Hanging on to old stuff ... I've had a lot of experience with both hanging onto it and waving goodbye. At this stage of my life, there is a lot of stuff. But hanging onto to it all has some unintended consequences ...

My former husband's mother died in a fire in her home more than 35 years ago. Her husband couldn't face the task, so my husband and I spent three or four days sorting through water-soaked photographs, years-old receipts and other financial papers, stacks of records, 78s and 45s, welded together from the heat of the fire -- simply unbelievable amounts of the flotsam and jetsam of a lifetime.

They'd lived in the house for more than 30 years and as far as I could tell, never threw anything away. Trying to sort what was important from what wasn't was a monumental job. So much of it was wet, soaking wet, and every bit of it reeked of smoke and flame.

We literally waded through ankle-deep water in the ravaged house, dodging the plaster that occasionally dropped from the ceiling. We wore boots, jeans and sweatshirts, all of which we threw into the trash when we were done.

All that remained of their lifetime together fit easily into a small panel truck. We loaded it up and drove from Chicago to our Wisconsin home, where we dragged box after box into the basement and laid all of it out to dry. As we had time in the ensuing months, we sorted it all again and more or less organized it, no easy task.

There is nothing like the smell of smoke -- absolutely nothing. It curls into your nose, drifts onto your hair, your clothes and your skin, lingering in a way like nothing else. And it was a sad job, too, linked to a family death that was horrifying.

It was my first experience with culling and keeping, and I will never forget it.

Years later, my parents moved from their longtime home to a retirement community. They solved the problem of what to move by throwing away absolutely nothing. They moved it all -- every single thing -- to their new home and stashed it in boxes under the bed, in boxes in the closets, wherever a place could be found, in the smallest nook or cranny. They didn't discriminate at all in what was placed in each box and none of them were labeled as to contents.

And then my father died, eight or so years later, followed less than a year after by one of my brothers (who lived with them), and in another few short years, my mother.

When the house was almost empty and ready to be sold, my sister and surviving brother and I systematically scoured the attic and the rest of the house, hauling out those boxes and boxes and more boxes of stuff, going through them looking for what to cull and what to keep.

We had to go through every single item in every single box, in order not to throw away something vital, something valuable, something of interest or sentiment. And we didn't have a lot of time in which to do that.

We quickly learned that the indiscriminate way in which all of it was packed into those boxes made it a very daunting task. Every box had to be opened, every item looked at. We found photographs mixed in with jewelry, other jewelry mixed in with medical records … we shredded box after box of old documents and older receipts and tossed outdated magazines and ancient newspapers.

We gave things away, had two garage sales and an estate sale, and eventually reduced it all to what still seems like a mountain of things. Even after bringing some items to our respective homes, there is more to deal with.

The largest portion of it remains, stored at my sister's North Carolina home, awaiting the day when we can manage some time together to (we hope) start the keep/cull dance again and bring it to a happy end.

All three of us have gotten into the habit of signing off email and phone calls saying, "You know, we've really got to get together and finish that job!"

It's been almost two years since my mother died, and we're not much closer today to getting it done than we were then. We're anxious to reduce those many boxes of a lot of things to maybe just a few boxes of far fewer things that are really important and really worth keeping.

But -- on the positive side -- all of that culling and keeping has improved my ability to let go of my own things with less angst.

I try to keep three key questions in my head as I consider each item: "Do I really need this? Could someone else put it to better use? Or is it something that I don't want and no one else wants, either?"

I have realized only recently that those three "key" questions are being asked too late. At some point in the future, someone else will be looking at everything I once owned, and asking the same questions.

It would be better, I'm certain, to ask those questions before I put my money down to buy something I'll be looking at a few years hence myself, wondering whatever possessed me to acquire it and keep it in the first place, and also wondering if anyone else will care when I'm gone.

Deciding what to keep and what to toss is very difficult, but it all boils down to one very simple rule.

Keep the things of value, but realize that "value" isn't always measured in dollars. Hang on to those things whose value is measured in love and family connection, in memories you will treasure long after the person who once owned them is gone.

So I'll keep the tiny photograph of my mother in her twenties, sandwiched between two thick pieces of glass, only two inches by two inches, that my father carried through Europe and Africa during World War II.

I'll keep my mother's favorite cobbler dish and the American flags that draped my father's and my brother's caskets at their funerals. And the photographs -- I'll keep those, too.

Everything else … well, everything else is just stuff.