Every time Dale Sperling’s mother pops by for her weekly visit, she brings with her a possession she wants to pass on. To Sperling, the drop-offs make it feel as if her mom is “dumping her house into my house.” The most recent offload attempt was a collection of silver platters, which Sperling declined.
“Who has time to use silver? You have to actually polish it,” she told me. “I’m like, ‘Mom, I would really love to take it, but what am I going to do with it?’ So she’s dejected. She puts it back in her car.”
It’s not that Sperling, 46, wants to be rude to her baby-boomer mother; it’s just that she has plenty of her own stuff. Plus, her father died in 2021, and they’re still trying to figure out what to do with everything he had. He owned an arcade in New York City and amassed closets full of collectibles magazines, posters, memorabilia, coins, buttons. Her mother is too upset to look at it, so little by little, Sperling and her sister have been going through everything. Deciding what to do with a lifetime of things is a monumental task. “It can’t just rot in her basement, and then what?” Sperling said.