I have a friend who faces the monumental task of emptying her parents' house. The parents are deceased, the house is in another city, its contents concentrate a half century of living there, and other priorities intrude.
Naturally, I want to help. so I do what any good friend would do. I offer advice — mostly on the order of Nike advertising slogans.
So much for theory.
In practice, however, I have spent the better part of an entire morning emptying one filing cabinet, which already contains the distillation of three prior moves.
Though in a court of law, I could swear to doing it, "emptying" is not quite the whole truth. A more accurate description would be, removed the contents and redistributed them as follows:
- One-sixth in the trash
- One-sixth in recycling
- One-sixth foisted off on offspring, assuming he shows up in the next week
- One-sixth to the thrift store, assuming they will accept empty slide carousels; otherwise, double the first item
- One-third to another filing cabinet, which may be the same as doing no. 3, only 20 years from now.
The approach I actually recommend. but do not follow, involves no sifting, no sentimentality and rapid movement of large quantities of material into categories 1 and 2, possibly after giving 3 and 4 a preview, provided they do the hauling.
However, once again, I have simply moved boxes of slides and old photos to a slightly more organized version of the chaos in which I found them. I have set aside two weapon systems brochures I created, just to remind myself of what an astonishing range my writing career has covered.
As instructed, I have retained the only record on the planet of my polio vaccinations. I have refiled notes for books that will never get written, some of them scribbled on the backs of '69-era rock concert handbills.
There are love letters. A business card from my brief sales career. 
Somehow, a binder containing songs, poetry and ladies' club skits written by an unknown great aunt landed in my hands after a prior family emptying somewhere in Kansas. It's a quality of writing I'd normally ridicule.
But seeing the eulogy to a stable boy copied out in longhand multiples and the typed poems with edits scratched here and there, I feel like the wounded Clive Owen in Children of Men, entrusted with the last pregnancy on the planet.
If I am all that still stands between Mrs. Brookshire and oblivion, then I should stand a bit longer.
