Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them? Patricia Marx, The New Yorker, February 21, 2022 online Kids have no interest in the loot amassed by their materialistic boomer parents. Illustration by Anna Haifisch Lately, I, a maximalist, have been yearning to be […]
A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything
“This allows us the illusion of being minimalist. We’ve substituted spiritual clutter for stacks of paper.”
“I have seen many changes in the way older adults are cared for over the years, mainly focusing on patient-centered care. Also, there are now more housing options, programs for travel, volunteering and socialization.”
By: Jane Oderburg, Generations (American Society on Aging) , January-February 2022
I have worked in the field of geriatric social work for 40 years in a variety of settings: senior center, nonprofit mental health organizations, private psychiatric hospitals, assisted living, long-term care, dementia-specific facilities and a cancer nonprofit. When I was in grad school, there weren’t any courses focusing on geriatrics, so I learned by attending workshops, conferences and reading as often as I could. I found I had a preference for dementia patients and their families/caregivers and developed several training programs for family and professional caregivers.
I have seen many changes in the way older adults are cared for over the years, mainly focusing on patient-centered care. Also, there are now more housing options, programs for travel, volunteering and socialization. Of course, people are living longer than before, and most are living an active lifestyle. There were no separate…
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“I got into this many years ago because I saw the elderly being taken advantage of, especially those with dementia,” Julie Hall, the director of the American Society of Estate Liquidators and a thirty-year veteran of the estate-sale business, told me. In one of her numerous books, which include “Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind” and “What Am I Going to Do with All My STUFF?,” she describes a woman with Alzheimer’s whose friends and neighbors, hearing that she was going to be institutionalized, showed up at her house and began looting the place. “What I witnessed,” Hall wrote, “was like watching a vulture strip a bone.”
The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.
By Lizzie Feidelson, January 7, 2022, The New Yorker
An estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead. If the owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms interchangeably. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house. A recent widow, she wandered through the rooms, dazed, dressed in a fringed denim vest.
The house was a beige Colonial-style four-bedroom with prim hedges and a small, sloping lawn. I arrived thirty minutes early, but a…
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Cpeanose 