One day we all end up dying.
Then depending on where you are at in life, someone is going to go through all your stuff. They are going to have to make decisions on what parts of your legacy get kept and what parts are thrown away. As they go through your items, they will find literally everything you had, the secrets and all.
After a long process of waiting I got my grandfather’s death certificate after 3.5 months.
The delay feels ludicrous but apparently Quebec has had a surplus in deaths and death certificates are backlogged.
I honestly don’t know how to feel about that. It’s kind of weird the bureaucratic process of death is delayed over too many deaths. Shouldn’t government staffing have projection charts and an ability to hire more people to deal with this crucial service?
Either way I spent a good chunk of today going through my grandfather’s stuff.
Vacating an apartment on a timeline creates real opportunity costs
Given our circumstances we will have to have the place empty by May 31 or June 30.
The nice lady at the Longueuil housing lady is going to see what bureaucracy magic she can do for us. If all goes well we need to have everything out by the end of the month. As I was looking at his possessions it became real clear how little time that is.
In Longueuil, garbage is picked up every 2 weeks.
I am still not sure if our deadline is May 31 or not, this will likely be revealed to me next week.
It will cost us 500$ to keep the place for another month. The question becomes can we actually sell 500$ worth of furniture in the following month. In all fairness it would probably need to be 750$ worth to make up for time and headaches.
While there are a couple of nice things, transport and storage become real questions.
There’s no space at my place for the furniture, unless someone else can hold onto these items, we’ll have to take storage fees into account.
That’s just the furniture.
Paperwork, valuable item, sentimental item or trash?
My mission today was to make sure we could move the furniture out to the trash area tomorrow (shoutout Chris Chrome for voluntolding himself).
A lot of the shelves and other furniture had stuff all over it. There is a kitchen full of dishes and cookware. There are clothing items and all kinds of paperwork.
There’s also a lot of Wish jewellery.
As I picked up each item I had to make the decision to keep the item or chuck it.
I threw out about 10 garbage bags worth of trash, donateables and recyclables.
Certain items looked like they could be valuable. Like the random leaf blower he has. That’s worth keeping, we can store that and flip it easy enough.
His plates were just regular plates. Those plates went to the donationable goods pile. Most of his clothing will end up in a donation box too.
There is an assortment of tools and trinkets. Most of these can fit into a box or a container. These can all be easily reviewed later.
I kept most of the paperwork. I confess I saw no value in keeping his 2006 car repair receipts, but anything that looked like anything is in a box ready to be reviewed. You never know if there’s some hidden account we should be aware of.
Still item by item I had to decide if this is something worth keeping.
It made me wonder what people are going to say when they go through all my stuff one day.
The distribution of dead person items is a logistical bore
My best solution was to make a Google Doc file with a list of everything noteworthy that got kept.
There’s some cool stuff like a vintage camera, with lenses and everything. There’s a tent. There are canes and some medical stuff.
Family members who want particular items can claim them. To be honest I’m not sure how we decide that. I’m just trying to make sure we can get his apartment empty with some half decent documentation.
Apparently the fridge and stove are also his. Those are a couple of hundred dollars if we can flip them. The problem is that’s a lot of ifs.
Tomorrow after we chuck all the furniture, we’ll take pictures of the fridge, stove and wooden furniture that apparently can’t go with the normal garbage. Then we hope that Marketplace produces some buyers.
Whatever noteworthy items that people don’t want, that I can store by myself, I will sell.
The gamble with online selling is there’s no guarantee people will want it. Marketplace is flooded with bookshelves, computer desks and other furniture items.
Most of his furniture wouldn’t sell, so alas we get to go throw that out tomorrow.
It was interesting learning about some of his habits
He used to keep the plastic things that are used to hold bread bags closed.
I found a bunch of them. I did recycle them but I got to wondering if he was recycling them or just collecting them for some other reason. What if someone else just threw them in the trash, just wasting his effort.
He had these mini stockpiles that clearly came from some special or another that was too good to resist. He had 11 lbs of butter in his freezer as an example. He also liked orange scented Palmolive dish soap.
Or maybe that scent was on sale too.
He has all these tapes and vinyls. Music was a big part of his life. He once even printed out custom jewel case cd liners.
I picture him macking on women with custom mix CDs, down to the fancy liners.
My grandfather and I were not close. I made an effort to see him a bunch before he died. But I will never really know who he was.
He did live an entire life full of adventures. He even owned a club at one point. Since I never took the time to learn his stories, I’ll never really know more than the relics we have left.
Or what we choose to keep and remember.
Live Long and Prosper Everyone
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