Buried with it

My house is 37 years old now. Father built it when I was a graduate student. I remember how I felt comfortable to live in the new house when compared to our drafty old house.
My grandfather built the old house. It was a 400 square meter big wooden 2 storied house where I was born and spent my schooldays, with grandparents, parents and 2 sisters. This was where I witnessed the death of my granpa. This is where I lived with my brother who died as young as one year old.
There was a large basement annexed to the house which scared the hell out of my friends who came to my house to play. None of them dared to get in there let alone explore inside. It scared me too, but I sometimes couldn't resist the temptation and got into. Going down a long stairs to the dark, musty cell I found a lot of knickknacks and bigger stuffs gathering thick dust---a wooden slide for kids, washing boards, or sometimes even a cat trying to find out somewhere safe to deliver her baby (actually we heard baby cats meowing from the basement).  Geckos lived there. I hated them then.
Strangely, the basement had a 2nd floor. Going up several steps there was a small room. The air was almost stifling. In the depth on a shelf was dust-covered glassware of strange shapes as you see in a laboratory; flasks, alcoholic lamps, beakers and a Liebig condenser with a coil of glass pipe surrounded by a water jacket. Some of them were broken like a sudden discontinued history of one's life. Cold, sad and regrettable. I had no idea what they were at the age 10 or so but fascinated by them. "What are they for? Whatever fate has made them tucked away here in this dark and small room?" Later I knew that they were experimental instruments which my grandfather used to refine a "deworming" medicine called santonin. He was patent attorney and perhaps a scientist who lived through difficult times. The times.... when people needed deworming drugs... The time had passed away but the broken glass was a remnant of the time... irreparable...regrettable...a shade of sadness...never said anything but...
When my father built this house, all was buried under the ground together with the basement. Buried with it was an old life. New life began in the house built on the remnant. Now...The new life has become old with the elapse of 37 years...
I am planning to build a house on the remnants of the two generations.