Katie Roiphe is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University and the author, most recently, of “The Power Notebooks.”
As your parents age, a seemingly trivial but oddly fraught question arises: What are you going to do with their stuff? When my mother downsized, she wanted me or my sisters to take her mother’s silver samovar. This is a giant, elaborately carved silver tea urn, which would look more at home in “War and Peace” than in a modern American living room. We all politely refused.
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