AT the weekend I was faced with the bitter-sweet task of clearing out my late mother’s house.

She moved there in 1982 – a house she’d designed herself for her retirement overlooking the sea in the town in Kent where she was born and spent her childhood.

Like her mother before her (and her grandson after her!) throwing anything away was an anathema to her.

She died in the summer, aged 91, and in her later years had become more forgetful.

My two brothers and I felt more than a little daunted at the task of sorting through all the things she’d accumulated (or things that my grandmother had accumulated, from which my mother found herself unable to be parted).

Bitter because it was a stark reminder of the words of the funeral service: Our days are like the grass; we flourish like a flower of the field; when the wind goes over it, it is gone and its place will know it no more.

We worked our way through cupboards and drawers stuffed full of papers and bric-a-brac, sorting out which we needed to keep, which we wanted to keep and which we would throw away, I felt sad that the ephemera which she had accumulated which was so much her: booklets and pamphlets of local history, the church minding rota, minutes from the school where she was a governor, sketches she had done of holiday memories; the very things that turned her house from a building into her home were being dismantled, disassembled and scattered… And sweet, because we came across things that touched us: photos from holidays, pictures and memorabilia from her childhood, letters she had drafted to us, her children, but never got round to sending; toys, games and ‘heirlooms’ that we played with when we stayed with our grandmother that we thought had been lost for ever.

Random bits and pieces that made us smile, reminisce and remind us of the vitality of her life that had diminished somewhat in her declining years.

But as the day wore on, I slowly realised that my mother’s life was enshrined much more in the values and beliefs that she had passed on to her children (and that we, in our turn, would pass on to ours) than in the ephemera of her existence.

One day my son will end up doing this for me: what will go through his mind?

What will my effects say about me?

“Its place will know it no more” – someone else will live in that house and make it their home… It’s how you live your life that’s important. What you accumulate is only ever significant in evoking that deeper much more meaningful and lasting story.