Hearse with a U-Haul
It’s a strange image when you first hear it.
A hearse… pulling a U-Haul.
You almost want to laugh. Or at least pause long enough to picture it clearly. A solemn vehicle designed to carry a body… hitched to a trailer stuffed with everything else. Furniture. Boxes. Keepsakes. The accumulation of a lifetime.
And then the question quietly slips in.
Why?
What exactly are we trying to bring along?
Because the truth is simple, even if we resist it. The hearse goes one way. The U-Haul goes another. One carries what remains. The other carries what never really belonged to us in the first place.
Yet we live as if we can hitch them together.
We spend years loading that trailer. Titles, possessions, achievements, grievances, identities. We polish them, defend them, insure them, expand them. We measure our lives by how full the trailer becomes.
Bigger house. Fuller garage. Longer résumé. More recognition. More “mine.”
As if, somehow, the weight of what we collect will give weight to who we are.
But at some point, quietly and without negotiation, the hitch disconnects.
No ceremony. No warning. No exception.
The hearse continues.
The U-Haul stays behind.
Every single time.
And suddenly the question becomes unavoidable.
What was real?
Not what we owned. Not what we controlled. Not what we accumulated. Those things were always temporary, always passing through our hands, even when we called them permanent.
What remains is something far less visible and far more enduring.
The moments we extended kindness when it would have been easier not to.
The forgiveness we offered when holding on felt justified.
The peace we allowed instead of choosing conflict.
The quiet recognition that perhaps we were never separate from anyone or anything to begin with.
These don’t go in a trailer. They were never objects to store.
They are states of mind. Ways of being. Expressions of something deeper than the world measures.
From an ACIM perspective, this becomes even clearer. The world of form is not where value is established. It is where confusion is practiced. We mistake possession for identity, and accumulation for meaning.
But meaning isn’t in what we gather. It’s in what we remember.
Or more accurately, what we stop forgetting.
You are not the contents of the U-Haul.
You never were.
You are not the roles, the labels, the successes, or the failures. You are not the body the hearse carries either. That, too, is part of the temporary set.
So what are you?
The question matters more than the answer we’ve been taught to give.
Because when the illusion of “taking it with you” falls away, something unexpected happens. Life doesn’t become empty. It becomes lighter. Cleaner. More honest.
You begin to see that nothing real can be lost… because nothing real was ever stored in the first place.
And nothing unreal can be kept… no matter how tightly you try to hold it.
So maybe the image isn’t absurd after all.
Maybe it’s honest.
A hearse with a U-Haul shows us exactly how we live… and exactly where we’re mistaken.
We keep packing the trailer.
Life keeps reminding us we don’t need it.
At some point, we stop loading… and start letting go.
And in that moment, something shifts.
We are no longer preparing for an ending.
We are remembering what was never bound by one.