Reply to The burden of so much ‘meaningful’ stuff

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[quote=Anonymous]My mom was a low-key hoarder for decades -- not pizza boxes stacked sky-high in the living room with dead animals in the corners, but a three-car garage and 4-bedroom house with 3 bedrooms full of boxes and crap. We were military and the boxes never got fully unpacked, and there was always a "junk room," but it got worse as she got older and she just piled *every  piece of paper* into a box without dealing with it and would "unpack" from a trip by dumping out toiletries and meds and whatever into a box...and then pile paper on it. Maybe medium-key hoarder?

My sisters and I, and her saint-like neighbors, moved her from that house to a one-bedroom apartment in a local CCRC last October after multiple months of crazed cleaning, that included 3 full 15-cubic-yard dumpsters of absolute crap. Sadly, not all the boxes got cleaned out so there were still 5-6 left in her new apartment to deal with. I finally finished the last one a couple of weeks ago when she was in a rehab center following back surgery.

I am glad we finished the cleaning out before she died. If she'd died and left us that mountain of garbage to deal with, I would have been so furious that I'd have ended up hating her posthumously. As it is, I've been able to work through my anger at her failure to deal with her crap for decades and get to a better place in my relationship. The stuff she has left will be manageable when she dies, because she doesn't have room to hide it away.

I'm not ever doing this to my kids. Never, never, never. People who hold on to stuff to pass down to their kids -- whether it's valuable/sentimental or just plain garbage they haven't been bothered to deal with -- truly don't understand what a physical and emotional burden that stuff can create.[/quote]

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