I want my parents to get rid of junk so I don’t have to!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^ Guess what, gramma? It was your work to do. Kids did not 'help' you accumulate all that crap, you did.

You're SUPPOSED to take care of this stuff so they don't have to do it when you die.

Oh and stop buying their plane tickets if you're gonna bitch about it later.

DP.

Harsh, but true.

I am so glad that I never have felt that way about any aging person in our family. Beyond harsh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t confuse people with things. Your memories of people are not the same thing as their stuff. Keep one or two tokens and then toss or donate the rest.

I don't confuse people with things at all, but I happen to love using the china, silver, and furniture that belonged to my husband's and my parents, grandparents, and great aunts.

My mom is convinced that her granddaughter (my DD 7) is someday going to want her China and silver, which I don't want because I think of it as "old lady stuff". But reading this... Maybe mom is right...

I would hang on to the china & silver and let your daughter decide when the time comes. Just box it up if you don't want to use it yourself. I doesn't take up that much space. You don't want to be the Mom who threw away her inheritance.

+1!! (I'm the poster who uses family china, silver, furniture, etc. Some is boxed away and labeled. I would never just hand it off to Goodwill without first checking to see if someone in our extended family might want it.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t confuse people with things. Your memories of people are not the same thing as their stuff. Keep one or two tokens and then toss or donate the rest.

I don't confuse people with things at all, but I happen to love using the china, silver, and furniture that belonged to my husband's and my parents, grandparents, and great aunts.

My mom is convinced that her granddaughter (my DD 7) is someday going to want her China and silver, which I don't want because I think of it as "old lady stuff". But reading this... Maybe mom is right...

I would hang on to the china & silver and let your daughter decide when the time comes. Just box it up if you don't want to use it yourself. I doesn't take up that much space. You don't want to be the Mom who threw away her inheritance.

+1!! (I'm the poster who uses family china, silver, furniture, etc. Some is boxed away and labeled. I would never just hand it off to Goodwill without first checking to see if someone in our extended family might want it.)

Agreed. I would hope that the china and silver could stay in the family.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^ Guess what, gramma? It was your work to do. Kids did not 'help' you accumulate all that crap, you did.

You're SUPPOSED to take care of this stuff so they don't have to do it when you die.

Oh and stop buying their plane tickets if you're gonna bitch about it later.

DP.

Harsh, but true.

I am so glad that I never have felt that way about any aging person in our family. Beyond harsh.

eh, some of the hoarding (or near hoarding) situations that some of the PPs on this thread are describing would be very tough to deal with. It isn't easy for a grown child to take time off of work and away from their own families in order to help a parent go through......what in some cases is quite literally trash. Bags, boxes, piles of stuff. Stuff that belongs in a dumpster. Stuff that fills closets and rooms.

Imagine spending your vacation time going through decades worth of stored crap. I can see how that could make a person a bit resentful.

There are two sides to this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hope you can do something. A neighbor of mine died and his son came later with a couple men and a dump truck. I know he kept some things but it was sad because of some of the things I saw being thrown away. One was an ornate family Bible with names and dates going back 100 years in the inside front pages. I pulled it out and took it home, then decided that was irrational and put it back.

Your post makes me so sad. It also reminds me of an estate sale in Ponte Vedra where a framed case of the deceased owner's swimming medals from a highly regarded university--at least 50 medals and more than a few were from MAJOR swimming events dating back to 1930's-- were on sale for $25. Just out there with the kitchen and living room stuff...can't believe that no one in the family wanted them.

But what are you going to do with grandpa’s old swimming medals? Put them in a drawer? How is that better?

PP here. I would hang the framed medals on an office wall in my home, or a basement playroom, etc. These weren't just any old swimming medals, btw, and the framed case was beautiful.

Yeah, I would have no desire to have that hanging on my wall. To each their own.

That's fine. We're a very sentimental family, and it would be very meaningful to me to have my grandfather's medals.

I am also sentimental but don’t put as much value on things as you seem to. Probably the same with the family selling the medals. My walls are covered in family photos and if I were that family, I’d probably have a lovely framed photo of grandpa wearing his own medals.

For those who view nearly 100 year old medals as "things," I would hope they'd take the time to offer them to a museum or the relative's alma mater, rather than letting them wind up in a Goodwill store or the city trash.

Sure, but was grandpa really a world-renown, Olympic athlete, or did he just compete in swim meets in college? Museums and special collections often have to purge their collections too, and decide among items with great historical significance. A lot of people try to donate their special heirlooms to museums, mistakenly assuming they have greater historical value than they do, when the real value is usually just personal/sentimental.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, the boomer and older generation values all this stuff more than their relationships with other people. Sad really.

