To ask you to ‘Destroy without reading’? (Bereavement related)

[Izzy24]

Would you?

So if you were coping with clearing personal belongings and you came across a package marked as above, would you respect that person’s privacy and dispose of it without reading? Even if it was unsealed?

I would look at what it is.
When people want to hide something they burn it not put destroy on it.

I wouldn’t destroy diaries either. Not sure I’d read them. But I would definitely want to keep them!

Christ, this isn’t a complex topic.

Someone can write ‘destroy without reading’ at any point, while hoping that they will live many more decades and continue to have the pleasure of the items themselves for those decades, and then actually destroy them before their death. But in the event of sudden death/incapacitating illness preventing them from doing so, they have left instructions which hopefully their survivors will have the integrity to honour. I’m not going to throw away precious things now in my 40s and deprive myself of the pleasure of them just in case I develop dementia in 20/30 years time. So I’ve done exactly that, marked them to be destroyed without reading, hopefully I’ll be destroying them myself in the distant future but if not, those dealing with my affairs know my wishes and I can only hope they honour them.

when an uncle died we didn't.
and it was a good thing as it included paperwork related to his service in ww2 and allowed his wife&children to receive a life changing payout.

We had this recently with my granny who passed away. It was her diaries. We burned them without reading them as per her wishes. Admittedly, I was curious what was in them but I couldn’t imagine doing something she specifically asked me not to do.

She liked to go back and read them herself which is why she didn’t destroy them when she was alive.

I would 100% open it.

I would open just in case they mid labelled them skim through

The thing is looking at something like this,

It could reveal a seriously dark family secret

It happened with me

And now i am seriously thinking how to deal with the aftermath repercussions.!

Ooh why would he not want someone to read those? Do you think they were mislabelled?

I am keeping some papers that are no one else's business and they'll have a similar note with them. They're love letters from my late husband.

I don't want to give them up now and I don't want anyone else reading them.

I would read for sure. I recently found out that the man I thought was my grandad wasn’t my grandad. I am so desperate to know for sure who it is but everyone is dead.

I’d have to sneak a peek I’m afraid. I wouldn’t read diaries, but I’d be interested in other paperwork.

There are a few skeletons in our family closet (from about a century ago) which we think we’ve unravelled, but I’d love to have things confirmed either way. I’d definitely proceed with caution, though!

What did it reveal?

I wouldn't be able to stop myself reading it, for sure, I am far too nosy. I might ask a friend to look first in case it was very upsetting.

No it’s not complex: unless someone dies suddenly, they can destroy their possessions, on diagnosis if necessary.

If there’s anything I really don’t want anyone to read it’s already gone.

Exactly.

Maybe it was a safeguard they never thought they’d need - maybe they had always intended to destroy them ‘sometime’ but eventually became too tired, ill or frail - or died suddenly/unexpectedly.

Such was def. the case with a friend of dh - he hadn’t actually left instructions to destroy, but it was left to his wife to go through a mass of papers and find out that he’d been having a long term affair. She was devastated.

No wonder he’d flatly refused help from dh, when he’d become very weak some months before he died, to go through it all and chuck most of it. Dh had assumed it was all ‘innocent’ stuff, like old bills and receipts he’d kept for ever - being something of a hoarder.

But by destroying it early, people deprive themselves of the pleasure of the items for the remainder of their lives. So some people choose not to do that and instead trust their loved ones to act with integrity and respect their privacy.

Nah im nosey I’d be getting comfy on the sofa with a brew.

Diaries might actually reveal the skeletons in the closet!

Diaries are actually a hard one because for immediate relatives they can easily be too personal to read and reveal secrets/thoughts the person had about people who are alive to read them etc. But a couple of hundred years down the line they are a highly valued historical source. Like a pp asked, when does a diary turn into a family historical paper?

I wouldn't look, much as it would kill me, because I'm a nosey fucker. Having accidentally come across things I can't unsee in FIL's house, I know it might well be for the best that I don't read it. But I wouldn't destroy either. My 'just in case' instinct is very strong.

My mum has asked that we destroy all her letters to my dad. My mum passed last year and the letters are at my dad's house (they weren't living together when she died) so that will be a task for when my dad passes.

She did leave some diaries of the years she was pregnant with me and my brother and the year following our births. I have read those and found them extremely comforting in the weeks after she passed as I could hear her voice in the way she wrote them. They weren't particularly interesting - ie not great revelations - just day to day stuff but they were what I needed at that time.

Some people have rights to secrets from me and some don't have rights to certain secrets.

This is the crux of it, except I wholeheartedly disagree. Everyone has the right to privacy, in any form of relationship. None of us is entitled to the entirety of someone else.

To be in a position of trust, where you are the person who finds such an instruction among personal belongings, but then wilfully overrides it ... that's grim, and desperately sad for the deceased person.

That's not how it works. Why should I have to destroy my husband's love letters before I die? I want the comfort of having them there.

I'll leave a note to destroy. If someone is disrespectful enough to read them, it says more about them than me.

Yes, I would and did. I promised my mother to do so.

Which they might or might not.