Three weeks after the funeral my sister-in-law asked, in the kindest possible voice, whether I had "started on the closet yet." I had not. I had been sitting in the house for twenty-one days doing essentially nothing, which felt like failure, and her question turned it into failure with a witness. So the next morning I opened the closet and started pulling shirts off hangers, and I want to tell you plainly: that was the wrong thing to do first, and it cost me the better part of a year.
There is an order to this. Nobody hands it to you. Everyone who loves you will have an opinion about the closet, because the closet is the visible thing, and almost none of them will mention the envelope from the pension office that has a sixty-day window on it.
Here is the order I would give someone now, three years out, having done it badly the first time.
This is the first step and it is not what anyone expects, because it is the least emotional thing in the house and grief tells you the emotional things are the urgent ones. They are not. They are the ones that can wait a year, and they will wait patiently. A pension election window will not.
In the first month, look only for things with dates: life insurance claim forms, pension and Social Security notifications, anything from an employer's benefits office, the vehicle registration, the property tax bill, the health insurance letters. Put them in one box — not a filing system, a box — and deal with the dated ones in date order.
I missed a window on a small survivor benefit through his union because the letter came in week two and I opened my mail in week nine. It was not a fortune. It was also entirely avoidable, and I still think about it, which is exactly the kind of thing you do not need to be carrying.
Ask one person to help with this and only this. It is the one part of the job where a practical friend is more use than a close one.
Second, not because it matters more, but because it is bleeding.
Subscriptions, the second phone line, the storage unit, the gym, the truck insurance on a truck nobody is driving. His phone bill ran eleven months past his death because I could not make myself cancel the number, and I do not entirely regret that — I called it twice, late, just to hear the voicemail — but eleven months was more than I meant to buy.
If a thing is costing you monthly and giving you nothing, cancel it. If a thing is costing you monthly and giving you something, even something you cannot explain to your children, keep it a while longer and know that you are choosing it. The difference between those two is the whole point.
Third, and this one surprises people.
The kitchen has almost nothing personal in it and it is the room you cannot avoid. Getting it into a shape that works for one person — moving the everyday plates down to where you can reach them, putting away the big serving pieces, letting yourself use his mug or putting it out of sight, whichever one you can stand — makes the house habitable while the rest of it is still frozen.
It is also practice. You will move one small object of his and survive it, and that is genuinely useful information to have before you get to step six.
The medications go to the pharmacy take-back. The things in the refrigerator and the freezer that he bought get thrown out, and yes, that is harder than it sounds, and yes, you should still do it. If there were oxygen tanks or a hospital bed or rented equipment, arrange the pickup.
Do this within the first six weeks. Not because of tidiness — because every one of those objects is a small ambush waiting in a cupboard for a Tuesday when you are doing fine.
Fifth, and here is where I would slow you down.
This is usually where the family starts asking. A brother wants the good saw, a nephew wants the fishing gear, and their asking is not greed — it is grief looking for something to hold. But once a workshop is dispersed you cannot reassemble it, and you will not know for months which single object was the one that mattered.
What I did, on advice from a widow at church who had done this twice: I walked into his workshop with a notebook and wrote down every category, and then I took one thing out of it and put it in the house. One. A folding rule with his handwriting on the back. Everything else stayed shut for a year, and when I finally opened it up I gave nearly all of it away easily, and kept the rule.
Sixth. Not first. Sixth.
By the time you get here you will have made a hundred small decisions and you will be better at it. Do it with one person, not four. Do it in the morning, not the evening. Set a stopping time before you begin and honor it even if you are "doing fine," because doing fine at eleven and crying at two on the closet floor is a very common shape for that particular day.
Keep more than you think you should. There is no rule that says three shirts is healthy and nine is denial. I kept a jacket that smells like nothing now and I still have it and it is not a problem.
And whatever you do, do not let anyone talk you into doing this in week three because they are uncomfortable watching you sit still.
Last. Deliberately last, and possibly not for years.
These are the only things in the house that will never become easier to deal with by being dealt with early. Everything else on this list gets simpler with distance. The letters get richer with it. There is no deadline on a shoebox of photographs, and the version of you that opens it in year three is a better reader than the one who would have opened it in month two.
I opened his nightstand box last October. It had a ticket stub, two of our daughter's school pictures, and a list in his handwriting of things to do to the house that I had never seen. I did four of them last spring. That would have been unbearable in the first year and it was a good week in the third.
Starting with the closet did not just hurt more. It made everything after it harder, because I had used up the reserve I needed for the paperwork on something that had no deadline at all. I spent that autumn feeling like I was behind on things, and I was, but on the wrong things.
If someone asks you when you are going to "start on the closet," you are allowed to say: not yet, I am doing the parts with dates on them first. You will sound organized. What you will actually be is protected.
People will tell you things in the first six months. Nearly all of it is offered with love and some of it is actively unhelpful, and it is difficult to sort them at the time because they arrive in the same warm voice.
"Do it all at once, like pulling off a bandage." Said to me by a cousin who had never done it. The bandage metaphor assumes the pain is in the anticipation. It is not — the pain is in the deciding, and there are several hundred decisions in a house. Doing them all in one weekend does not shorten the pain, it concentrates it past what you can carry, and you make worse choices at hour nine than at hour one. Almost everything I regret giving away, I gave away on a day when I was trying to be efficient.
"Don't make any decisions for a year." The opposite error, and it is the one in every advice column. It is good counsel about the house and the town and the money. It is bad counsel about a pension election window, a truck insurance policy, and a freezer full of food. The blanket version of this rule is how I missed the union benefit — I had been told, repeatedly, by people I trusted, that I was not supposed to be dealing with paperwork yet.
"He would have wanted you to." Occasionally true and mostly a way of ending a conversation. Nobody who says it knows. I found it easier once I started answering, mildly, that I did not think he had an opinion about the garage.
"Let the children take what they want now." This one is tempting because it feels generous and it clears space. But adult children in month two are grieving too, and they will ask for things they do not want and fail to ask for the one thing they will want in five years. My daughter took a box of his records in March and gave them back in September. What worked better: I photographed the workshop and the shelves before I touched anything, sent the pictures to both of them, and told them nothing was going anywhere for a year.
Order more death certificates than you think you need. Ten, not three. Every institution wants an original and several will not give it back. I ordered three, then had to order more twice, each time with a wait, and each wait held up something else in the sequence.
Write down what you gave away and to whom. A cheap notebook, one line per item. Not for legal reasons — because in the second year you will suddenly want to know where the good binoculars went and you will not remember, and that small unanswerable question will occupy an entire evening. I started mine in month five and wish I had started it in week one.
The paperwork was finished in the first four months, which is roughly the pace it demanded. The workshop took fourteen months. The closet — the thing I started with, badly, in week three — I finally finished properly in the second spring, and it took one morning and was not the ordeal it had been the first time, because by then I had had a year of practice at deciding.
The nightstand box is still on the shelf in the hall. I have opened it twice. There is no step eight, and I have stopped waiting for one.
She kept the paperwork — that is why it held up.
Are your own documents where someone could find them?