‘I feel like I’m cancelling out her life’: the wrenching work of clearing out a parent’s home

From old love letters to pieces of string, our homes are stuffed with stuff. When it comes time to empty a parent’s home, sorting the junk from the memory can be overwhelming Soon after her marriage in 1952, Ellen Rogers’ mother, Fay, bought a coordinated bedroom ensemble – a floral dressing gown and matching bedspread.

The day I talk on the phone with Rogers, she has made a tough decision – she is putting the gown and bedspread in a garbage bag to be sent off to a charity shop. “I feel so bad,” she says. Fay died in May aged 97, and had lived in the same terrace house in Camperdown in inner Sydney her whole life. Rogers grew up in the house and returned three years ago to be a…