I agree that your dad would have felt very satisfied that it was you who took care of those belongings.
When my paternal granddad died, he left 39 000 books behind. I hope you can imagine the physical and emotional effort of unloading 40k books.
Maybe the daughter should appreciate all that lovely ordering nuance, or maybe not. For my money, large collections are expressions of a pathology and there is no duty to keep them pristine once their owners pass. In fact I think it’s quite rude to leave that burden to others. Your shit, your problem.
On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
No aggression meant towards the original commenter but in my experience as a son and grandson, that road can take you somewhere you don’t want to end up as a father.
Edit:I should add I’m just as pathological as the rest of my family. Instead of stuff I collect rules, and I have to be very careful to not impose those rules unconsciously on other people.
He rented a moving truck, and put them all in some storage units closer to where he lived. It turns out he had also recently lost his job, and so with nothing else to do, and the impending need for some money, he started cataloging and selling them on eBay, bootstrapped his way into opening a small comic book business, then opened a larger store selling other things, which turned into a small chain of stores selling all kinds of hobby and collector stuff in the local area.
When I decided to offload my small childhood collection, he made me a generous offer for it which enabled me to make rent month. As he was looking through what I brought he told me this story, I asked what happened to the original collection. He said he now had a warehouse full of inventory of people's collections like mine, and that he just continued to move them via his stores, shows, and eBay. It had made him a steady living.
What you do with these things very much depends on you and an ability to find positivity in the situation. A literal library's worth of books is not an easy thing to handle for certain. I grew up in a family printing business so I have a pretty reasonable idea of how difficult it is to handle and store 40-50-60k books so I'm not without sympathy. But there is often value in these kinds of things.
And I do not think this is one of those things where if only she had spent six months studying it and doing a big wall full of pushpins, index cards, and post-its joined by yarn lines, suddenly it would all make sense and she’d inherit a magical musical truth.
> Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home
Seems like once she put the collection back together, the order was already lost.
Appart from that, I feel like there is some poetry to her slowly making it her own collection by listening to the records one by one. Kind of like a new like growing from within the records.
Each to their own, it's certainly something I've done in the past as a (former) collector - the stress you felt may be more of a projection reaction, though your observations about meaning in the madness are valid.
Huh? I alphabetize my collection so I can find things.