Detroit ? It’s been nine years this month since Helen B. Love’s mother died, 13 since her dad passed, and she still hasn’t cleared out all their stuff. What she hasn’t given away to friends, relatives and charity, she has stored in her home in Detroit and in a family cottage.

“Striking the balance between dealing with the stuff and feeling good about what happens to it is everyone’s issue — whether the stuff gets trashed, goes to charity, or is recycled,” says Love, 62, who produces “The Senior Solution,” a radio show for the Detroit Area Agency on Aging (10 to 11 a.m. Saturdays on WGPR-FM 107.5).

As Baby Boomers age, they face the often monumental task of cleaning out the belongings of parents who have either passed away or become too ill to live alone. The task can be physically and emotionally exhausting and result in a range of feelings — from bittersweet memories of times spent together to anger and resentment about being left with such a tremendous chore.

Every day, approximately 4,800 boomers lose a parent, according to Julie Hall, an estate liquidator and author of “The Boomer Burden: Dealing With Your Parents’ Lifetime Accumulation of Stuff” (Thomas Nelson, $14.99).

“A lot of these parents were part of the Depression generation so they didn’t throw much away,” says Hall. “It’s not just big stuff. I’ve gone through homes where people have saved hundreds of rubber bands, paper clips and Cool Whip containers. They have so much stuff that the children are at a complete loss about what to do.”

When the parent, while alive, specifically dictates in writing where everything is to go, it’s a lot easier for the children — and usually results in fewer fights between siblings and relatives.

“Kids can get ugly, to be polite,” says Theresa Brune, founder of Simplify It LLC in West Bloomfield, Mich. “In the best situations, the children get together and enjoy it; in the worst, it tears a family apart.”

Hall agrees.

“It happens first and foremost because adult children and parents don’t have that conversation about end-of-life care and what they’d like to bequeath to others,” she says. “The children are afraid to do it because they don’t want to face it and the adult parent doesn’t want to talk about it either. So many parents think, ‘Oh my children are smart; they can handle it; they’ll figure it out.”‘

But some adult children get so overwhelmed by the clearing-out task, they get stuck.

Consider Linda Moragne, 52, of Oak Park, Mich., and her three sisters. Their mother, Martha Moragne, died in December 2005, and most of her belongings are still where she left them. “We can’t let go,” Moragne says. “Removing them would make us feel like we’re getting rid of her.”

Clinical psychologist Peter Lichtenberg, who directs Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology, says an inability to go through and sort through parents’ belongings may signal the need for grief counseling to help cope with the acute sense of loss.

“Coming face-to-face with all the possessions that have so much meaning not only to the parents, but to the children can be such a powerful emotional experience,” he says.