My dad had a brief encounter with a coma and it really brought the mountain of his belongings to the forefront of my mind. Books, comics, baseball cards, knives, guns, and other collectibles. Where he stores all this is a giant building that looks like a barn.
After his coma I talked to him about my fears of dealing with this and the issues I had trying to reverse engineer his finances from QuickBooks. He was actually very receptive, and it was an opportunity for him to share his thoughts on life and death with me. Since then he's earmarked or given away a lot of things, and the building is much more organized.
If you find yourself in a situation like the article, don't wait until someone died to deal with those things. In my dad's coma, I observed my own mental state; everything I saw was a collection of memories of my dad, I couldn't fathom if he passed what to do with all of it (and my mother would need to move). I had no hierarchy that correlated things that remind me of him and things that were valuable to him. Those things were impossible to know without a conversation.