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[quote=Anonymous]22:28 here, OP.  Some advice on starting the cleanup.  My mom was in her late 60's, too.  Strangely enough, once the reality set in that she was moving to a new place, her attachment to the piles of sale papers from the 1980's that she still wanted to go through sort of miraculously disappeared.

What helped was getting her out of the house, physically, and making a written agreement with her about what she would agree to part with.  We made a solemn vow not to discard anything outside of the categories she agreed to, and we stuck to it.

What we agreed to preserve for her to sort through herself:
* Any photographs at all (we threw away a lot of rotted frames though)
* All of her clothes
* Any of my deceased dad's cotton shirts or sweaters that were not stained (she had ideas that she would make a quilt out of them, even though she has never sewn in her life)
* Anything that was on her bedroom dresser that did not fall into an agreed-upon "garbage" category

Garbage categories that she agreed to let us dispose:
* All upholstered furniture (we bought her new furniture for her new place except for my dad's favorite armchair)
* All food items including food containers
* All old newspapers
* All paper towels, plastic bags, and anything that had touched food or was moldy
* All magazines

Books required some finesse and negotiation, but once we had cleaned everything else out WITHOUT her there, books weren't so bad.

The other key was we NEVER allowed her back into the house once we had started the cleaning.  We moved some of her favorite things to her new place, which we had already furnished with the basics.  So she had some familiar things to start with.  Then we just added more that was not totally ruined.  But she never, ever saw the place again once we started throwing things away.  She wouldn't have been able to handle it.
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