My father's book collection weighed heavily on his mind in his final years. His 25,000 used books filled the inside of the modest three-bedroom rambler where my parents lived since 1949, and "do something about the books" was increasingly high on lists he made in an effort to bring his life to an orderly conclusion.

Ultimately, when my widowed mother moved from New York to a Silver Spring senior apartment, it was left to my sister and me to deal with this tangible legacy. It was not all-smooth sailing. But tensions subsided after we decided to give most of the collection to a university -- a good deed and a good tax deduction.

We war babies and baby boomers, it has been said, are the beneficiaries of the largest transfer of wealth in history. Our parents toughed it out through the Great Depression and World War II, prospered in the '50s and '60s and retired with more bank accounts (my parents had 30 or so) than they -- inveterate savers that they were -- would spend in their lifetimes.

But they also accumulated stuff, by the room, basement, attic and garage-full.
Stuff with which not until death did they part. Stuff handed down, stuff stashed away, all kinds of stuff. Some large and valuable -- art, pianos, mahogany dining tables; some more sentimental than sizable -- photographs, sheet music, holiday ornaments. And often it falls to the heirs to decide what to do with it.
"I've had one where the mother had kept little samples of hair from the relatives, even distant relatives, with photographs of each one," says Lyn Sutherland, a Bethesda antiques and estate sales dealer. "The son had me throw it all out.
"You'd be surprised the amount of photos I have to throw out. They were never identified." 

Then there are those that have been identified -- and more than one survivor wants them. "It's very traumatic," Sutherland says. "It's when all the problems that ever occurred between siblings resurface."

Sutherland, 61, has been helping survivors dispose of stuff for 28 years. These days she is trying to come to grips with her own possessions, which include 150 framed pieces of artwork, five sets of china and various folk-art pieces, old tins and dolls.

"If people don't go through their stuff in their fifties and sixties when they're physically able, it's a lost cause," she says. "I've tried to document everything I have for my daughter, so they [Pam and her husband] understand what's what, so it doesn't end up in a yard sale for a little bit of money."

The Depression generation, now elderly and passing on, saved everything -- rags, rubber bands, bottle caps, Sutherland says. "Then you get to [my] generation, and we're kind of half and half. And I look at Pam's generation, and that's a throw-out generation. A lot of kids today don't want to polish silver. They want Crate & Barrel. I'm sure my daughter is going to have a nice little sale when I go to the yard sale in the sky."

But one recent weekend, at a well-lived-in Chevy Chase colonial, Sutherland was holding an estate sale for someone else's daughter. There she sat at the sales table, surrounded by stuff. Downstairs: a nice teak desk priced at $135; several Princess phones for a few bucks each; shelves of books on politics and history; classical records. Upstairs: closets full of men's clothes -- including dozens of suspenders.

"Some days, I'm in control. Some days, the stuff is in control," she says. "This gentleman never threw his clothes out. Every closet and every chest of drawers was filled with his clothes. This gentleman also had lots of light bulbs and batteries. He had 15 jars, tons of matches. I've had sales where I've spent hours unscrewing jars, taking the lids off. And I have to put the jars in the recycle bin."

Before the sale, the man's daughter, an only child, had tossed out 40 bags of "trash," including, as it turned out, a valuable stack of Redskins game programs from the 1960s.

"I just did what I thought I needed to do, take the things I needed to keep, and get rid of the things that seemingly had no significance to anyone," said the daughter, Catherine Stuart, a Raleigh, N.C., lawyer, in her own defense. "But you learn otherwise."

"A lot of people don't see the treasure," says Larry Ulrich, who been driving a donation truck for the Prevention of Blindness Shop in Kensington for 20 years. But he is not unsympathetic to those left to deal with a lifetime of belongings.
"Some places you go in, I mean it's like a nightmare," he says. "I mean, some people never throw anything away, and the poor family comes in later . . . . I hope I don't do this to my daughter."

Whether they hoard trash or treasure, many parents simply don't tell their adult children what they have, much less make an inventory. Survivors are often too emotionally distraught to deal with the leftovers, much less have them appraised.

In Stuart's case, what wasn't sold at the estate sale went to charity, for resale or reuse. These items included a hearing aid and eyeglasses. "If the stuff can be used to enhance other people's lives, that's meaningful," said Stuart.

Of course, at the end of the day, a parent's most lasting legacies are intangible. My Dad handed down his love of books, not for their market value but for their intrinsic worth. My mother passed on her love of family, heirs and all.

