Swedish Death Cleaning: What We Save, What We Toss

I’ve taken this quiet time between the holidays and the New Year to do a deep cleaning of stuff. I have the concept of “Swedish Death Cleaning" in mind: I’m doing this in part because I don’t want to leave our children with as much stuff to sort through as my parents did for me. I want to lighten my load as I grow older, and lighten the load for our children.

There are boxes of letters from friends no longer in my life, and letters from friends who still are. Photos from my teenage years, letters from past lovers, children’s artwork, writing clips, press clips, ancestor photos dating back to late nineteenth-century Russia: who was that woman wearing a white lace dress standing next to a young girl with a giant white bow in her hair?

Some of these are precious: I will keep all my children’s art and let them decide for themselves what to keep and what to discard. And I will keep all my writing from my childhood and my teens. Now, 50 years later, I am taken with how strong my commitment was to express myself in words, and to stick with my craft.

But some things, once meaningful, no longer are. Like that photo of a college roommate I dearly loved. Our friendship lasted decades — and then one day, with no explanation, she was gone. I was deeply hurt. I thought a lot about her over the years, with anger, with sadness, with bewilderment, and eventually I came to see that for whatever reason she needed to move on, she did. Years have passed, and I am ready to move on, too. I threw the photo out.

What do we hold on to? What do we get rid of? And why?

I suspect that if we went back through the archives of our lives, we would find threads that connect our decades. Keeping some of those memories is important—they are the through lines of our stories and have lead us to who we are today. We might also see that we are stronger than we know, doing our best to be decent humans trying hard to survive and thrive in an often difficult world.

Thank you for riding with me on this journey. May we laugh a little more, judge a little less, choose kindness when we can, and cultivate resilience by holding each other up in love and community. May we show up for the people we love. That’s why we’re here.

I wish you all a blessed, healthy, joyful, creative new year.