My father passed away suddenly last week. I would love to be able to just get someone in to clear the house and "get on with my life", but it doesn't work like

My father passed away suddenly last week. I would love to be able to just get someone in to clear the house and "get on with my life", but it doesn't work like that when someone dies. Instead of being able to just grieve I spent all weekend digging through 40 year old bank statements and other crap trying to find all the documents that we need to be able to register the death so we can actually bury him. And no, I'm not going to just get someone in to clear the place out, because in all the crap is stuff that matters. Some of it will be paper, like his hand-draw schematics from when he worked on Concorde, some of it will be objects like his first camera, or the model of a ship he built when he was young that's in a cupboard somewhere, some will be photos. But all this stuff is buried under all the meaningless objects he filled his house with (how many torches does one man really need?). The problem with accumulating crap is not the crap itself, it's the way it acts as a barrier to all the stuff that mattered, both to him and to us. I had been slowling trying to sort all his stuff out before he died, and as we did so we'd uncover little mementos and memory joggers (great for a man in the early stages of dementia). Each one would spark a conversation and his eyes would light up and his voice would get all excited and I'd learn something new about my dad, some new story. But 95% of the time was just going though tax returns from when he was 30 and insurance documents for policies that expired in the 90s, and pointless objects that were only there because my parents couldn't go into a garden center without buying some nik-nak. So no, I'm not complaining about all the crap because I'm an asshole. I'm lamenting all the time and effort lost, that could have been better spent with my father when he was alive, and with his memory now he's dead, but which I and my siblings instead have to devote to trying to excavate what's important.