A personal reflection on Swedish Death Cleaning and the emotional journey of decluttering a life, exploring themes of memory, relationships, and the legacy we leave for our children.
After you retire, you are required to do a month or two of Swedish Death Cleaning . I’ve learnt this from articles I’ve come across in 17 different publications. This process involves throwing out all your useless stuff, while placing whatever’s left in tip-top order, properly labelled and explained. I have a few questions about this.
Why is it always the Swedes who supply unsought advice to the rest of us? In the ’70s I remember them harassing us all to get into pornography and partner swapping, and that didn’t work out well for anybody. I think saunas came next, possibly in the ’80s. In the ’90s, it was strenuous massage and meatball sandwiches. Then, more recently, the idea of watching weird murder shows on TV as a method of relaxation. I’m sure they are all lovely, those Swedes, but could they slow down on the suggestions? Not that Swedish Death Cleaning is necessarily a bad idea. The aim is to reduce the stress on children, as they confront the complex emotions that arise from the death of parents. They’ve lost those guiding lights, those steady hands, those people who inspired them to make the world a better place. Here’s the question for me: “Can I ease their burden”? Well, harangued by the 17 newspaper articles, I’m trying. The problem is the scale of the task. Every time I try to throw something out, I’m taken down a rabbit hole of memory. I don’t need this address book from when I was 21, and certainly my sons don’t need it. But I flip through it before throwing it into the recycling, and an hour later I’m left wondering: “Who was that Mandy, and who was that Steve, and who is this person in Canada with an address in Alberta that a younger me has so painstakingly transcribed?” And then, in the same address book, I come across my partner, my true love, here described as “Debbie” – a contraction of her name that she’s never liked. There’s a university college room number, but – of course – no phone number. At some point, I must have knocked on her door. Hopefully, by then, I’d learnt what to call her. The address book is no use to anyone, of course, and yet I find myself reluctant to throw it out. Maybe one of my sons might pause to flip though and see the first clumsy step – “Debbie” – in the relationship that later led to his existence. OK, probably not. They’ll throw it in the skip without looking. I’m not blaming them: I’ve been through this with my parents and step-parents. It’s a brutal business. The first to die was my stepfather – my English teacher from school, who’d run off with my mother in term two. He’d then, some years on, disappointed her by dropping dead while my father remained healthy. This was “terribly unfair”, according to my mother, once you considered a) my father’s drinking problem, b) the teacher’s prowess at squash and c) the fact that she and the teacher were both English aristocrats (a claim that can only be described as “seriously contested”). Still, he died. And so his daughter from his first marriage flew out from London, and the two of us built a bonfire out the back of this house in country NSW and burnt just about everything. It was not a hostile act, not by either of us. It was just a question of “who needs this stuff?” – the old bank statements, the teaching notes, the school magazines. When my mother died it was more dramatic. She’d left hundreds of love letters between her and the English teacher, including both her steamy erotic thoughts about him, and some less than complimentary thoughts about her own son. “A punishing presence” was how she described me in one letter, as she described the weekend I visited her to mark my 15th birthday. I still remember reading through these letters, after she died, alone in her empty house, the Queensland sun filtering through the windows in a way that seemed to heighten rather than dispel my gloom. Are there things that would embarrass me if my children found them? Should I throw out the three-volume, self-annotated, product of a period of adolescent madness? What about Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s erotic fantasies? I purchased a copy last year. So, do I need to put a sticker on the front declaring my legitimate excuse? And what of the joint record collection, product of shacking up with “Debbie” – indicating an intense shared interest in Billy Joel? (Three copies of The Stranger?) Maybe it’s better if the children face up to our flaws. I’ll throw out the old bank statements, the old news clippings and perhaps that third, mysterious, copy of
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