Is it just me or is that article written by, and this thread full of, assholes? Your parents are dead and you’re complaining about having to sort through their stuff and deal with their horrible taste in furniture? If you don’t want to deal with it have it all collected and sent to landfill and get on with your life. I’m genuinely surprised at how miserable and selfish sounding a lot (not all) of the people in this thread are.
I would love to be able to just get someone in to clear the house and "get on with my life", but it doesn't work like that when someone dies.
Instead of being able to just grieve I spent all weekend digging through 40 year old bank statements and other crap trying to find all the documents that we need to be able to register the death so we can actually bury him.
And no, I'm not going to just get someone in to clear the place out, because in all the crap is stuff that matters. Some of it will be paper, like his hand-draw schematics from when he worked on Concorde, some of it will be objects like his first camera, or the model of a ship he built when he was young that's in a cupboard somewhere, some will be photos. But all this stuff is buried under all the meaningless objects he filled his house with (how many torches does one man really need?).
The problem with accumulating crap is not the crap itself, it's the way it acts as a barrier to all the stuff that mattered, both to him and to us.
I had been slowling trying to sort all his stuff out before he died, and as we did so we'd uncover little mementos and memory joggers (great for a man in the early stages of dementia). Each one would spark a conversation and his eyes would light up and his voice would get all excited and I'd learn something new about my dad, some new story.
But 95% of the time was just going though tax returns from when he was 30 and insurance documents for policies that expired in the 90s, and pointless objects that were only there because my parents couldn't go into a garden center without buying some nik-nak.
So no, I'm not complaining about all the crap because I'm an asshole. I'm lamenting all the time and effort lost, that could have been better spent with my father when he was alive, and with his memory now he's dead, but which I and my siblings instead have to devote to trying to excavate what's important.
In a way it was good, we'd been planning for a long, slow decline into immobile sinility due to alzheimers and vascular dementia, but in the end he died at home in his sleep, two days after seeing all his kids. He was already getting quite distressed by his memory loss, and would have hated being dependent on carers for everything or ending up in a home.
Go see you parents everyone, you might not have as much time as you think.
I found out overnight my dad passed away. Here's the thing - I might come here and post some thoughts about the big clutter horde at his place that'll need to be sorted out. I'm certainly not coming here to talk about how I feel about my dad passing away. Because.. why would I do that? Who are you people to me? Who am I, or my dad, to any of you?
It would be pretty weird to do the latter, not the former. One is a shareable likely relateable situation with the potential for insight and interesting discussion. The other is a personal matter that doesnt belong on a generic online commenting platform.
I think most people understand this.
You'll have to forgive me that my thoughts are a little muddled on the whole issue right now. My core point is that one aspect of the situation feels quite appropriate to discuss here, while the other more intimate (and central) one does not. The outcome, assuming most other people also feel that way, is that the discussion here is not representative of the grief experienced when a close relative passes away, and shouldn't be taken as any kind of indication about people here 'all being assholes'. And that this is expected and fine.
It's a bit of a cognitive dissonance yes but I do not think they are assholes as you said. They were clearly attached to the items and in essence they people those items once shared the connection. Having strong emotions is not a bad thing, you need to see over the petty complaining.
Quote from the article:
"Sons and daughters who have faced the chore describe wrestling with how to do it properly, respectfully and fairly (also cheaply and quickly) while ghosts hover. The whole process shakes awake buried sorrows, sibling rivalries, family dysfunction. It is never just about the the stuff."
I think the point is that people are obviously sad and grieving about their parents' death, and that then having to deal with their possessions is additional grief.
Someone kept something useless and valueless for decades. It clearly meant something to your recently-deceased parent, so if you just bin it without thinking then that feels like a betrayal to me. Imagine if you walked into your parents' house when they were alive and just started binning their momentos/prized-possesions/favourite cups/tools/etc right in front of their face - what would the reaction be from them?
I don't think people begrudge the time and effort so much, just that they are upset at having to make decisions on what to keep and what not to keep, especially if they are already grieving.
I've got some of this on the horizon for my in-laws. I feel like if I do the clearance and not my wife we can find a happy medium - I know the in-laws well enough and long enough to treat it with respect and deference, but I am also distanced enough to not get all tied up in sorrow about old childhood memories or whatever, and hopefully be able to move quickly(or if nothing else to genuinely clear out the trash and leave the personal stuff to the wife to look through)
