Family photos for estranged relatives

[iris lilies]

Brooke responded promptly to my offer to send these photos saying “That would be nice. Send themto ....[address.]

I will mail her the quilt as well, since her response was fast and positive.

There is a family ring that technically she shoild get being the eldest of that generation, but I am not done wearing it. She doesnt get it—yet.

[catherine]

I heard an interesting mental exercise once -

imagine that a fire burns your home to the ground, when you and your family and pets were out of town. No one died. All you have left is your suitcase and it’s contents. How do you feel?

Your feelings are quite telling. If it’s a sense of relief - then you should feel no guilt about any downsizing or decluttering that you choose to do.

That was a real-life exercise for my mother. She suffered an aneurysm, had a protracted rehabilitation, and during that time my uncle and I moved all her stuff into his barn. A short time later he handed me a small insurance check ($1000) and told me the barn had burned down and so had all of the contents. Nothing was saved. (I have questioned the accuracy of that story over the years, to be honest).

My mother came out of her illness and I had to tell her that she had nothing. I also lost stuff I would have eventually inherited--many beautiful furnishings from my ancestors. I lost my wedding gown, which was stored at my mother's house and moved to the barn with everything else. Family photos gone--poof!

So I've already BTDT once, and if it happened to me as it did to my mother, I know I would be more relieved than grieved.

[Zoe Girl]

I’m having this problem in spades. I’m in the middle of a divorce. We had 40 years of photos - prints, slides, negatives, digital archives of some, iCloud photo stream from the whole family’s phones for a dozen years.

How do you even begin with this sort of thing? It’d be a monumental effort even to sort through it.

Yes take time. I eventually went through and scanned the photos on a disk to my ex before I did a big move. I also worked in a photo lab. I would do what you need to do, display it, box it, only put up pictures without her, change any furniture that you hated or rearrange, plant some vegetable she always hated in the garden. Not out of anger but out of reclaiming your space.

The best day was when my ex got his 2 bank boxes of physics notes from college out of the house,