I would say their "love language" is stuff, and they aren't able to understand that mine isn't. Their attachment to stuff as love gets in the way of actual relationships.

[Anonymous]

Oh my gosh - OLD CHRISTMAS CARDS! A PP posted about this. I was in my 90-year-old mom's house last week, going through all the charity mail in her "junk room" - aka my old room. She gets tons of charity mail from scam charities and it is exhausting to make sure she is not giving them money.

Anyway, I discovered that she has been saving old Christmas cards. Years worth. Just in one of the giant boxes in that room. I almost cried. I'm an only child, one who posted upthread, and I can feel a panic attack coming on at the very thought of cleaning out her house. The pictures and cards and things she saves from years ago, while sentimental to her, mean nothing to me. It would be different if she ever looked through them, but she does not. They are just packed away waiting for me to deal with at some point.

I swear I will never do this to my kids. I actually think about it because I am afraid I might change my stripes as I get older. but she has always been this way and I am less inclined to keep things. I still do keep more than I probably should, but I definitely make an effort to get rid of things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, the boomer and older generation values all this stuff more than their relationships with other people. Sad really.

I would say their "love language" is stuff, and they aren't able to understand that mine isn't. Their attachment to stuff as love gets in the way of actual relationships.

+ 1

This is my experience with my boomer parents. Stuff is so important to my mom because she grew up poor and feeling deprived, and now has a shopping/hoarding problem. She is constantly mailing me some junk she bought, and gets offended when I don't want to keep it. She will also mail the exact same stuff year after year, because she doesn't remember that she bought it and mailed it already. She has special display cabinets around her house for all of her ceramic tchotchkes. When their 3-bedroom house I grew up in was getting cluttered, they actually moved to a larger 5-bedroom, 4000SF house after retirement. (they upsized!) so they wouldn't have to part with ANY of their junk. When I stayed at their house last Christmas, I opened a few drawers in the bedroom I was in and found things like pipe cleaners (I mean, WTF? These are from when I was a child - I'm 40), my cousin's high school graduation invitation from 20 years ago, random church bulletins and cat calendars from the 80s. Don't even get me started on the cookie tin collection, the VHS tapes, the aging Barbies, and the drawers of unused candles. They have storage rooms in their basement with things like my grandpa's old luggage, blenders that don't work, and seashell art they bought in Florida. The situation was worse than I thought, because it seems like they can't distinguish between what things have value vs. what should have been recycled or trashed between moves. I absolutely dread the decluttering task that will fall to me and my sister when the time comes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don’t confuse people with things. Your memories of people are not the same thing as their stuff. Keep one or two tokens and then toss or donate the rest.

I don't confuse people with things at all, but I happen to love using the china, silver, and furniture that belonged to my husband's and my parents, grandparents, and great aunts.

My mom is convinced that her granddaughter (my DD 7) is someday going to want her China and silver, which I don't want because I think of it as "old lady stuff". But reading this... Maybe mom is right...

I would hang on to the china & silver and let your daughter decide when the time comes. Just box it up if you don't want to use it yourself. I doesn't take up that much space. You don't want to be the Mom who threw away her inheritance.

+1!! (I'm the poster who uses family china, silver, furniture, etc. Some is boxed away and labeled. I would never just hand it off to Goodwill without first checking to see if someone in our extended family might want it.)

Agreed. I would hope that the china and silver could stay in the family.

The daughter might not want it, but one or more of the grandchildren might.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, the boomer and older generation values all this stuff more than their relationships with other people. Sad really.

I would say their "love language" is stuff, and they aren't able to understand that mine isn't. Their attachment to stuff as love gets in the way of actual relationships.

+ 1

This is my experience with my boomer parents. Stuff is so important to my mom because she grew up poor and feeling deprived, and now has a shopping/hoarding problem. She is constantly mailing me some junk she bought, and gets offended when I don't want to keep it. She will also mail the exact same stuff year after year, because she doesn't remember that she bought it and mailed it already. She has special display cabinets around her house for all of her ceramic tchotchkes. When their 3-bedroom house I grew up in was getting cluttered, they actually moved to a larger 5-bedroom, 4000SF house after retirement. (they upsized!) so they wouldn't have to part with ANY of their junk. When I stayed at their house last Christmas, I opened a few drawers in the bedroom I was in and found things like pipe cleaners (I mean, WTF? These are from when I was a child - I'm 40), my cousin's high school graduation invitation from 20 years ago, random church bulletins and cat calendars from the 80s. Don't even get me started on the cookie tin collection, the VHS tapes, the aging Barbies, and the drawers of unused candles. They have storage rooms in their basement with things like my grandpa's old luggage, blenders that don't work, and seashell art they bought in Florida. The situation was worse than I thought, because it seems like they can't distinguish between what things have value vs. what should have been recycled or trashed between moves. I absolutely dread the decluttering task that will fall to me and my sister when the time comes.

