Getting rid of someone else’s stuff
As you might imagine, I’m still engaged in the task of closing down my ex’s place and most days I’m spending many hours at it. I’ve hired someone to help with the hauling and distribution, but that person can’t really make the decisions. My brother and sister-in-law came up for two days and they helped me too, although again I’m the one who has to make the decisions.
This is extra hard because my ex and I didn’t live together, and because he was very much a saver. He never wanted anyone else to throw out any of his things, including me, so it feels like I’m going against his wishes. But of course it must be done. And he really, really, wanted to do it; he just ran out of steam the last few years.
And so it is left to me. It’s an extraordinarily large task, and I can’t postpone it because I have very very little storage space where I live.
What am I finding? Tons and tons of things, many of which have a deep and touching emotional resonance for me. And just being in his place without him being there too is jarring and sad.
A hundred or more maps, conjuring up the pre-GPS times when road trips meant me sitting in the passenger seat trying to decipher a map and give directions.
Cards and cards and cards, some from my mother to me (none of which I remember). They are touching, but I read them once and then toss them.
One undeposited check from his father, from decades ago.
An indescribable number of bills and bank statements and credit cards and driver’s licenses and passports going back nearly fifty years. Many are mine; I had no idea he saved them.
My 50th high school reunion name tag. I didn’t save it; he did.
Playbills and tickets. Notes from old girlfriends, some very emotional. Notes I left for him, completely practical and pedestrian such as, “I think I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.”
Letters he wrote to his parents in the mid-60s when he spent many months in Europe. The one I read complained about the French food (!), but he was living at a student hostel where dinner cost thirty cents. It was mostly potatoes.
User manuals for cameras and projectors that go back a half century. The cameras and projectors that go with them.
Clever things he wrote: song lyrics, and an invite to our dog’s 15th birthday party that was very amusing.
I saved a few things – for example, the dog party letter. But the rest go in the dumpster or the recycle bin. Tossing them feels a little like tossing the very young man I first knew, the medium-young man of our marriage, the older man he became as his handwriting dimmed due to Parkinson’s. I have to steel myself to just do it because there’s no saving most of these things. He couldn’t stop time and neither can I.
[NOTE: I didn’t have to do any of this when Gerard died. His younger brother stayed in his apartment for about two months, taking on the task. All I did was walk in for about an hour and take a couple of mementos. Gerard had lost virtually everything in the Paradise fire, but a little over four years had passed and he’d amassed a fair amount of stuff, although nothing even remotely approaching the lifetime collection of my ex. And yet it still took his brother about two months to accomplish closing the place down.]
As a natural declutterer who ‘travels light’, getting rid of my parents hoard (my declutterring is probably a reaction to their hoarding), I was actually relieved to go in and say ‘throw it all away, it all goes’. Easy, and something I wish I could have started when they were alive. Exception only were photos, which I digitized, colorized and polished using AI, then threw the physical ones away. So as of today everything physical of my parents is gone, the digital content in the cloud, shared with extended family, and photo samples put on Ancestry.com with a detailed tree going back three generations for anyone doing genealogy.
whatever:
Parental stuff is ordinarily much easier.
It’s tough getting rid of someone’s stuff because throwing away the physical objects also feels like throwing away the memories associated with them. In this case the object is really just a (physical) prompt for those memories.
So one coping strategy I’ve found is to take good pictures of any meaningful things so that the pictures can prompt the memories and you’re not burdened with yet another object that you’ll never actually use.
I did that when my Wife died in 2026. A life time together, traveling the world. We didn’t have Kids so we were able to travel a lot. My Wife collected old books. I did a major clean out. I guess you could call it decluttering. But I still have a lot of things. I found cards that I had given to her for Birthday, Valentines Day, and Christmas. I also found cards from her to me, many of which she made herself. I could not keep them all, but I do a number of them. Some sitting on my desk as I write this.
I have a neighbor that has a garage full of stuff. He recently gave some to his son, but there is so much stuff, some really junk. His Wife has tried to get him to go through it and get rid of a lot of it. I even ask him too. But, he is stubborn. So his Wife will have to do it.
I still find something that I will think “Will I use this”. If not I might set it aside for a couple of months and if I didn’t use it, it goes out. Other things head to the trash immediately.
It is something I have to do.
I spent a year sorting through literally generations of stuff… school papers of my GGF! The memories of that ordeal and all the legal paperwork managing 3 brothers -38 years later I still can feel suffocated by the memories/nightmares – people have no idea what they leave behind to be dealt with. My sympathy to you Neo as well as the countless contestants.
