Today someone asked me, very seriously, whether his children would be helping sort out all the stuff in the house and garage now everything has imploded.

I laughed. Loudly.

Not because I’m bitter.
Because after 32 years of evidence, it would be statistically shocking if they suddenly appeared wearing overalls and holding storage boxes.

Where were these mythical helpers when we were drowning in:

• overflowing garages,
• mystery cables from 1997,
• drawers full of screws with “might come in useful” energy,
• broken gadgets awaiting resurrection,
• and enough random possessions to open a small branch of a recycling centre?

Nowhere.

For three decades I appear to have been:

• Head of Domestic Archaeology,
• Director of Lost Property,
• Emotional Support Staff,
• and Senior Manager of Other People’s Chaos.

But suddenly now?
Now I’m apparently supposed to imagine a Disney-style family clean-up montage.

I can see it now:

“Don’t worry Dad, we’ll take care of everything.”
Cue uplifting music and labelled storage containers.

No.
What actually happens in these situations is:

• one person looks confused,
• one disappears,
• one says “just throw it away,”
• and somebody finds a golf club from 2004 and becomes emotional.

Meanwhile the woman who spent 32 years stepping around boxes marked IMPORTANT is expected to calmly supervise the collapse of an entire identity built out of possessions nobody wanted to deal with before.

And honestly?
The garage tells the truth long before people do.

Because people reinvent themselves all the time.
But old drawers, paperwork, forgotten phones, cables, receipts, photographs, tools, and abandoned hobbies?
They quietly preserve the version someone tried to leave behind.

That’s why sorting through a life is never just tidying.
It’s forensic psychology with dust.

Still, I genuinely wish them luck.

There are at least seventeen unidentified chargers in there alone.