Letters to the Editor
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Goodwill
I volunteered for a long time at a Goodwill regional sorting center, going through bags of donated books. As you dig down through one of bags, you get a rather clear picture of what the donor had just done through. Bags of books on recovering from divorce, a dump of the old college text books about 3 years after graduation, a whole pile of weight loss and fitness books discarded together, and sets of pregnancy and infant care books (sometimes used, sometimes brand new and unopened).
The saddest, though, was when you could tell survivors were cleaning out the house of a departed person. In many cases, the people donating the books didn't look through or between the books. We would find all sorts of things from bearer bonds, to family history/heirloom items and photos, to legal documents, to surprisingly large amounts of cash. We'd return the things we could match to a name. Otherwise, they'd go toward Goodwill.
These donations made me sad because either the donors were still emotionally overwrought and didn't do a good job sorting or they just didn't care what the deceased person had.