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On one hand I can envy your stable life. I moved across the country many times in pursuit of a career. We had 6 houses in 6 different States...from the West coast to the East coast and everywhere in between. Moving and getting re-established in a new location can be difficult and stressful.
On the other hand, I would not want to have lived my whole life in one small area. Life is about change, growth and experiencing new and different things. Life is certainly not about living in the past with old memories and knickknacks. At least that is not how I want to spend my time on earth.
When my mother died it took 5 months to go through everything in her house. The year-old Sunday New York Times-es were easy, but there was a lot that was not so easy. The day of the closing, my sister was still taking stuff to the dump. 10 months later, my husband died and I had to deal with all of HIS stuff, and he was a bit of a packrat. Here's what I learned from all this:
1) The past is gone. All we have is now. Real memories live in our minds and our hearts, not in old STUFF.
2) Your kids or young people you know do not want your stuff. Except maybe your 1920s Victrola. If you're lucky. But your huge quartersawn oak breakfront, your collection of Lladros, your 1912 crystal that was your great grandmother's, your post-1980 comic books? Forget about it. No one wants it.
3) After your grandchildren, no one will remember you. Photos of you will mean no more than old photos of strangers.
4) Stuff is ephemeral.
I have been de-cluttering and divesting ever since my husband's death. It's hard. It's like throwing your life away. I have no children, and I filter everything through "Would I want my sister to deal with this?"
Sorry for your losses... it takes a lot to deal with one loss only to have another.
Last fall New York Times had a good article on decluttering (Kissing Your Socks Goodbye: Home Organization Advice from Marie Kondo). In a nutshell: Keep only what brings you joy.
Well said and simply said... keep what brings you joy.
The corollary might be don't toss if it will bring you sadness.
I moved around a lot in my youth, school, jobs, military, and just a lot of Gypsy in me making me want to go to the new and different. Finally settled in one house for twenty years and then retired. Sold my house, bought another house one hundred miles south, wife died two months later, lived alone a few years, met a great lady, married and moved again. Change---It's the one thing we can count on. If we don't act first, circumstances will cause us to act, if we don't like change, we won't like life itself.
My wife's brother lives in ND, he grew up and continued to live in just one house until age 64, he recently moved to the small nearby town and thinks this is a major upset in life. It's all relative to the person experiencing change, the big change of course is waiting for us all, and for that reason we'd all be better off to let go of the past and live for the day, it's one of the major delights of being retired..Move on, be happy that you are in good health and can move on, many of my friends never made it to retirement, disease, stress, wars, alcoholism, and suicide, take their toll, and ultimately deny many their opportunity to change.
I still have a major project. I need to digitize all the photos and slides. They are all in one place, a huge cabinet behind my desk.
This is a huge project awaiting me. Actually, all my photos of the grandtwins (hundreds) are digitized and were never printed. Is there a service I can email them to for printouts at a reasonable cost/per?
Best of luck in this! Just remember that regardless of your precautions, it is easy to lose everything electronic. I recently lost over 5 TERABYTES of pictures, videos, sound files, etc. to a malicious virus that crashed through my firewall and anti-virus like it was nothing. 3 external hard drives and my main computer drive were irretrievably corrupted, leaving me with random DVD backups to piece some of my memories back together. Moral of the story? Don't toss the hard copies of priceless memories.
That's just terrible! My plan was to put everything on stick drives as a backup too.
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