The person sorting a loved one’s belongings must distinguish between what was treasured and what was merely never thrown away.

Sorting someone’s belongings makes you an interpreter of a life you only partly saw. Some things were loved and some were simply never dealt with, and the two look identical in a drawer. You end up guessing at meaning under time pressure and grief, and every guess feels like a judgment about what mattered to them. That difficulty is real, and it is not a failure of memory on your part.

Go slowly where you can, and give yourself permission not to decide about everything at once. A single box of undecided things is a legitimate outcome. And if you are able to, tell the people who will one day do this for you which few objects actually meant something.