But, still, there's all that stuff. And it can be overwhelming -- unless, perhaps, you are Michelle Passoff, clutter expert, lecturer and author of "Lighten Up! Free Yourself From Clutter." Passoff got into the business of de-cluttering "from years of hearing people saying, 'What do I do with my parents' stuff?' plus my own experience."

After her mother left a New Jersey houseful, she "went in with a secretary and a computer, just as I would do for a client. We went room by room, item by item. Then I distributed a list to the heirs, had them indicate what they wanted. There was no disagreement on paper, but one of my sisters went in and took what she wanted anyway. I also had someone come in and appraise everything. Then I added up everything everyone wanted. It came out just about even, luckily."

Passoff tells of a Florida woman who lived in her mother's home for two years after the older woman died, then moved two blocks away, schlepping along her late mom's possessions and plopping them in her entrance hall and garage.
"It was too emotionally daunting for her," said Passoff. "There is an unwillingness to cope, so you go elsewhere . . . . In my clutter classes," says Passoff, 50, "I tell people, 'You think it's going to be over when you're gone, but it's not. The best thing is to start getting rid of junk while you're living, because it never ends, and it's not going to end when you're six feet under.' "

Her advice: Make a record of what you own and what it is worth, and write down the intended beneficiary, "so it doesn't end up being a scrimmage between siblings on who will get what."

Division of leftovers, clearly an emotional landmine, has spawned a whole field of therapy -- and therapists. One prominent practitioner is Dennis Pearne, a Natick, Mass., psychologist, author and self-described "wealth counselor and consul- tant."

Pearne, 53, got into the field because of his own angst over inherited wealth. But possessions, he notes, can often be even more anxiety- producing. 
"At its best, stuff is highly more personal and valuable than cash. It is very much treasured, so it can be more of a blessing than a cash inheritance in a lot of emotional ways.

"And, of course, it can be the root of more competition, jealousy and resentment than cash inheritances," adds Pearne. "The person who received the roll-top desk or the special earrings sometimes suffers resentment from siblings, feelings of 'Mom always liked you best, Dad always liked you best.' 

"Sometimes, more than cash, it surfaces feelings of unresolved grief and mourning. If the beneficiary hasn't sufficiently mourned or grieved, the object becomes associated with the pain of loss. The material object inherited becomes sort of the tip of the emotional iceberg, underlying sibling rivalry or unresolved issues with parents or grandparents. I wind up doing a lot of family therapy over this type of thing.

"At its worst, everything down to an inexpensive pair of earrings with sentimental value becomes the subject of long drawn out court battles and people not speaking to each other for years."

But when there are no heirs, and thus nobody to whom to hand down stuff, or to fight over it, what then?

The Blindness Shop's Ulrich, who calls himself a "donation procurement officer," has seen it all. But one unclaimed legacy has proven especially difficult to dump. "Someone's remains are sitting in my library right now," he says.
"Somebody who helps elderly people with their affairs called me," he explains, about a deceased woman who lived in Charter House, a retirement high-rise, in downtown Silver Spring, and left 20 boxes but no heirs.

"There was a box inside a box never opened," Ulrich says. "It had a mailing label, dated Aug. 14, 1995, from Long Island Crematorium Co., West Babylon, N.Y. It said it contained the remains of David Alexander. I drove around with it for a while. I'm kind of stuck with the guy now. I might put him in my garden."

Before we moved my mother from New York to her Silver Spring apartment, my sister, Deborah, and Michael, her husband, helped sort through her belongings. "We gave her the opportunity to say goodbye to her things," my sister recalls. "It was basically triage."

I did what I could, but I was here and Deborah was there, and not even there, really, but at least three hours closer. The distance underscored the geographical and logistical challenges typical today in disposing of parental possessions. When we were growing up, the family was so close; in the years since then, we have gained mobility and lost that closeness.

When my mother died, about four years after my dad, divvying up what was left of her belongings proved much less daunting. For one thing, there was a lot less of them, and a lot more we readily agreed could go to charity.

We puzzled briefly over my grandmother's mahogany table, the one my mother used for large family dinners; it had seemed so big when we were young and now looked so small. Neither my sister nor I had a place for it though, so, despite a small twinge of sentimental attachment, we let it go.

Still, it was the books more than anything that dominated our family's household in Greenvale, N.Y. After everything had been cleared, the garage -- which hadn't held a car since 1951 when the books took over -- was suddenly empty.
My sister and Michael parked their car in it, just for a moment. It was a moment of triumph, and of letting go. The house and its stuff as we knew them were gone. It was time to move on.