As many of you now know, it has been a roller coaster of a year for me. My parents passed away within 57 days of each other. Next, we were compelled to empty out their house in very short order. You can read the initial installments of my ongoing odyssey here: Part 1 and Part 2.
Without going into detail as to why, we were given roughly one month to empty out our parents’ house. This was the home they had lived in for more than 40 years—with 72 years of marriage memories in it.
While our parents were not hoarders in the classic sense of the word, they did have a lot of stuff. My brother and I joked that their belongings were like Tribbles from Star Trek. For you non-Trekkies, tribbles are cute fuzzy creatures that are basically born pregnant and if you start with one, you will have dozens before you know it.
We would empty out a cabinet, and then find more stuff lurking behind it, and more stuff lurking behind that stuff. There seemed to be no end to their belongings. Every time we found a new surprise cache, we would yell out, “Tribbles.”
And we just did not have the luxury of time to go through their possessions to see what we wanted to keep or give away. Going through the house properly could easily have taken a year—given that we both had businesses to run and our own lives to live. Our sister offered to come in from California to help, but she already had come in for two funerals and two shivas, and she had a job as well, so we declined. Why mess up her life, too?
Because our parents kept kosher, they had several sets of dishes, utensils, and pots and pans as meat and dairy had to be separate. So there were meat and dairy sets for every day and meat and dairy sets for special occasions.
And then there was Passover meat and dairy for every day, and Passover meat and dairy for special occasions like a Seder. You cannot make this stuff up. In fact, I suspect kosher dishes were the inspiration for the “Friends” episode in which Monica’s towels were categorized into 11 types.
On top of that, our father—a retired rabbi—had a basement library with about 10,000 books in it, and much of that was Judaica, in Hebrew, English and Yiddish. Many books (thousands, in fact, as well as other objects) were considered holy and could not be thrown out. And I know Dad would never have wanted us to sell them, even if we could find buyers in that short window of time we had been given.
(Spoiler alert No. 1: Almost no one wants physical books anymore. Many synagogues and schools are closing their libraries because space is at a premium, and reading material is going online.)
There were also filing cabinets filled with papers, including sermons, articles and eulogies that Dad had written. What were we going to do?
A cousin of mine said, “Well, Esther, if you cannot clear things out by the deadline, you can always put the stuff in storage.” My knee-jerk reaction was, “Never going to happen.” (I don’t think he had a real sense of the sheer volume that had to be handled. Another cousin came to help me pack books one day, and her jaw dropped when she saw the size of the library. She had known my parents very well but had no idea what lurked below ground level.)
We knew we could not go the storage route, because then there would be no end to this, and we would be stuck with thousands of books and other objects forever, paying storage fees into perpetuity. Our lives would never be our own again.
The Honeymoon is Over
So get this: I was given the news that we had just a few weeks to empty out the house five days before Brian and I left on a 10-day honeymoon.
In a panic, I called my dear friend, Laurie, who had just retired. She said, “I have time. Go on your trip and I will do research while you’re gone.” And bless her, that’s exactly what she did. She created a well-organized Google Sheet with several tabs, and recorded all her research about where to get rid of things and whom she had already contacted.
In fact, Laurie engineered the sale and removal of Mom’s two pianos. There was a baby grand and an upright. (Spoiler alert No. 2: If you have an upright piano you want to ditch, good luck in getting rid of it.) The buyer was really interested in the baby grand only, and did us a favor by hauling away the upright as well.
Removing those two pianos was a great start, because it gave us more space with which to work.
But what about everything else?
Laurie had made a lot of phone calls while we were away (yes, she is my friend and nope, you cannot have her), trying to find charities that would accept (and better yet, pick up) clothes, furniture, dishes, and just about everything in the house. She had no luck (and that was no surprise, as I had decluttered at the beginning of the pandemic and had the same feedback) until Serendipity stepped in.
Laurie had called B’nai B’rith at the exact moment their staff were in the midst of arranging for the housing and settling of Ukrainian refugees. These unfortunate people needed everything. Two of these people were a man and his extremely pregnant wife. Score—for everyone involved.
The Ukrainian couple and their friends came over two nights in a row with a rented U-Haul truck and filled it each time with furniture, towels, dishes, and even some books and Judaica (I had no idea they were Jewish).
Mom’s cleaning lady wanted to take some items such as dishes and pots and pans to send to the Philippines. I told her, “Go for it.” Evidently, it is cheaper to send a crate of items to the Philippines (because it is a flat fee regardless of how full it is) than it is to buy them new there.
Another cousin of mine (I have quite a few) suggested that I post an announcement on a private Facebook group called Everything Jewish Toronto regarding Dad’s books, saying that we were giving them away to anyone who would use them and respect them (rather than re-sell them, which would have Dad rolling over in his grave).
