title: Stuff After Death: How to Identify, Value and Dispose of Inherited Stuff
author:  Mary Miley Theobald 
description: Mary Miley Theobald is an Army brat who has lived in Virginia most of her adult life. She received her BA and MA in history from the College of William and Mary, taught American history and museum studies at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirteen years, and has worked for Colonial Williamsburg since the 1970s. She is the author of almost 200 magazine articles and nine nonfiction books, most on history, travel, and business topics. For fun, she writes a historical mystery series set in the Roaring Twenties. Stuff After Death draws on Theobald's curatorial and business backgrounds to help people deal with unwanted household items. See her website at www.marymileytheobald.com.
zlib_text: Dedication
  For D.M.—Because you don’t have to let it bury you.
   
  
  Chapter One
   
  NO ONE ever expects to spend their thirtieth birthday in a crematorium,
  writing a check for their last eight hundred dollars, so that the people who
  took your mother’s dead body will hand it back to you in a little cardboard
  box.
  Happy birthday to me.
  It wasn’t quite the last of my money that purchased my mother back. My
  account still had a paltry eighty-six dollars and twelve cents, plus the four
  hundred in cash tucked into the zippered pouch in my suitcase. The money
  should let me rent a room in town long enough to clean up my mother’s
  property. So to speak. I just wanted the house and surrounding sheds clean
  enough for a local realtor to be able to put the whole sorry parcel of land on
  the market.
  There was no way, I’d been told over the phone yesterday, it could be
  sold in its present condition. I hadn’t asked the woman from Connor Realty
  to elaborate. I had my own memories of my mother’s house to go on