I find this topic fascinating. First, because I don’t typically like to hold onto things. These types of situations fascinate me because it’s foreign to how I think about things. But it is so very common. Most all of us have had to wade through mini-mountains of someone else’s possessions.
I was speaking to a friend who, with his wife, his brothers and their spouses, was spending the better part of two weeks filling dumpsters with the incredible amount of nearly useless things his parents had refused to let go of. Some of the things he shared with me were bizarre, but I thought about it after our conversation and came to the conclusion that his parents’ instincts made perfect sense. For 99.999% of human history privation was the norm. It still is in many places on Earth. My mother’s parents were not hoarders, yet they never threw anything away. They were born in Poland and lived in the U.S. during the Great Depression and rationing of World War II. Everything that was not irreparable was put to use. Our Winter boots were lined with plastic bags from that week’s bread held over our calves by the rubber band that had been wrapped around that morning’s newspaper. My dziadkowies’ house was tidy and clean. They bought nothing they didn’t need. But they also never threw anything away if it had any use. Prior to 1970, or so, no human would throw scrap metal or wood into the trash. I feel odd throwing away all the spare screws and allen wrenches that come with anything I buy that requires assembly, but I know if I don’t they will accumulate and get in the way.
My friend said he found hundreds of broken chairs on his parents’ property. His dad would see one at a garage sale and think, “that’s a decent chair and it can be repaired,” and so he’d buy it and bring it home. (And he did fix some of them.) That instinct isn’t wrong. Humans without that instinct rarely survived to adulthood prior to the 20th century. But in the USA, or Canada, or Western Europe in the 21st century that instinct can cause one difficulty. I suppose this is comparable to weight issues in those same countries. How do you turn off hundreds of thousands of years of evolution that taught us to eat when food is available and hang onto any material thing that may be useful?
Yet the results of not fighting that instinct is a tremendous burden on others. It is so very hard to go through someone else’s possessions and decide the fates of those items. My wife and I share a story of doing this for loved ones and very nearly throwing away something with an incredible story. The thing itself is of almost no commercial value. One would be hard pressed to get $1 for it at an estate sale. Yet the story behind that item’s significance to my wife’s family is amazing. And it is a miracle we learned the story of its provenance minutes before it would have been thrown in a trash bin. It is now one of our most cherished possessions. But what other, similar things have I thrown away doing this same thing for other family and friends?
Hang in there, neo. What you are doing is not only physically demanding, it’s mentally and emotionally exhausting. Take care and good luck!
It ain’t easy.
It ain’t easy!
That’s a good point, Rufus.
Most of my immediate family has died in the past two decades, so my sister and I are trying to sort out three houses worth of stuff into one house. It’s hard going, because throwing away family mementos while you’re grieving can be a spiritual hurt, like you’re throwing away the memory of that person themselves.
My sister is one of the “take a picture and then throw out the momento itself” school, while I’m trying to go the Goodwill/Salvation Army/Habit For Humanity route, I.e. pick up a bookcase/ lamp/ doll/ whatever it is/ and say “My mother/ father/ brother/ other relative/ enjoyed this, and now it’s someone else’s turn to enjoy it.” You aknowledge the value of the item itself and pass it on to someone who will need it and appreciate it, rather than throwing it in the dumpster.
Stuff. I’m beginning to hate stuff. Mine, other peoples, how I react to stuff, what is does to me.
When my parents’ house of nearly seven decades had to be cleared for sale, it took two rolloff units and six days of auctioneer crews to strip the place. Some items went back to great-great grandparents, as well as through the lifetime of my Depression era parents. Over ten thousand photos as far back as 1874 to review and select a few keepers, donate a few to local historical society, toss the rest. Had to fight off an emotional attachment at every turn.
Two days ago cancer claimed my beloved, who was ruthless about minimizing clutter. Today I look around our house, or now my house as it may be, and am still overwhelmed with stuff. My family’s keepers, my own, and my beloved’s.
We cooked and entertained a lot twenty years ago, but the last couple of years use ten percent of the cookware and kitchen things, less than that of the dishes and tableware. Furniture, garden tools, and now things that will always remind me of my beloved.
Some things of marginal utility or value, many things with inherent value that will not be easily matched with somebody who valued them.
Emotionally it may be hard or easy to let go, but functionally it’s hard. Unless one is super ruthless and sends it all to the landfill. Makes me hate stuff, and my relationship with it.
Deepest condolences, Dan D, and best wishes on dealing with the “stuff.”
