Ask before treating a lifetime’s belongings as an obvious problem to solve.

What looks like clutter from the doorway may be a working system, a set of decisions somebody made on purpose, or the last physical evidence of people who are gone. The urge to sort it is usually genuine care mixed with your own discomfort at how it looks, and those two feel identical from inside.

Ask what an area is for before offering to help with any of it. Then let the pace be theirs, including on the days when nothing gets decided.