I find it hard to imagine being well enough to travel to Switzerland under my own steam, and also in such bad shape that i was ready to call it quits. But i admire your level-headed planning. And i also offer virtual hugs.
My Canadian friends have been able to sit in a room at home with their loved ones while they underwent MAID (medical assistance in dying, as it’s called there.) That is what i would like, on both ends of the equation. Sadly, it’s not an option where i live.
Thank you for the virtual hugs. I wish we could all have the opportunity to make choices like this when necessary but I absolutely understand the dilemma.
The last time I visited my mom in her new digs, she asked me what we were going to do with all of the albums. I told her we weren’t sure yet. She told me to bring her a couple of albums at a time and she would take the pictures out of them and put them in boxes (shoebox size) instead. I think this is a pretty good idea. It will give her something to do, she’ll look at pictures that she probably hasn’t seen in many years, it will drastically cut down the space the albums took up, and then my sisters and I can easily divvy up the pictures at some point.
That is a great idea. Unfortunately, none of us took the time to look at Mom’s albums before she passed, so that wasn’t an option for us. Quite frankly, I wasn’t even aware that she had put together so many albums.
The funny thing is I have 4 file boxes full of pix from the 70s to 2000s still in the oldfashioned envelopes from the drug store along w the negatives.
They never made it into albums, much less back out into shoeboxes. 
When my wife and I moved from the US to the UK a few years ago, she insisted on shipping album after album of photographs. Which are junking up several closets and a cedar chest in the master bedroom.
Not one of them has ever been looked at, as far as I know.
Photographs are an odd case… people are stubbornly reluctant to get rid of them, but very seldom actually view them…
We only ever looked at my parents albums whenever old relatives would come over. Last time we did that everyone took pictures of the ones they wanted and asked about who was in the photos. My brother has them now and asked if he should pitch them. I told him to hold off until mom dies because we most likely will look at them again when that happens, then pitch them.
IMO photos are the absolute limit case poster child for the difference between “valuable” and “irreplaceable”.
Unless digitized first, they are utterly irreplaceable. But they have zero dollar value and scant (or zero) sentimental or historical value.
IMO the thing that’s key to decluttering is ruthlessly separating those two ideas and focusing solely on “valuable”. Which does not mean only dollar value. Sentimental value can be real. But needs to be acknowledged and acted on, not just be a passive and unwitting proxy for irreplaceable.
Old albums you look at, share with grandkids, give relevant pix to the Historical Society, etc. are sentimentally valuable. Old albums you ignore in a musty trunk in the attic, or moldy trunk in the basement are not sentimentally valuable to you. They’re just irreplaceable and you’ve confused that with valuable.
Ha Ha! Try to convince my wife of that.
But, choose your battles… domestic harmony and all that…
I’m not sure whether you should hope they all get destroyed with mold, or fear for your very soul that they might get severely damaged by mold and she will spend every penny you both have trying to get them all restored.
Then she’ll put them right back in the basement / attic to moulder once again.
If you scan photos, you can get rid of the original, and the file takes almost no space. That’s if it’s worth your whole to scan them, of course.
When my mom died, we ended up with all the old photos (which i have no interest in) because my daughter offered to scan them (hasn’t happened) and my brothers couldn’t beat for them to be thrown away.
That pile of boxes I mentioned are all “to be scanned” if I ever get the gumption. The over/ under on that is trending towards: Narrator: He won’t.
I lost 100% of my albumed photos, probably 6 shelf feet total, in the separation from now ex-wife. I honestly can’t decide whether I’m happy or sad they are gone.
Fortunately she doesn’t usually seem to want to to even look at them.
Maybe it is a sort of subliminal comfort that they are there… an idea of connection to the past?
I ended up with the albums, and have since scanned all of them. Don’t know if I or my siblings will ever look at the scanned images. I doubt if anybody will ever open the albums again.
My brother scanned a few of Dad’s slides, and last weekend he was in town and said he’d continue the project. He is now the proud owner of a full tote of slides, perhaps numbering a thousand or more. I am very happy to no longer own them.
This seemed useful, so I’m sharing it:
(Gift link)
From the article:
Sentimental items are among the hardest belongings to part with. The mementos can feel intertwined in our identity, particularly if they once provided us comfort or belonged to a loved one. Getting rid of them can signal that certain chapters of our lives have closed, said Selena Jones, a grief and trauma therapist in Ontario who coaches older adults in the art of decluttering.
“People get caught up in the fear that if they let something go that is sentimental, that they will forget the memory,” she said. But our memories live inside us, she added, not in our things.
If you’re looking to pare down some of your most meaningful items, here are gentle ways to get started from decluttering experts.
I wish they did - one of the reasons I’m scanning photos is because I have very few memories of high school. The few memories I have were jogged by photographs , programs and that sort of thing , some of which I’ve only seen because other people have posted them on social media. I don’t know if I used to have more photos that disappeared forty years ago ( I suspect I did, since I had a boyfriend who was into photography and one of the few photos I have is one he took) But if I did, I sure wish I had them now. Not sure what I won’t remember twenty years from now so I’m trying to keep the photos without the clutter.
I do know what you mean. I’ve never had a great memory and despite many efforts to improve it, it remains stubbornly non-functional. I guess when someone told me to “live in the moment,” I took that suggestion a little too seriously. So things, papers and pictures all trigger memories that might be completely gone without them.
Like you, I’m trying to dispose of the stuff that means little or nothing, while hanging on to the stuff that generates good memories.
the problem with removing photos from the album is that you lose the context.
Usually people who pasted each photo onto the album page, also labelled it
Even if there’s only one label per page, that still gives you the date and context
“Timmy’s 8th birthday party in grandma’s back yard”
That’s different than a shoebox of 100 photos, with 5 or 10 consecutive pics of a group of kids sitting at a picnic table, and you wondering, “gee–I know that must have been a birthday party., but where was this taken?” And worse, after opening the shoebox, somebody will mix up order the photos, so you have 5 or 10 isolated snapshots, scattered among the 100 pics, so you can’t even be sure they were taken the same year. "Is that Timmy when he was 7? or maybe 9?
Depends - I’ve never seen a label in a photo album. If the context isn’t obvious, (like a wedding photo or a photo from the one trip to Disney) " Timmy’s 8th birthday" is written on the back of the photo.
I’ve seen context just from the other photos on the page.
But my family didn’t do a lot of photo albums. Those photos i promised not to throw away are mostly loose, it in individual frames.