conversation started.
But use cautiously, as who knows how long it will take these conversations to end.
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