God, I hate to ask this…

I am sorry you are going through this but I know from your post that you will make whatever time you have left, long or short, precious and valuable. 

My main thought is that it will be comforting to gather your best, favorite, or most convenient system and let it be the joy in your life that it obviously has always been. A treasured piece of music can have many times the power in times like this. 

This is something all of us come to.  Do you deal with it on your terms or not?  I'm sure a lot of gear goes cheap at estate sales, or unscrupulous local buyers take advantage of windows and such.

Your best move on the records is to call a couple of local record dealers and get quotes on what they'll give you for your whole record collection.  It will be dimes on the dollar if you're lucky.  If you had the time and energy, you could do like I did and create a long listing of albums and list them on Craigslist & US Audiomart, and deal with buyers.  But just unloading to a dealer is your best move.

As for the gear, US Audiomart is probably  your best bet.  You may need help with packing and shipping.  As with the records, the urgency to sell will likely net you a bit less money, but it will be more than if your wife were to sell it.

As much as we love our gear, it eventually becomes just so much clutter.  That's why I unloaded my entire record collection and turntable.

Nobody knows how long s/he will live. Just try not to think too much about it. I asked my children to keep all my audio stuff when I will not be alive. Part of me is in this stuff and I would not like somebody (whom I don't know) to have it (ironically, I bought used many LPs, CDs and cassettes, and I did not think about who was their previous owner, still I hope s/he would not be disappointed knowing that they became mine). Your family may keep your stuff as a sacred  memory of you. 

My father was given <2 years to live (CLL), that was 20+ years ago he is now 78 and in good health, still occasionally does treatments.  Doctors had to keep amending the outlook and eventually admitted "who knows" because of constant advances in treatment.

To answer your question, if you have an estate plan which you probably do, I don't think it would be hard to specify an executor of the equipment, say the owner of a nearby high-end gear dealer you trust.  They would at least know what the stuff is and could oversee liquidation of the gear, not to get the most money out of it, but to find new homes where it would be appreciated.

Better yet, maybe Audiogon could have an "estate sale" category, and you could specify some portion of the proceeds to your favorite charity or disease research effort in your honor.

It's funny, some of the equipment me and my friends have is so high-end or specialized that we sometimes say, "they will bury you with this", because of the unlikelihood of it being surpassed any time soon.

-J

i must say my grand mother died when i was 21...

But the priest visited her very often since my birth till she died...

The doctors said nothing to do for her in the first 20 years of my life but she survived the strong iron health of his husband who died before her ironically , one morning his heart stop at 85 ...

Death is not decided by doctors but by God...

listen the music i recommended above ...