canyonwalker | (Reply)

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How much trouble it is to sort through things when someone dies or abruptly needs to downsize depends on how much of it is likely to be valuable. In the case of Grandma Bea, her house was huge and had a lot of good stuff in it. In the case of friend Del, he had more stuff than we thought, and it has turned out to be more valuable than we thought. His surviving spouse is glad we helped triage it. Yet in both their cases there was also a sadness in finding valuable things that the deceased never got around to using. They never knew the full joy of the things they carefully collected.

It's different with my inlaws, for example. They're a bit of a pair of pack rats, and a lot of the stuff they've held onto is just junk. "We're sorry in advance for all the trouble you're going to have cleaning out our basement when we die," they told Hawk, and her brother, and me several years ago.

"Oh, it's not going to be a problem," I assured them. "We'll rent a dumpster and hire day-laborers to throw everything in it."

They were slightly taken aback by that. 😂

Because of experiences like these I try to be deliberate about what I'm keeping. If I'm unlikely to use something and it's not valuable enough to hold onto, I get rid of it. If I keep it I make a plan for when and how I'll use it again. I don't do this every single time but often enough to make a difference.