7 September 26
Disposition of Stuff
It’s been almost a year since Mum died, and watching this video by estate seller Walter Ashford, about how to dispose of things before you go, it looks like she did it almost perfectly. I remember the hours we spent with her last year, going through old photographs. She had already, long before, given old family photos to me, naming the people she knew and telling me “oh, that was a friend of Helen’s, I never knew her name,” which was a perfect reason to toss it. She had given me her signed copy of Auden’s poetry, she had sorted out the Rosenthal china (mostly) with my sister, she had sold the silver nobody was ever going to want. My sister has the hand-embroidered linens. But the best thing is, we got to say, while she was still alive, what we wanted to keep. There was no fighting about it. All this is very much in line with Margareta Magnusson’s Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, where you carefully dispose of all your crap before you die so your children don’t have to. Ashford says that what kids want to keep is often a surprise.
I don’t have children, and my niece and nephew are unlikely to want anything of mine, but I do think the advice in the video is very useful for people contemplating downsizing:
a) Ask your heirs, independently, what one thing in your house would be upsetting to them if they found out it had gone. Write it down.
b) Write down in pencil on the backs of photos who the people are and the date. You’re often the last person who can do this.
c) Break sets on purpose. Nobody is going to want a full 12-place dinner set, but 6 silver teaspoons? (Don’t give your children the burden of disposing of your stuff they took out of guilt.)
d) If there really are things in your house that are valuable or that might be, get them appraised before your death.
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