Dan D, I lost my Wife of 57 yr to cancer last July. Some went to Garage sale, what didn’t sell went to Viet Nam Vets charity. Consigned some things, sent to auction other items. A great deal went into the trash. Still doing some of it 15 later. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a great deal of items, items we bought together. But I went into the process with this one thing in mind – if I died tomorrow, it would be auctioned off, or trashes. So I did it now. Not easy, and yes mistakes made. I am not looking back at what I did though.
Memories are there with us all the time. We did not have kids so no help there. I hope you have a good friend or 2 that you can spend time with. I will tell you now though that at 10 PM the house is very quiet.
If you want to reach out to me, let me know.
Very affecting comments — by Rufus, Dan D, and Shirehome especially.
Is Neo’s audience or crew or whatever you want to call us a bunch of oldsters? I’m 78 (same as Neo, I think). Are there any youngsters among the readership here?
Dan D – Condolences for your loss….
Neo, F.Y.I.: Instapundit: CYBERSECURITY: PHP Vulnerability: It’s Really, Really Bad.
Are there any youngsters among the readership here?
Not many, I believe.
It’s an all-consuming full-time job awash in sentiment and emotions, and minutiae. You feel the need to go through everything, but it’s tedious and draining. I kept so much at first, then surrendered to the reality that I just couldn’t keep it all. I finally whittled it down to a somewhat manageable but still quite sizable amount. Pictures and some paperwork mostly. A few sentimental objects. When I’m gone, all of it will most likely be tossed in a dumpster.
One if the few comforts I take from my elderly aunt’s neighbor gaslighting her into disowning me is that that b**** will have to go through the hoard in her house. Sadly, some of that is family stuff: my grandmother’s collection of miniature brass items that I loved as a child, family photo albums, the creche that was my great-grandparents… but that vast majority of the crap there is just that, crap. The neighbor won’t go through it — she’ll just go through it enough to steal what she wants, bring in an estate sale person, and pocket the proceeds. But it does save me from having to go through a veritable hoard of junk. (Especially releieved that i won’t have to deal almost forty years of household hazardous waste: there’s CABINETS of it in the garage. I remember opening one of them and thinking, “S***. That’ll be an issue to deal with…” and then finding more and more and more.)
“Exception only were photos, which I digitized, colorized and polished using AI, then threw the physical ones away.”
I had to clean out my mom’s house after she died and it was an ordeal but fortunately a couple of years before she died as a Christmas present I had organized her photos into categories in storage boxes. I used the opportunity to weed out a lot of meaningless and duplicative photos–and wound up with a giant contractors bag of junk.
The funniest part of the process was that we lived in Austin, Texas. Now, my mom loved snow but it only snows in Austin every 5 to 10 years. Every time there was a dusting of snow my mom would go out and take a boatload of pictures of the barely white yard. I’ll bet a quarter of what I threw out were “snow” pictures like that.
I expect that my sister and I will have gotten off lucky with our parents: the horrific brush fire in 2003 which burned their retirement home (and all the detritus from their families on both sides) reduced the body of “stuff” considerably. My youngest brother remarked at the time that fights in the family over who gets what will have been reduced considerably.
When Mom and Dad rebuilt the house, they furnished with things that no one else much cared about. The handful of genuine family relics saved from the fire are all parceled out among us now – as my brother commented, there was no fighting over them. Dad passed away, and then Mom became an invalid, living with my sister’s family.
Much of the extraneous stuff at my house was intended for my daughters’ house, which she was able to purchase earlier this year. We have managed to declutter my little house considerably since then. OTO – my daughter will have a raft of my books to sort through and dispose of…
Neo, have you ever wondered if you are living a Hallmark Christmas Movie?
We just pulled out the solo stove and destroyed brokerage account and mortgage statements going back to the 90s.
Steve on October 24, 2026 at 2:13 pm
Just my personal anecdote, but I had to use paper records from our broker from 1992 to re-establish the basis of a stock purchase we made at that time. Their system was either wrong or did not have/show the data back that far, what with updates/ upgrades, etc. over the years.
I also still keep my check register booklets back quite a ways. I found a medical procedure payment from 1982 that helped set the date for that procedure. I should be throwing away some paper records after X years (where X might be between 3 and 10 or 15), such as insurance and some past medical bills/ expenses. But some things retain potential residual value beyond your usual expectations.
As a boomer working in a high tech company, I did adapt and adopt some high tech solutions (and have the Excel files and PPT files to prove it), but I am still not 100% internet aligned or oriented, although I am getting better each day. 🙂 Paper was my introduction to the wider world as a boy and younger adult. I have not totally shaken that initial development.