What to throw away

Clearing out your deceased parent’s house is never a happy occasion. Not only are you grieving for your loss but the work can be a momentous chore. Only once the people have gone do you start to question the value of the items that have been kept, or hoarded in some circumstances. Of course, life requires things to carry on. We all need those functional items which allow us to eat, enjoy ourselves and survive yet, beyond those basic needs there is so much more.

Unless you have consciously tried to get rid of some of your belongings while you are alive then two adages apply: the longer you have lived in a house the more stuff you will have accumulated and; the bigger the space the more stuff you can fill it with.

My father has been dead for over a quarter of a century and so I cannot hold him as responsible as my mother for all of the stuff we, my brother and my sister, had to clear out. In her defence, the house is big and she had lived in it for a long time. The house was able to accommodate a lot of stuff.

Getting round to clearing it was an issue in itself. None of us wanted to start too quickly out of respect for my mother (and father) yet the prospect of the work ahead hung over us. We all knew it would be a daunting task as there was stuff that was of financial value, sentimental value, nominal value to others and stuff with no value at all.

Being in the autumn of our own lives, we already have all the stuff we need. We cannot keep everything that our parents had and so nearly everything had to go, either to charity shops, for sale or to the local household waste recycling centre. There was so much lovely stuff yet very little that we needed.

The problem was what to keep. In the end, each of us took a few momentos, enough to remember our parents by (as if we would forget them) but not enough to crowd out our own homes. The rest has had to go. Inevitably we will have thrown the odd item out that we should not have yet, not having seen them for many years I doubt we will miss them.

What I have come to realise through this exercise is that the time to start clearing out your detritus is now. I don’t plan to leave it all to my own children but what do I keep and what do I throw away?