Letting Go when Emotional Attachments are High

This is a personal story and one I hope will help anyone clearing out after loosing a loved one.

I received a text message from an unknown number last week. Inside it, a photo of a rocking horse we sold six months ago. It was one of the toughest items we parted with in the clean-out of our family home, but also the most symbolic. The buyer had messaged to update me on all the TLC she'd given him since.  A new saddle, new tail, new bridle, washed, waxed, polished and cared for. "I just love him," she wrote. "Remember, I named him Banjo, in memory of my grandfather."

I didn't expect a rocking horse to be the thing that taught me how to let go. But it was.

We finished clearing my parents' house earlier this year. Three years after my mum passed away. Eighteen years after my dad. In the gap between those two goodbyes, my brother and I quietly became the custodians of two entire lives' worth of belongings, and more. Both my parents were only children who'd inherited from their own parents, and from aunties who never had children of their own to leave things to. My dad kept everything. I mean that literally. Things like a typed memo about his mother's employment status, decades old, carefully filed away as if it might be needed one day. He moved house more times than I can count in his life, and still, somehow, none of it was ever left behind, never disposed of.

So when he and then my mum were gone, all of it became ours to hold. At times it was nostalgic, looking through everything, an insight into parts of their lives we’d heard stories about and others that made us curious about stories we’d never been told. But of course, other times, it was a weight. A house and garage full of decisions we had to make, along with the fear of making the wrong one, but not realising any decision about ‘stuff’ isn’t necessarily wrong.

If you've done this, sat in a house that used to be full of people who loved you, trying to work out what to do with everything they left behind, I don't need to explain the particular kind of angst it is. It's not just the physical work of it, though there's plenty of that. It's the quieter ache of holding an object in your hands and trying to feel your way into what it meant to someone who isn't here to tell you anymore. And then the harder question underneath that one: even if I knew exactly what this meant to them, does it mean anything to me?

My brother asked me something during the clean up, as I held up an old vase neither of us wanted but I was ready to put in the keep pile. "Are you just keeping this to make it someone else's problem when you die?" It may sound harsh, reading it, but it was true, and once he said it, I couldn't stop asking myself that same question about almost everything in that house.

Because here's what nobody really tells you going in: the people who love us and keep our things safe are not always the same as the people who need those things to keep living. My parents did something genuinely special, holding onto all of this for so long. But safekeeping isn't the same as belonging. At some point, everything they'd protected needed permission to go and be loved again.  Properly, actively, by someone who'd actually choose it.

The long goodbye

We took our time with the house. Three years, to be exact. There were good reasons for that, and I don't regret them. But I want to be honest about what that slowness cost us too, because having all that time also meant we never had to decide. It was like running a storage unit we didn't need to think about. And strangely, the longer I sat with certain pieces, the less certain I became, not more. Time didn't make the letting go easier. It just gave me more chances to change my mind, and more chances to feel guilty about whichever way I leaned.

I’d sit there holding something waiting for a sign. A door would keep opening and closing, a light would flicker, a song would come on, but it wasn’t the decision-making nudge I needed. These subtle messages felt more like ‘let it go’, not ‘hold it tight’.

If you're in the middle of this right now, I don't think there's a right pace. Slow can be a real gift, the space to actually feel what you're doing instead of rushing past it. But it can also be a very soft, very forgivable way of avoiding the goodbye altogether. And I think we did a bit of both. Every weekend, trying to make the decision if we were going to enter the house of endless decisions!

Letting go, one layer at a time

The easy things went first. The functional, the everyday Ikea and Kmart pieces that never asked anything of us emotionally. Garage sales, donations, whoever wanted them.

Then the expensive things that still didn't hold much sentimental weight. Surprisingly easy too. Money was never really part of any of this. It was about making sure everything found a new home.

Then came the old things. The cameras dad had loved, the model cars he played with as a child, the rocking horse purchased by our grandma, mum’s jewellery, the crystal, tea sets, shelves of books. This is where it slowed right down, and where the decisions became the hardest. Part of me wanted to hold onto almost all of it, on instinct, long before I let myself ask the honest question underneath: what would I actually do with it? Would it live, or would it just move from one box to another?

The parting that changed everything

Let me take you back to the rocking horse, because I think it's where this whole story really turns. It was 2 and a half years into the clean up when we finally decided we needed to let it go.

