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[quote=Anonymous]Yup, yup, yup.  Been there, done that.  One was long-distance, large house, for father with dementia.  I needed to get a lot done in compressed timeframes, so I kept things simple - donations of his books from the University that would accept them (former professor), estate sale service, trash hauling.  Fortunately this was in a large metropolitan area so there were resources to throw at it.

Other parent had a smaller apartment, but packed.  A relative blessedly came and helped me pull out stuff that other family members would want (mainly photos and jewlery), I took some stuff, and then called Hunks Hauling Junk to take the rest -- they (supposedly) donate what can be donated and dispose of the rest, and for me everything is gone in one step and I don't have to make decisions about what's donatable where.  Again, fortunately, a major metro area where that was available.

And I was fortunate that I could make those decisions myself - I'm an only child, and the relatives who had an interest were interested for sentimental reasons and not financial.  So no one said, "You're paying to have someone take that away?  We could sell it."

And even so ... even so I know there were things that were not optimally handled, that maybe could have been salvaged or re-used or whatever that ended up getting tossed.

All I could do was tell myself I was doing the best I could under the circumstances, to learn the lessons I could and to move on.  (It also helped to think that at least some of that stuff was just built up through the years and would have been thrown away earlier in the ordinary course of things.  It seemed like a lot all at once because it was years and years worth of stuff.)[/quote]

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