I’m not asking about the worst job. I’m asking about the grimmest one. For me it was when in my teenage years I was making candles you would put on a grave. Most of the time is was just filling the form, burn the right shape and passing it forward. But sometimes I had to fill in for a person who was selling these things, and that is where it gets grim. It was decades ago but I still remember one lady who asked what would be the best candle to memorialize her late husband. And she gave me the whole life story of her and her husband. I shit you not, it was the most touching love story I have ever heard. I quit the next day.
I cleaned out houses before a sale.
Most of the times I was called, the previous owner had died with no next-of-kin who gave enough of a fuck to do it themselves.
So every day, I’d be going through all personal belongings of someone who had died recently, and divided it into 2 categories: worth selling, and trash.
95% of the treasured items the deceased left behind went into the second pile.
We’re running into this right now. My family has lost a few members recently, and my mom’s gone into Final Prep mode.
Really really.
We kids are constantly discussing this. We can’t keep the broken antique sewing machine on which her great aunt made a quilt when she was a baby. We tell her “sure” but we all agree a lot of it is just going away. We have no space for this.
So much of what we keep is just for the sentiment, and that’s cool, but has no significant value to someone else if they don’t have a connection to it. It will go and make a memory with someone that starts at a thrift store.
As the world gets more consolidated for space and we lose the attics and crawlspaces where we host the treasures we will never use but know they’re there, we may have to reduce our baggage.
And that’s how I entered my own Final Prep mode decades early (ideally).