Decluttering Your Parents’ Home After They’ve Passed: The Hardest Decluttering You’ll Ever Do

Even if you’ve been working your way through your own midlife clutter, there isn’t much that can prepare you for clearing out your parents’ home.

Whether your parents lived in the same home for 10 years or 50, decluttering after they’re gone is unlike any project you’ve tackled before. That’s true no matter how complicated your relationship was or how much you loved them. And to add insult to injury, alongside your grief, there’s also a very practical job that has to get done.

If you’re facing this now – or know you will someday – I hope this helps you approach it with a little more grace for yourself. It will never be easy, but a little bit of advance mental preparation goes a long way toward smoothing the bumpy road.

The biggest challenges facing you as you face decluttering your parents’ home are the sheer overwhelming size of the job, working through your own grief and many other emotions that come up as you go and navigating the feelings of siblings and other family members. It’s a lot for sure, but I’m going to break it down for you and truthfully, just being aware of these challenges goes a long way toward facing them bravely and gracefully.

1. The Size of the Job Can Feel Impossible

Even if your parent wasn’t a hoarder, decades of accumulated belongings can feel paralyzing. Your parents’ home is filled with furniture, paperwork, collections, clothing and all of the practical things needed to keep a house.

I know it feels daunting, but mentally separating those categories before you even begin the work is helpful. The two categories to think about first: the furniture and the practical household items. Why those two? Furniture is big so there aren’t as many decisions but most pieces will require a logistical plan to move. Are there pieces that you or other family members want? Is there enough in quantity and quality to have an estate sale? What happens to the stuff nobody wants?

As for the practical household items, presumably they do not hold any sentimental value to you or others. You can go through (or hire someone to) round up the shampoo, the cleaning supplies, the paper clips, the contents of the medicine cabinet and anything else that falls into the category of ‘mundane household.’ You don’t need that stuff – and your parents don’t either. Please do not waste energy trying to figure out good homes for paper clips. You need to conserve your wits for the harder decisions!

Clothing is another category that you can deal with quickly. It’s more emotional for sure, but think about it before you get into the closets. Is there a piece or two you’d like to have? (I kept a Patagonia jacket of my mom’s – I wear it on colder winter mornings when I take the dogs out and think about her giving me a nice warm hug.) Take a couple of items and then the rest can easily be donated. Scope out a spot before you’re into the work (pick someplace close, with good hours and an easy process.) Delegate the donation run to someone else who needs a job to do.

The harder categories like paperwork, collections and anything sentimental you may want to save for later – if that’s possible. If you are on a time crunch to clear the house out, taking some of that stuff with you to sort out later when the grief isn’t so raw makes a lot of sense. That said, your home should not turn into a storage unit for these things. Thinking beforehand about what papers are important to keep, what collections you might like to have for yourself, etc. means you can look for those things – set them aside – and not spend precious energy going through every single file, trinket and photo album.

The bottom line is, if you have even a rough practical plan in place for the work of clearing the home of possessions, you will have more energy to expend on the emotional journey you’re facing.

2. The Grief Roller Coaster

As you declutter your parents’ home, the emotions will be coming hard and fast. That’s just a fact – there isn’t really anything you can do to stop it from happening. What you can do is give yourself permission to feel the feelings (they won’t kill you, I promise) and come prepared with a lot of Kleenex. Trying to push the emotions away is going to come back and haunt you later, letting yourself feel them now is healthier in the long run.

Expect your emotions to surprise you. You may breeze through some rooms and completely fall apart over an old grocery list with your mom’s handwriting or her favorite sweater (or Patagonia jacket, see above!) Keep calm and grab that Kleenex – the tears are gonna be what they are.

The tricky part about your feelings is they can start to mess with your decision-making process. Some items carry deep meaning; many don’t. But your feelings may try to convince you that you are a bad daughter/son for getting rid of the Lladro collection that your mom loved but you never cared for. You are not a bad child.  In case you get caught up in feelings, let me say this to you now: you don’t have to keep everything to honor someone you loved. Keep the things that have meaning to you. The things that will make you (eventually) smile when you see them.

It doesn’t have to be a lot (in fact, it shouldn’t be – remember you have a lot of your own stuff back at your house!) A few things will help you as you continue along on your grief journey. Too many will end up boxed in your garage where they won’t do anyone any good.

3. Protect Your Relationships with Your Siblings

This is, in my opinion, the hardest challenge when decluttering your parents’ home. Some sibling relationships are fraught, some are close. Some siblings are separated by distance, where one or more carried the majority of caretaking duties as their parents’ aged. The intricacies and nuances of your specific relationship with your siblings doesn’t necessarily have a strong bearing on how this process goes.

Even in the best sibling relationships, people have different skill sets. Individuals, even if they are related – have different ways that they grieve. Some are better in a crisis. Others are good at tackling a to-do list. And different people have different relationships to things. One sibling may want to save everything; another may be ready to empty the house immediately. I obviously can’t advise on specific family dynamics here, that would be impossible. However, I can offer a few guiding principles that can help you get the job done while preserving your familial relationships. Here they are, in no specific order:

• Assume best intentions wherever possible
• Try for early communication (that is, before you begin in the house) about roles, expectations and decision-making
• Go in ready to make some compromises
• Play to individual strengths when figuring out who is taking care of what
• Remember that at the end of the day, your relationships with the living matter more than the physical things your parents left behind

In an ideal world you are leaning on each other through this process. It isn’t always possible, but going in with a good mindset can help immensely.

It’s Never Easy

Nobody goes through the process of clearing out their parents’ home and enjoys it. You’ll probably second-guess some decisions. You’ll probably keep a few things you didn’t plan to and let go of others you thought you never could. That’s okay!

There isn’t one perfect way to tackle this job – you just have to power through. But with a bit of insight and mental preparation, you can survive it with your wits and relationships intact. (Maybe your tear ducts will need some time off 😉).