It was bought for my brother the year he was born. Rare, beautiful. A locally made, unique piece. It needed real work to shine again. When I first listed it, collectors circled with low offers, telling me that it wasn't worth much, hoping I'd believe them and let it go cheap. My brother wouldn’t accept a low offer. We held off. And then a message came through from a woman who had genuinely been searching for a horse like this one for a long time, not to sell it on, not to add to a collection, but because she longed for one in her home. I let her make an offer. We said yes. When she came to collect it, she was overjoyed! When she arrived home she messaged me to let me know he was proudly sitting in her home and she’d named him Banjo. Heart burst.

For her, it was the one she'd been hoping for. For the collectors, it would have been just one more thing in a pile.

I let it go with more peace than I thought I'd feel. That horse had sat in our garage for years, unseen, unplayed with, unloved and now someone was finally going to give it a life. Six months on, she's still sending updates. That was the moment I understood what all of this actually was. Not the loss of my parents' things. Just my brother and I, finally letting those things find the people who were ready to love them properly.

Next, were my dad’s model cars. Three containers full of vintage model pieces, half-finished cars and boxes from his childhood. I’m sure you can imagine the heartache of letting these go, but if we held on to them they would have literally sat in storage. There was no motivation from either of us to learn how to make them. The young man that bought them, glasses, softly spoken, reminded me so much of a young version of my dad. He told me he was just getting back into modelling after years away from it. Later, he messaged to say how stoked he was with everything he'd found in the boxes and sent a photo of a car he'd since finished building. My heart was so full.

And then there was my mum's painting. Three flowers, hung above her bed, that she had personally painted. I ended up giving this to a neighbour who'd always tell me how much she loved and missed my mum. She told me three was her lucky number. That she had threes of everything, all through her life and home. I don't think you can plan for a moment like that. You can only notice it when it arrives, and let it quietly convince you that you're doing right by the people you've lost.

There were so many other moments like this. People purchasing mum’s artwork at garage sales for their nursery. The people moving into their first home, purchasing furniture and we’d throw in extras to get them started. Gifting mum’s craft supplies to friends that we know would bring them to life in a way mum had once planned. So many partings filled with gratitude. Their things were reigniting hobbies, building new dreams and becoming pieces of pride in new homes.

What I couldn't let go of

I didn't keep much, in the end. But what I kept, I kept with my whole heart.

There's a Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66 record, the one that fills the room with a kind of nostalgia I don't fully have words for. There's my dad's camera, and a set of his binoculars, sitting out in my living room now instead of boxed away somewhere. There's my grandmother's costume jewellery, pearls and brooches and vintage bracelets I used to raid from her boxes when I was thirteen years old. There's my mum's charm bracelet, one charm added every year by my dad, for every anniversary they shared. There's a punch bowl set from the '70s, an engagement gift, present at every party our family ever threw (including my own 18th and 21st) that I already know I'll bring out again. A red kaftan that mum wore in the 70s and a ruffle blouse she purchased when working one of her first jobs at a boutique in Footscray. And there's all the crystal that I never planned on keeping, until I actually held them properly, maybe for the first time in my life, and realised I loved them.

It aches a little, thinking about how long some of these things sat in storage, even while my mum was still alive, replaced on the bench by whatever was ‘on trend’ at the time. I remember, embarrassingly, thinking how daggy some of it was. My mum used to say, half joking, that she'd need to find someone else to take the good crockery and the crystal, because she already knew neither of us would want it. We, like so many of us, absorbed, somewhere along the way, that new and disposable was worth more than old and made with care. It took losing her, and spending months of indecisiveness, to finally see them clearly again.

What less taught me about more

When there's a lot of something, it's almost impossible to really see any single piece of it. It just becomes noise, background, clutter you've stopped registering. But strip it back, down to only the things that earned their place, and suddenly everything you kept means something. I see these pieces before I fall asleep. I see them when I walk in the door at the end of a long day. They're not stored away for later, waiting for a version of me that might appreciate them someday. They're just here, now, being beautiful, being used, being part of my actual life.

If you're in the middle of this too, clearing a home that used to hold the people you loved most, trying to work out what deserves to come with you and what doesn't, I don't think there's a fast way through it, and I'm not sure there should be. But I can tell you this much, from the other side of it: the things you're most afraid to let go of might be exactly what someone else has been quietly hoping to find. And the things you find yourself holding onto, the ones that become more beautiful the more you hold them, those might be the ones worth building a home around.

You realise, too, that the real memories were never in the stuff. They're held deep in your heart, kept alive through the stories you tell and keep telling. The photos you look back on, the photos you share.

You were never meant to be the custodian of all of it, forever. You just get to be the one who decides, with love, where it goes next.

And now, as I look around my house, I'm grateful for the little touches — the things I've finally given value to, because of what they mean to me personally. Not because they were someone else's things I thought I was supposed to hold onto.