This topic was briefly brought up (somewhat ironically) in the
You Know What Really Makes Me Happy thread.
At some point we're all going to have to deal with our parents passing away. Some already have. The challenge of taking care of their affairs is huge, especially if our parents didn't plan for it. I thought it would be a good thread to get people thinking about these things and get some advice from people who have been through this already.
Have you had this conversation with your parents? Do they have a plan? Have they already started getting rid of some of the things they've accumulated over the years? Are you doing it yourself?
The great junk transfer is coming. A look at the burden (and big business) of decluttering as Canadians inherit piles of their parents’ stuff
Sorting, storing and disposing of old family belongings will be a labour-intensive challenge in the next decade as baby boomers age
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/cana...tering-canada/
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Apple News link if you have it)
The article is behind the paywall so here's a snippet for people without access:
Quote:
Last fall, Kevin Cameron stood in the doorway of his parents’ two-storey Saltbox home in the woods on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, the place he’d built with his dad when he was a teenager and woken up to during snowy family Christmases with his own kids. The silence felt like a punch in his gut. For the first time, his mother was not coming around the corner to greet him. His father was not in the basement, tinkering with an engine. He had died that summer after a stroke at the age of 87, and his mom, 81, was now in a nursing home, losing her memory of the house. Yet the rooms of the place were just as they’d always been, as if his parents were only running errands in town.
Wandering through the house, he saw the kitchen shelves loaded with bowls and dishes, rooms crowded with furniture, books and knickknacks, closets packed with clothes, drawers stuffed with toothpicks and razors, a full set of mouldy encyclopedias on a shelf. His dad’s workshop was filled with tools, machine parts, cardboard boxes of greasy washers. There were sheds in the backyard cluttered with chainsaws and bikes and broken microwaves, along with a 1950s backhoe his father had insisted he inherit, even though Mr. Cameron, an artist, has absolutely no use for it.
This was only the beginning. After a long search, Mr. Cameron would eventually find the registration for his parents’ car - which he now had to sell - inexplicably buried in a plastic bag stuffed with unused Christmas cards, the kind that charities send in the mail. There were keys that matched no locks. Sales receipts that went back to 1948. His parents had kept everything and thrown out nothing.
How could a house that felt sorrowfully empty also be so overwhelmingly full? “And then it hits you,” Mr. Cameron says, “all the work ahead.” He saw the months of lost weekends, the five-hour round trips he would have to make from his own home in Greenwich, in the Annapolis Valley. This was the inheritance he never wanted: a burden that would rob him of time, just when his dad’s death was reminding him, at 58, of his own mortality.
Anger and resentment sliced through his grief. Why had his parents left him with all this mess?
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