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

‘My apartment has become a museum of family stuff and stories. Once, I couldn’t bear to let the stuff go; now I feel suffocated by it.’ Illustration: Victoria Hart

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 live-in carer for her mother. Now she’s cleaning out the house so it can be sold. The decisions she must make are endless; which pile for what item – family, rubbish or charity? “It’s overwhelming – there’s so much,” Rogers says, “including every bloody card she ever received.”