Hi Ceej, my twin brother was a hoarder and his wife is still clearing out the house and his daughter has regularly come up from Ormskirk to help with the clearing,the radio sets he collected have mostly been sold(he was a radio ham and collected many war time radio sets, some out of Lancaster bombers and quite valuable) and while he lived there the place was unimaginable, radio sets, tools, bits of old clocks, clothes, plates of glass and enumerable unrelated bits and pieces strewn all over the floor to the extent that you had to be careful ware you walked, could not get to the back door and even the dog struggled to move about and it was hilarious to watch, my brother died from a brain tumor after a long, slow decline on the 4th September 2021, my mother died on the 5th January this year at home at the end of 4 years with dementia, I was her principle carer and my health was wrecked at the end of it to the point ware my GP put me under a mental health nurse used to dealing with battle field stress, apparently I Have a form of it, I suppose your mother dying in your arms on the stress level 1-10 is 11, enough about me, you have lost both parents are like me you are an orphan and for you from what you say the pain is not yet over, I am lucky in some ways, living with my mum in her house I have a roof over my head AND I do not have to clear the house out, I feel very sorry for you having to clear out your dads apartment with his partner going into dementia care, I suppose you will have to sell the house to pay for care, my mother wanted to pass away at home and I was available, I was determined she would not be left to die alone and what sort of son would I be if I had not done that for her?, it was the hardest thing I have ever done but I did it because it was the right thing to do, and with the help of others I was able to fulfill her wish, we were alone in the house when she passed, it was 2010 hours at night,I felt drained, exhausted and numb, I was in some sort of shock, the following days I just wanted to die in my sleeping bag and would have done so had I not been found, basically I am alone in the world with my old life gone forever, between 2012 and 2017 were the happiest years of my life, I went for direct cremation and return of the ashes followed by a service in April, her ashes are mounted in a casket on the lounge wall and form the center of a memorial to my family, there will always be a place for my mother,even if only her ashes, it is still her house,so often the ashes are put away at the back of a wardrobe or under a bed, until recently my brother was in a plastic bottle with a barcode on it, either they should be mounted properly and respectfully or scattered.I take it you are alone in the wrold?,life is not easy, and we all have are cross to bear, we all have one thing in common on this site, that is a need to reach out to others, we all have a form of bereavement depression or post bereavement depression and you are still coming to terms with the loss of your mother after two years, for me its 9 months and I have good days and bad days, some compare bereavement to getting over cancer, and yes, it can be like that, we can do a lot more about cancer then dementia(still a death sentence and kills more people then anything else, a dementia diagnoses is invariably a death sentence unless you die from something else along the way and at the end it is a crucifixion, you drown in your own fluids, clinically you die the death of christ, (I stepped up my mothers medication towards the end knowing what was coming, I did not want her to suffer)
Do not feel guilty about having to go through your parents effects, I know it feels tromatic, but it has to be done and is just one of those things, I have got rid of my mothers cloves (age uk) but I have kept most of the furniture, I have let the garden have its way this year having put a steel toe cap through my left foot and just after 2 days in hospital with cellulitis I was leading my mothers funeral including a 20 minute Eulogy that I did standing up, I carry on, as my mother would expect me to who at 95 grew up during the war and learnt about life at a very young age losing her cousin in the middle east on the 22nd May 1941 in the Crete operation, she was 13.
thinking about you.
Tim