There is no need to panic about it. You can get rid of it after she is gone just as easily as you can get rid of it today. You can even throw money at it to make it go away.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, the boomer and older generation values all this stuff more than their relationships with other people. Sad really.

I would say their "love language" is stuff, and they aren't able to understand that mine isn't. Their attachment to stuff as love gets in the way of actual relationships.

+ 1

This is my experience with my boomer parents. Stuff is so important to my mom because she grew up poor and feeling deprived, and now has a shopping/hoarding problem. She is constantly mailing me some junk she bought, and gets offended when I don't want to keep it. She will also mail the exact same stuff year after year, because she doesn't remember that she bought it and mailed it already. She has special display cabinets around her house for all of her ceramic tchotchkes. When their 3-bedroom house I grew up in was getting cluttered, they actually moved to a larger 5-bedroom, 4000SF house after retirement. (they upsized!) so they wouldn't have to part with ANY of their junk. When I stayed at their house last Christmas, I opened a few drawers in the bedroom I was in and found things like pipe cleaners (I mean, WTF? These are from when I was a child - I'm 40), my cousin's high school graduation invitation from 20 years ago, random church bulletins and cat calendars from the 80s. Don't even get me started on the cookie tin collection, the VHS tapes, the aging Barbies, and the drawers of unused candles. They have storage rooms in their basement with things like my grandpa's old luggage, blenders that don't work, and seashell art they bought in Florida. The situation was worse than I thought, because it seems like they can't distinguish between what things have value vs. what should have been recycled or trashed between moves. I absolutely dread the decluttering task that will fall to me and my sister when the time comes.

There is no need to panic about it. You can get rid of it after she is gone just as easily as you can get rid of it today. You can even throw money at it to make it go away.

NP. But they will more than likely need to move out of that large jammed packed home and into a smaller place or assisted living or a nursing home as they get older and less able to take care of the place and themselves. If that is the case, the adult children will have to step in and help them get rid of the stuff. Every time their grown kids visit them now all they see is the huge, monumental task that awaits them.

[Anonymous]

Can you smuggle out a bag of crap every time you visit? Will they notice if the cat calendars go missing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can you smuggle out a bag of crap every time you visit? Will they notice if the cat calendars go missing?

Oh. lord. Can you imagine what would happen if pp was caught smuggling out a bag of that stuff? Even if it's just a bag of old cat calendars and Christmas cards it isn't right to take their belongings like that.

Can you imagine if someone did that to you?

[Anonymous]

My mom did a major decluttering, and told me she did it so that I wouldn't have to throw away all her crap after she died. My mom is awesome.

My in-laws have a basement totally full of all kinds of random crap, and I've told my husband to tell them that either they sort through it now, or when they die, I'm hiring a crew to just back up a truck and take everything away. They are borderline hoarders, and we really want them to downsize now because it's going to be an utter disaster when they die.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:^^ Guess what, gramma? It was your work to do. Kids did not 'help' you accumulate all that crap, you did.

You're SUPPOSED to take care of this stuff so they don't have to do it when you die.

Oh and stop buying their plane tickets if you're gonna bitch about it later.

DP.

Harsh, but true.

I am so glad that I never have felt that way about any aging person in our family. Beyond harsh.

eh, some of the hoarding (or near hoarding) situations that some of the PPs on this thread are describing would be very tough to deal with. It isn't easy for a grown child to take time off of work and away from their own families in order to help a parent go through......what in some cases is quite literally trash. Bags, boxes, piles of stuff. Stuff that belongs in a dumpster. Stuff that fills closets and rooms.

Imagine spending your vacation time going through decades worth of stored crap. I can see how that could make a person a bit resentful.

There are two sides to this.

This. I once spent an entire visit with my in-laws helping my MIL "purge" stuff. We didn't even get through one dresser, which was crammed to the gills with stuff, and she didn't want to throw anything away. Some of the stuff was really cool--old photo albums and scrapbooks and stuff--but there was just so much junk. I don't resent her keeping the family heirlooms, but I do resent that every visit involves trying to stay on top of the crap and knowing that it's like shoveling water out of the ocean. They have to clear paths from their bedroom door to the bed, because of all the crap that she's bought for grandkids (not for events, just randomly, and then she forgets about it, and finds it a year later) and old magazines and books and piles of old clothes, etc.