When someone dies, they leave behind a house full of objects, and every single one of them seems, in the raw weeks after, to be load-bearing — as though the person is somehow distributed across all their stuff, and to give away the chipped mug or the drawer of rubber bands or the third-best coat would be to give away a piece of them. So you keep everything. You can’t not. And then you’re standing in a storage unit two years later, paying rent on a dead person’s possessions you never look at, drowning in objects, having somehow turned grief into a warehousing problem. I’ve watched this happen, I’ve half-done it myself, and I want to say the thing that felt forbidden to say: you are allowed to let go of almost all of it, and keeping everything is not more love. It’s often less.
Here’s the reasoning that finally freed me, and it starts with a hard truth: the object is not the person. It feels like it is, especially early, when everything they touched still seems warm with them. But the coat is not your mother. The rubber bands are not your mother. Your mother is not, in fact, distributed across four thousand household objects such that each one holds a fraction of her that’s lost if you let it go. That’s grief’s illusion — the raw, early, magical thinking that binds the person to their stuff because the stuff is all that’s left. And acting on that illusion, keeping everything because each thing might contain a piece of them, doesn’t preserve the person; it just buries them, and you, under a mountain of things, until the few objects that genuinely carry them are lost in the pile of ones that don’t.
Because that’s the actual cost of keeping everything: it devalues the things that matter. If you keep all four thousand objects, the one worn wooden spoon she used every day and the random spare button from a coat she never wore have exactly the same status — kept, boxed, undifferentiated. But they’re not the same. A few objects really do hold her — the spoon, the handwriting, the one ring, the thing so associated with her that you can’t see it without seeing her — and thousands of others are just stuff, the ordinary undifferentiated debris of a life that any life accumulates. When you keep it all, you drown the sacred few in the neutral many. Curating up — choosing the objects that truly carry her and letting the rest go — isn’t a betrayal of the sacred few. It’s what rescues them, gives them room to actually hold her instead of being lost in a storage unit of rubber bands.
So here’s the permission, since no one gave it to me and I needed it: you are allowed to let go of the vast majority, and choosing what to keep is an act of love, not a failure of it. Keep the things that genuinely summon her — and you’ll know them, they’ll have a pull the others don’t, they’ll be the worn daily objects and the handwritten ones far more than the valuable or the formal ones. Photograph a few more that you want to remember but don’t need to house. And then release the rest — donate it, gift it, let it go — without the guilt that whispers you’re discarding a piece of the person. You’re not. You’re doing the thing that lets the real keepsakes breathe. Love is not measured in retained square footage. A person honoured by three objects you actually see and hold every day is more present than one buried under a storage unit you can’t bring yourself to open.
The hardest part is that the illusion is strongest exactly when you have to make the decisions — in the raw early grief, when everything still feels load-bearing and letting go of anything feels like a small death. So if you can, go slow; keep more than you need at first, and curate down later, when the magical thinking has loosened and you can tell the sacred few from the neutral many. But do, eventually, let go. The dead don’t live in their stuff, and keeping all of it doesn’t keep them — it just keeps you from the few things that actually do. You’re allowed to let the rest go. That permission is one of the kindest things grief will ever offer you, and almost nobody says it out loud, so I will: let it go. Keep her, not her things.