I'm at the point in the cleaning out, throwing away task where I'm faced with decisions about memorabilia.

Examples: I have the shirt I wore as a volunteer for 1984 Olympics here in L.A.; the name plate I had on my office desk at work; my handwritten journals; bronze the "brontosaurus" statuette my mother gave me when I was little and loving to learn about dinosaurs.

What should I keep? What should I give away or throw away? None of this stuff will be used or displayed. Maybe it should all be consigned to the dust bin and forgotten.

When I'm an old lady and in a retirement home--certainly when I'm dead--it will all just be somebody else's trash anyway. Who will care about an old Olympics shirt and a bunch of journals written by a nobody? When I die, I will just be another of the nameless billions who have gone before.

When I left for Peace Corps service, I put everything in storage and my mother promised to pay the $15 monthly storage fee. She didn't do it and I returned to find that everything I cherished and had so carefully wrapped was gone.

And, though I've missed things from time to time, life goes on and I'm not diminished by the experience. (Though I must admit it was hard to forgive her; she never told me she wasn't paying for storage nor informed me of the storage auction notices she received.)

I've been putting off deciding about memorabilia for years. Advice?