Death Cleaning: A Gift You Leave Behind

Imagine this. After your cremation, part of the cremation services offered in Beltsville, MD, your family goes to your home to begin the process of taking care of the final details that need to be attended to after your death.

This was the home you and your spouse settled into as a final destination and where your children spent their formative years until they left the nest for college and then careers that took them all over the country or the world. This was the home where the entire immediate family, and often extended family as well, gathered for milestone events and for holidays.

Overall the time you lived there, you accumulated stuff. Some of this stuff has monetary value, has sentimental value, or is heirlooms that your family will want to keep. But the odds are good that much of the stuff in your home could have been thrown away or given away before you died.

Now your family has the task of deciding what should stay and what should go and then actually getting rid of the stuff that goes. They have a lot of work ahead of them, and that work may be accompanied by dilemmas and unnecessary stress as they go through the process of decluttering your home.

Now come back to the present, to this moment right now while you’re still alive. Is this the ideal scenario that you imagine for your family after you die? If it’s not, and for most of us, it isn’t, then now is the time to start doing something about it.

Before you go into overdrive and start throwing or giving everything away in a decluttering spread, you need to make a smart plan that takes into account the things in your home that you or your family may want to or should keep.

If you have family members close by, enlist their help in going from room to room to make an inventory and to decide what should be and shouldn’t be kept. If none of your immediate family lives close enough to help with this project, then enlist the help of a close friend.

You may find things that you don’t personally want to keep, but maybe something that one of your family members might want. This is a good way to start talking with your family about your own end-of-life planning. For those items, let your family know what you’re doing and give them the opportunity to get those things.

Be sure, however, to put a reasonable time limit – perhaps the next time they plan to visit – on how long you will keep it for them, and let them know that you will give or throw it away once that time limit has been reached.

If you have things that you have already decided to leave for certain family members, go ahead and give those things to those family members while you are alive. This will make it easier on the executor of your will or the trustee for your revocable trust, in terms of distributing inheritance items, after you die. It can also eliminate a lot of conflict among your family over stuff.

Once you know what you need to get rid of, then, on a room-by-room basis, gather together what will be thrown away and what will be given away (many charities will pick all these items up, so you don’t need to take them anywhere).

For things that you have to take somewhere to donate or that are being thrown away, you can easily set a goal of one garbage bag of each a week from one room at a time. In the course of a year, you could easily give or throw away 104 bags of clutter and have your decluttering completed.

If you want more information about cremation services offered in Beltsville, MD, you can talk with our expert staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A. You can drop by our funeral home at 4400 Powder Mill Rd., Beltsville, MD, 20705, or you can contact us today at (301) 937-1707.