My mother managed the estates, and I helped execute them. I sorted, documented, preserved, and released. We did not order dumpsters and make it all disappear; we handled it with care and with history intact.
Between 2001 and 2011, both of my grandmothers died, and then my mother died. During that same period, I remarried and helped navigate the loss of a mother, a father, and a grandmother in that family as well. Loss was not theoretical; it was constant, and it became a kind of education.
Alongside those years, I built experience in interior design, renovation projects, estate management, organizing, and project coordination. I have worked in and around homes for more than twenty years, refining my eye, understanding systems, and learning how environments reflect what we are holding onto and what we are reluctant to face.
Because I lost my parents early, I became the friend people called when their parents died. I could sit in the middle of it without flinching, helping decide what to keep, what to release, and how to move forward without erasing the past.
For a long time, I believed I could not build a real career because everyone around me kept dying. Now I understand that I was living the curriculum, learning how to help my own generation walk through what I had to navigate earlier than most.
Many people my age are now helping aging parents, inheriting homes full of history, and feeling caught between grief and responsibility. If my parents were still alive, I would likely be in the middle of it too. Instead, I stand beside others with clarity and steadiness, bringing structure to what feels overwhelming and lightness to rooms that could easily become too heavy.
We do not wipe everything out, and we do not build shrines to the past. We open it up and look at it clearly, preserving what matters and releasing what does not serve the life you are stepping into.
I do this because life taught me how.
Karen
Karen Kritzer
Clearing the Heir did not begin as a business plan; it began with loss.
Right after September 11, 2001, my father died unexpectedly, and the next day my divorce was finalized. I moved back to Northern Virginia to help my mother and start over, and everything in my life pointed home.
Over the next decade, I helped my mother, my father’s mother, and my mother’s mother downsize homes they had lived in for more than fifty years. We went through everything, including their belongings and the belongings they had inherited from their own parents, sorting through layers of what had been preserved, avoided, and quietly carried.
CERTIFIED LIFE COACH • SPACE MAKER • TRANSITION SPECIALIST