You Can’t Take It With You, So Apparently I Have To

The fine line between mementos and junk

I can now see my future with alarming clarity. I’m going to end up living in a house filled with German beer steins, surrounded by dozens of clocks ticking from every room, slowly driving me mad like I’m the protagonist in a lost Edgar Allan Poe poem about estate planning. My other option is to rent a storage unit, move everything into it and eventually add my own records, books and boxes of sentimental debris. Then, when I’m in my 80s, I will take my son there and announce that it all belongs to him.

If you think that sounds less like an inheritance than an elaborate practical joke, you’re not alone. A May 2026 survey of 1,200 Americans, commissioned by 1-800-GOT-JUNK, found that 49 percent would rather inherit nothing than deal with a relative’s belongings. Nothing! Only 20 percent wanted everything a relative owned. Among the respondents who’d already cleared out a relative’s home, 56 percent said the volume of possessions made it harder to grieve.

This is the inheritance Gen X never prepared for. We’ve become the loading dock between two generations. Our parents are handing us the china, clocks, steins and commemorative glassware they spent decades collecting. And many of us have children who’ve already made it clear they don’t want most of those things, along with most of ours. We’re receiving one household’s worth of memories while accumulating another, and someday someone will have to decide which pieces of our family history deserve to survive.

At the moment, that someone appears to be me.

To find out what I was really being asked to inherit, I called David J. Ekerdt, a professor emeritus of sociology and gerontology at the University of Kansas and author of Downsizing: Confronting Our Possessions in Later Life. He told me we generally keep objects for one of two reasons. Either they’re useful, like a stepladder or a potato peeler, or they symbolize something. They may represent our accomplishments, our relationships, our values or the past. They can even represent the future, like the cookbooks whose recipes we still plan to make someday.

The trouble begins when we assume those meanings can be transferred along with the object.

Kelly’s father may look at a beer stein and remember where it came from, when he acquired it and why it belonged in his collection. I look at the same stein and wonder if it’s dishwasher-safe. The object travels easily; its meaning does not.

When parents select a particular object for a particular child, Ekerdt calls it “intentional placement.” They are not just asking, “Would anybody like a lamp?” They have chosen the person who should receive it, which makes the exchange more emotionally loaded and a refusal more painful. The parent may be trying to establish a lasting connection: If my son keeps this, he will think of me.

They may also feel a responsibility to the object itself. “Believe it or not, we sometimes think that objects have souls and feelings,” Ekerdt told me. We want them protected, appreciated and sent to “a good home.”

This explains the language my parents and in-laws use when discussing their possessions. They don’t want us to take these objects so much as care for them. The clocks, steins and china are being put up for adoption.

Ekerdt offered a few suggestions for adult children facing an advancing wall of family possessions.

1. Ask for the story, even if you don’t want the thing

If your parents are determined to give you something, ask them why it matters. Where did it come from? Who owned it first? What do they remember when they look at it?

Ekerdt said this would likely “gratify them enormously.” By listening, you’re allowing them to pass along the meaning, which may be what they wanted to give you in the first place. You can photograph the object, write down its history or record your parents talking about it. The beer stein may eventually disappear, but the story doesn’t have to.

It occurred to me that Kelly’s father had spent years assembling this collection and that I’d responded to it largely as a storage problem. I knew what the steins looked like, but almost nothing about why he’d wanted them. Before deciding their fate, I could at least give him the pleasure of remembering out loud.

2. Offer to help with the decision, not just accept the cargo

Parents may push possessions toward their children because the alternatives are exhausting. Every object that comes into the house must eventually leave it, and somebody has to decide whether it should be sold, donated, recycled or thrown away.

You can help by finding an auction house, donating what’s usable or bringing in someone to run an estate sale. You’ll also need to break the news that nobody is getting rich off those commemorative plates.

It can be emotionally exhausting, but it’s more useful than relocating everything to another storage unit, where the family continues paying rent to avoid making a decision.

3. Sometimes the kindest response is to ‘shut up and take it’

Most decluttering experts warn against letting unwanted possessions cross your threshold. Ekerdt looks at it differently. Once an older parent has begun seriously downsizing, accepting an object can be an act of generosity in itself. 

“Just shut up and take it,” he says. “Affirm the giver with open arms. Flip your idea of what a gift should be about. A gift isn’t always in the giving; sometimes it’s in the receiving. That is what you’re doing.”

You are relieving your parents of an immediate problem and allowing them to feel that something important has been safely placed. You don’t have to announce that you hate the lamp, have no room for the china or intend to investigate whether 100 beer steins can be donated to community theater companies staging The Sound of Music.

Is there a rainbow bridge for your parents’ old stuff?

Your parents may already suspect that the object won’t remain in the family forever. Once it’s out of their house, says Ekerdt, they are not likely to remain fixated on its fate. If you can find another use for it, or another home, you’ve still helped.

There’s a small, loving deception involved. Taking your parents’ belongings with no intention of keeping them is the estate-planning equivalent of telling your children that the family dog has gone to live on a farm. The fantasy allows us to get through a painful transition without dwelling on what happens next.

Perhaps our parents need a farm for their possessions. Somewhere in the imagination, all the old lamps are glowing, the clocks are keeping perfect time and the beer steins are being raised nightly by grateful men in lederhosen.

The next time we visit Florida, I’m going to ask Kelly’s father to take me through the collection. I want to know which stein came first, which one is his favorite and whether any of them have a story more interesting than “I found it at a flea market.” Then Kelly and I can choose a few to keep. Our son may want one someday, though I can’t confirm this, and all available evidence suggests otherwise.

We’ll load the boxes into the car, thank Kelly’s father and let him watch his collection leave with the family. For a while, at least, the steins will have found a good home. After that, we will help them find the farm.