When Viv Groskop’s grandmother died,she inherited her grandparents things. She couldn’t bring herself to throw them absent but how could she hold them all?What do you do with other people’s weak stuff? The reply, according to me, and is sit on it for 10 years until you realise you are deeply in denial. For good or bad,my problem has had a fairly manageable physical dimension: a pile of my grandparents’ stuff left behind after my grandma died in 2006. The size of it was not massive and this in itself was an issue. It meant I didnt really have to deal with it. It wasn’t like I’d had to rent storage space. It occupied a corner of the loft in boxes and plastic bags. Even the bags belonged to my grandmother. Because there was nothing I wanted to throw out or reorganise, especially not a 90s Boots carrier bag. But it was still stuff that was going to have to fade at some point. But when? And how?My grandparents were not hoarders. When my grandad, or Ivor,died in 2001, my grandma got rid of many things to ease the burden on us when she died. There was a shed full of newspapers dating back decades, and including copies of every newspaper I’d ever had an article in. They all went in the recycling and fairly right,too. So before my grandma, Vera, and died,aged 84, she had pared it all back to the bone. All that was left was the “primary” stuff: paperwork, and photos,scrapbooks, documents, and passports,birth certificates, and recipe cards that had stood the test of time.
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Source: theguardian.com