@AussieRecharger, treating myself as gently as possible in the circumstances. Both Hubby and myself are finding we're very "scatterbrained" and losing our train of thought easily. Both kinda flat and stressed at the same time, and I'm not sleeping well. My "self care" time is generally getting out in the garden, or online relax time.
We've needed to do things like hunting down some photos- there was one in particular we wanted that we couldn't find. It was a both a relief and a bit sad when I found it, because I'd put it with some important paperwork relating to my Dad when he was the very unwell one a year or so ago, and we thought we might be organising his funeral. Hubby needs to put together a eulogy, but his Dad is organising the majority of the funeral details.
The emptying and selling of my Mum and Dad's house isn't a clash of values problem. Both my sister and I want it off our minds, but my main reason for being on the forum is our Older Daughter's severe, long term and uncertainly-diagnosed MI. She's adult, doesn't live with us, but does sometimes need high level support from us. We've been supporting her through multiple SA and SH incidents (literally hundreds of) plus other mental health issues and physical (?) health problems (which may or may not be psychological in origin, or "amplified" by her MI- we literally don't know).
My sister lives near us, but works full time, so we've all been trying to juggle in little opportunities to make that 400k trip to visit our parents and sort their house. And it wasn't a tidy house... very full house, very full shed. Probably could have more or less furnished 3-4 houses with what's there. So the problem is it's a mammoth task, and very little spare time and energy available for it. All three of us (self, Hubby, sister) are struggling with varying degrees of depression and anxiety, so Mum and Dad's house gets tackled in little 4-5 day bites. By that point, we're all so burnt out that we need to head home. And these "bites" have become less frequent over time, because it was wearing us down beyond our limits.
Just the logistics of moving the things we want to keep gets complicated when it's such a distance. We should be able to hire a truck, but when it's that far away, you can't get a hire truck at their end and return it to the same franchise at our end. They want you to drive it back to where you got it from. So we want to make sure that we've got everything that needs to come down this way ready to go in one truckload, but there are parts of Dad's big shed that we haven't even been able to sort through yet. Once we can get to them, I think the "keep or not" decisions will be fairly straightforward. It's the getting there that's hard. (The shed is packed almost solid. The walkways filled up as Dad got older, and both his body and his memory started to fail him.)