Going through the house properly could easily have taken a year—given that we both had businesses to run and our own lives to live.
I called every rabbi I knew. The bottom line is that, over the next three weeks, most of the holy books were gone to students and clergy. And another cousin took all the boxes of Yiddish books to hold for yet another family member who was studying Yiddish.
I had boxed up the holy books that were left, and the rest of the books (the secular ones) were left on the library shelves for the time being.
Then a close friend of mine, visiting from overseas, stopped by, and he told me he could arrange for the removal of all the holy books I’d boxed up. Serendipity again.
The next phase was MaxSold, which arranges for online auctions in downsizing and estate sale situations. Their business model is fantastic: They came to the house exactly twice. The first time, the team arranged the possessions into groups or lots, labeled them, took photos and recorded descriptions. (The remaining secular books were included in those lots.)
After that, they uploaded the lots (including photos and descriptions) to their website for us to edit and approve. Once we approved, the auction went live and bidding took place over a number of days before the auction closed. After that, the team returned for the second visit to distribute the lots to those who had won their bids and paid with their credit cards. There were a couple of hiccups, but with more than 200 lots filled with tribbles, that was pretty darn good.
Serendipity played a role in this adventure a third time. A family friend reached out to me and asked me if I’d contacted the Ontario Jewish Archives (OJA). I replied that I had, and that they weren’t interested in the books. He answered, “Not the books…your dad’s writings. I’m sure they’ll want them.”
By this point, I was exhausted and ready to crack. I was behind on work. The deadline was looming. MaxSold had completed the auction and the pickup of the lots, and I was just about to make an appointment with Just Junk to throw out absolutely everything that was left. I told this friend that I had little hope of meeting them but sure, have them call me.
When the OJA person called me, I told her, “Look, I don’t want to be difficult, but I can’t keep spending entire days on end at this house and I’ve got to clear it out this week. I will be at the house tomorrow meeting with Just Junk.
I’m going to book an appointment with them for later in the week, and I won’t be back at the house before they come for that clear out. So if you can meet me at the house tomorrow, you can take whatever you want. But after tomorrow, it is all going to be junked.”
The long and the short of it is this: OJA people came to the house the very next afternoon with a ton of bankers boxes. Hours later, they hauled the boxes away, filled with articles, sermons, and eulogies, and also personal writings, such as letters Dad had written to his mother in Yiddish.
They also took framed photos of Dad’s school days in downtown Toronto, as there were over a hundred framed items that none of us kids had room to take.
Just Junk was the last step. Five strapping young guys, six truckloads, and three and a half hours was all it took. The house was empty. They were amazing.
Yes, I have kept photo albums and some framed items, but no one has room for that. So we have to get them digitized. And we each took a few mementos. Organizing those parental items currently in our basement is our next winter project.
Some time ago, I had heard of a concept known as döstädning, or Swedish death cleaning, and I remember thinking at the time that the term was quite off-putting. Now I know more about it: it’s based on the book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter” by Margareta Magnusson.
The author lost her mother and her husband, and she found going through all their possessions physically and emotionally taxing. (But I will bet she had more than a month in which to do it.) So “death cleaning” means getting rid of items you don’t need so that your loved ones don’t have to deal with it when you are dead.
There was so much my parents refused to deal with or talk about before they left us. Dealing with their tribbles was one of them. I wish we’d been able to do some kind of döstädning with them, but it wasn’t meant to be. If we had been able to do so, this crisis we faced, and the disruption to our personal and work lives, could have been avoided or at least minimized.
I promise now—in writing—that my children will not face the same kind of hell we did. I know better.
Esther Friedberg Karp is an internationally-renowned trainer, writer and speaker from Toronto, where she runs her QuickBooks consulting practice, EFK CompuBooks Inc. Consistently in Insightful Accountant's Top 100 ProAdvisors, she has been named to the Top 10 twice.
With the unique distinction of holding ProAdvisor certifications in the US, Canadian, UK, and International versions of QuickBooks, she has traveled the world with Intuit. She has spoken at conferences such as QuickBooks Connect, Scaling New Heights, and Future Forward, and has written countless articles for Intuit Global.
Esther has been named one of the “Top 50 Women in Accounting,” a “Top 10 Influencer” in the Canadian Bookkeeping World, and is a repeat nominee for the “RBC Canadian Women’s Entrepreneur Awards.” She counts among her clients many international companies, as well as accounting professionals seeking her out on behalf of their own clients for her expertise in multi-currency and various countries’ editions of QuickBooks Desktop and Online.
She can be reached at esther@e-compubooks.com or 416-410-0750.
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