Yep, beautifully said. A few years ago, I watched my mom and her siblings do this for my grandmother, and just recently another fleet of siblings did this for my parents' next-door neighbours (who have not one but TWO entire houses full of stuff - a farmhouse and a house in town). It's so tough. And the reassurances of "they're just things" don't hold much weight when they're not your things - when they belong to people you love, who aren't here to tell you what to do with them.
The neighbours are long-time family friends. Their boys grew up with my mom and her siblings, and they've been like an extra set of grandparents to me my whole life. At the height of their sons' cleaning frenzy, assorted hilarious crap kept mysteriously appearing in my parents' yard: an enormous wire-frame of a star, wrapped in silver tinsel and covered in Christmas lights, a large pair of realistically painted ceramic chickens, wind chimes. (My parents still have the chickens. They are nestled very proudly in my mom's front flowerbed. She pats them on the head whenever she walks by.) It was heartening to see them having fun with something that was otherwise exhausting and frustrating and sad.
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Date: 2017-07-12 02:10 pm (UTC)The neighbours are long-time family friends. Their boys grew up with my mom and her siblings, and they've been like an extra set of grandparents to me my whole life. At the height of their sons' cleaning frenzy, assorted hilarious crap kept mysteriously appearing in my parents' yard: an enormous wire-frame of a star, wrapped in silver tinsel and covered in Christmas lights, a large pair of realistically painted ceramic chickens, wind chimes. (My parents still have the chickens. They are nestled very proudly in my mom's front flowerbed. She pats them on the head whenever she walks by.) It was heartening to see them having fun with something that was otherwise exhausting and frustrating and sad.