Jameson - Downsizing the family home: What to Save, What to Let Go

All across the country, the groans are getting louder as the adult children of aging parents, and often the parents themselves, look at a lifetime of accumulations and cry: What am I going to do with all this stuff? Never before in history have we been blessed with so muchand felt so overwhelmed by it.

Although I now know that I am not alone, I sure felt alone in January 2013 when I stood paralyzed on the threshold of my childhood home, a fully loaded house where my parents had lived for nearly fifty years. I, too, cried, What am I going to do with all this stuff? as I faced the task of clearing out the old homestead and getting it on the market.

Waylaid by emotion and the responsibility for doing the right thingwhatever that waswith my parents lifetimes worth of possessions, I felt ill equipped.

I wanted to be respectful of my parents belongings, honor their lives, be a good steward of their assets, and preserve their past and mine. At the same time, I didnt want to be weighed down by more stuff, even if that stuff meant somethingand it almost all did. I had a house full of things, too. Although I knew that most older parents, including mine, want to gift their children with the assets of their productive lives and bequeath them the roots of their history, they do not want their households to be albatrosses.

But the line between bestow and burden is blurry.

I looked for help and found little published about what to do with the avalanche that the greatest generation is leaving to those in its wake. The books I could find were written by estate-sale professionals, who approached a houseful of memories and stuff as a business problem, with the solution being to hire an expert. That seemed to be missing the heart of the matter. Many books also deal with clutter, but calling your parents belongings clutter seems demeaning. Were dealing with a vast amount of memory-laden, historical, occasionally valuable, often irreplaceable acquisitions. In short, were talking about the museum of your familys life.

( Marni Jameson)

The house in Orange, California, my parents and I called home for nearly half a century.

Faced with this, I did what I do. As a journalist and nationally syndicated columnist who has written a column on home life and home design for a dozen years, I called on my own pool of expertsantiques appraisers, organizing gurus, family psychologists, art experts, and garage-sale aficionadosand grilled them.

I applied the pieces of their advice that made sense to me along with my own instincts and wrote about it all as I went through the process. In my weekly column, I chronicled this rite of passage: the learning and loving and letting go.

Never in my nearly thirty years of writing for media had one topic struck such a chord. I received hundreds of e-mails from readers asking me to please put my columns in a book. Some shared their stories. Others asked my advice. One reader told me shed kept all the columns and put them in her safe deposit box for her kids to read.