When my father passed, I thought the hardest part would be the estate paperwork. It wasn't. It was standing in his garage at 11pm, holding a coffee can full of buttons he'd saved since 1974, trying to decide whether that meant something or nothing at all.
This is the part of estate cleanup nobody warns you about: it is not logistics, it is triage of a life. Every drawer is a decision. Every closet is a conversation you wish you could still have.
A few things that helped us:
1. Sort into four piles, not two. Keep, donate, sell, and "decide later" — a box you seal and revisit in three months when the grief has less of a grip on your hands.
2. Photograph before you empty a room. You will forget the layout, and sometimes that memory matters more than the furniture did.
3. Hire help for the physical labor, not the decisions. A cleanout crew can move boxes; they cannot decide what your mother would have wanted. Let them carry the weight you don't need to carry.
If you're in the middle of this right now: it does get lighter, room by room.