For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for July 12, 2021

Mrs. Richards must jar some mean jellies/jams and pickled vegetables.

She’s in for one of the worst (and inevitable) experiences that life has to offer. Trust me on that one.

Well in my case one or more of my sisters convinced my Dad that I could not be trusted with those kinds of decisions. Now that he has passed on, one of them has been “Awarded” the task of sorting through the remaining items from two widowed grandmothers and both of my parents. Over 90 years of accumulated stuff. When Dad informed me that I would not participate in Trust Management he half expected objections on my part. As I told my sister that got the job, in kept my opinions to myself that day because he and I were in a public location and because my main thought was “I don’t need the headaches of dealing with it all.”

40 years of “stuff” or 40 years of “memories”???

Just wait till the two siblings can’t agree on something. I lost two of them that way. They are still around somewhere though.

Assuming that one starts collecting stuff around age 10, then that means that grandma and gramps are only around 50 years old? Funny they looked 20 years older than that. Isn’t age 50 a little young to have to move into a senior’s residence?

I remember in 2000 my parents moved from our 5-bedroom house to a 1-bedroom senior-living apartment. It was hard for all of us to decide what we would each keep & what should go. Fast forward to 2018: my mother died & my father had to move to a senior boarding house…essentially a single room. Thankfully, my mother had the foresight to “tag” everything with what was to go to whom. When my father died last year there wasn’t much left to go through.

We had to do this last year, for my in-laws. We promptly started weeding out in our own stuff so our kids would have an easier time, when, in 20-25 years they will have to help us! (it does help that we don’t really have storage space), our storeroom has moisture we haven’t been able to get rid of so we changed it into a wine cellar and I promise y’all that won’t be the room the kids will complain about :D

I brought my girls to help with my Mom’s move some 30 years ago. They had fun competing to find the oldest date on the jars. I think the oldest was 15 years old and the pickles were translucent.

It’s a gift to your survivors as well as yourself to downsize while you have the strength and mental capacity to do so. It’s bittersweet but freeing.

I moved recently. It’s amazing how much stuff you decide you don’t need when you have to move it, or worse, pay to have it moved.

when I downsized, I gave ALL my canning jars away. I wish I had kept a few.

Lynn’s Comments:

Looking at these last 2 days worth of strips, I see that I’ve used the word “ready” 7 times. If I was checking the work of a student, I’d point this out right away as an error in the script!

YES! We can!

Just a small point – in British Columbia they call them “strata” not condos. Nope, don’t know why either but a relative recently moved West and bought one.

Around here, we pack it all up and give it to the Salvation Army Stores to re-sell to help fund their work. I have given a lot of kitsch to the guy downtown who sells the stuff in is store and on eBay. He loves it, and it makes money for him and his family.

In our late 60s, my wife and I have had a bunch of “if you go first or I go first” discussions and will have a lot more. There are so many things that will change immediately and so many more that will change over the following months. It is so much easier when there is no grief to get in the way.

I remember when my mom was still alive, she also had either canning jars or jars dad placed down in storm cellar, told my sibling we have to get rid of as I was not interested in canning as our mom did, I did post on fb anyone like the jars only one response. lot of them I trashed. After mom passed had to clear contents in the house out to work on, the way house was could not sell or try to lease, we fixed it up, then rented first time and then year later did a sale to sale the rest, most of the furniture did sell ahead of time. We are on 2nd renter. And there is a contract they have to initial and sign in agreement. Mom had collection of nice cute dolls, only sold one, more needs sold.

Well #1 is gt rid of the canning jars and quit all that type of work! And for me it would be on the order of 64 years of accumulation and adding. I dismissed my first ten years of hording I figure one to ten there isn’t much to hoard.

Yeah 40 years of "stuff is a kinda skimpy time-line.

My mother in law passed away. She was something of a hoarder. In an upstairs room we found glass canning jars with stuff in them for over 30 yes. Since we happened to park the dumpster under the room window, I took the window out and my wife and I spent an enjoyable day tossing glass jar of varying sizes into the dumpster. Some of the splashes were epic.

My family went to Missouri to help pack up my grandparents when they moved from the house they’d lived in since 1923. It was over 50 years. I’m glad we did, cause I caught Grandma trying to throw out old photos! All the way back to tintypes. I rescued as many as I could, but Mama hampered me a bit sigh

We’ve done it four times already, and yes, it’s not a pleasant task at all!!!

I helped some of my friends, too, when they asked, because they said I have experience after cleaning out my parents’ and my in-law’s houses… One friend made a mistake of being too attached to her parents’ house, and moved practically everything to a storage locker…about ten years later, she ended up dumping practically everything, because so much of it, not only was out of date, but also became unusable after that decade…then she regretted paying all that rent for nothing.

My advice would be to call one of those companies and just stand there and make decisions on the spot, and not take more than a carton or two from each room, or none at all…

Let all the clothes go, that’s for sure.

Let the furniture go, unless it is three generations old, and solid wood. Particle board stuff will never, ever be worth real money ever!

Have an appraiser for art, if your parents collected real art, not prints, or copies, in those cases, the frame is worth some money…

No one wants china sets, just check Value Village: very expensive china that might have cost thousands with all the serving pieces, is being sold for pennies on the dollar…I’ve seen waterford crystal that originally cost fifty dollars a goblet being sold for two dollars…

Etc. … etc. …

I remember cleaning out my grandparents’ house. There were lots of canning jars but the food was no longer edible so I spent a lot of time dumping that food.

That type of trip is stressful enough…. Having kids along is just more stress that no one needs.

When I got a one week opportunity in the late 1980’s to begin clearing out my parent’s house while they were still alive I found financial records back to the late 1920’s including nearly every check my father ever wrote. I filled a six cubic yard dumpster, and when they came back they couldn’t tell that anything had been removed, or at least they never complained. When all was said and done, and my father had passed and my mother’s memory had weakened considerably, the total removed came to 6 of those 6 cubic yard dumpsters. Unfortunately, I found only a photocopy of a very valuable relic which included a statement in my now deceased father’s handwriting: “I have the original”. Just like him. He found a way to take it with him.

They could eat the jars instead

40 years of “I want to keep thats”

Way to set up the exposition, Lizard Breath!!!!