Cleaning Out the House

There is a job inside every family that almost nobody volunteers for, almost everyone ends up doing once, and nobody is ever quite prepared for. It is the job of going through a parent’s house after they’re gone — or, increasingly, while they’re moving into a smaller place that doesn’t have room for forty years of belongings.

The job has no real name. Executor covers part of it, legally. Eldest child, the one who lives closest, the daughter, the one who took early retirement — those are the informal names. Whatever you call it, it’s the same role: standing in a house that isn’t yours but isn’t a stranger’s either, holding objects whose meaning you only partly know, deciding which ones get to come with you and which ones go into the dumpster outside.

Nothing in your life prepared you for the velocity of it. The dumpster is rented by the day. The relatives are in town for a week. The realtor wants the house staged by the fifteenth. You came expecting grief and got a logistics problem on top.

A few patterns show up over and over in how this work goes well — or, more accurately, how it goes less badly. They are not strategies. They are, more or less, small kindnesses to your future self.

Take the photo before you take the thing.

Of every object you’re considering keeping, take a phone photograph of it where it was sitting before you pick it up. The phone tags the photo with the date and the rough location automatically. Six months from now, when you’re holding the brass candlestick in a totally different room of a totally different city, the photograph is what tells you where it lived for forty years. That context is most of what you’ll wish you remembered.

This sounds like a small thing. It is the one piece of advice from people who have done this work twice that, from people who did it once, comes back as “I wish I’d known.”

Decide twice — once fast, once slow.

The first pass through the house is a sorting pass. Keep, donate, ask the sibling, dumpster. Move quickly. Don’t make every object a referendum on your relationship with the person who owned it; that way lies madness, and several broken families. Get everything into a category, even tentatively.

The second pass is the slow one — only on the keep pile, only at home, after at least a week. You will throw out about a third of the keep pile on the second pass. That’s fine. That’s correct. The first pass is triage, not commitment.

Photograph the room before you start.

Before any object moves, walk the house with the phone in panorama mode and record what every room looked like. Not because you’ll want a tour. Because, weeks later, you’ll be trying to remember whether the lamp was on the left side of the bed or the right, or where the framed photograph hung, or what was in the curio cabinet that you may have skipped past too quickly. The panorama is the memory you didn’t know you needed.

Don’t sort alone if you can help it.

The work is faster with two people. It is also less likely to wreck you. The person doesn’t have to be a sibling. A friend. A neighbor who knew your parent. Anyone who can keep you company in a room that doesn’t have its owner in it anymore. The work is grim alone in a way it isn’t grim together.

If you have to sort alone, set a kitchen timer for thirty minutes and take a break when it goes off, every time, no matter how much momentum you feel you’ve got. Momentum is what makes people throw out the wrong box.

Watch for the things that go too easily into the dumpster.

The dangerous category isn’t the obvious heirlooms — those, you protect by reflex. The dangerous category is the almost-obvious one. The drawer full of letters, half of which are bills and half of which are something else entirely. The shoeboxes in the closet that don’t look like anything but might contain anything. The contents of a desk that someone died in the middle of using. These are the things that should be set aside, not sorted on-site. Bring them home, sort them later, in good light, with coffee. Almost everyone who has done this work has a regret about a box they tossed in the third hour of day one, and almost nobody has a regret about a box they kept and sorted in week three.

Write things down as you find them.

If you pull a watch out of a drawer and remember that your mother once told you it was your grandfather’s, write that down right now on a sticky note and stick it to the bag the watch goes into. Don’t trust yourself to remember tomorrow. The job of sorting is so total that the meta-information falls out of your head at a rate you’ll be surprised by. Sticky notes — laughably low-tech — are the difference between an object that gets passed on with its story and one that gets passed on as another piece of jewelry.

A small notebook works too. So does a voice memo app on the phone, said out loud while holding the object. Whichever you’ll actually use.

Accept that some questions will never be answered.

You will find things you can’t identify. Things in boxes nobody ever told you about. A photograph of someone whose name you don’t know. A letter addressed to your father from someone called J. with no return address, dated 1973. You will want to know. You will sit on the floor of the bedroom and want, badly, to know.

You probably won’t, and that is a fact about the universe more than it is a fact about you. Some of what gets passed down is the question, not the answer. Put the mystery in a labeled envelope. Maybe a cousin in a generation you haven’t met yet will figure it out. Maybe nobody will. Both outcomes are okay.

And: this work will be easier for your children than it was for you.

That’s the only part of this that’s a promise. The job your parents left for you was hard because almost nothing about it was written down — the meanings, the stories, the why-we-kept-this. You can change that for the people coming after you. Not perfectly. Not exhaustively. But noticeably.

Pick up an object you own. Write down, today, the one sentence about it you’d want your daughter to find. Stick it to the bottom of the object with a piece of painter’s tape. Or — and this is what we’re building — put it somewhere that isn’t going to fall off in a damp basement.

That sentence, written today, is the dumpster your kids won’t have to rent.