I flew cross-country last week and knew the flight would be a great opportunity to immerse myself in work and get ahead of the game. I’d write a post, sketch out a calendar for upcoming ones then clean up notes from a few recent interviews to get a jump on an article due next month. I think you know where this is going. Instead of working on any of the above, I binged on Direct TV pretty much the entire time.
It wasn’t completely wasted time though, because my show of choice was a show I’d been meaning to watch: “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.”
To the uninitiated, the point of Swedish Death Cleaning is “cleaning out your stuff so other people don’t have to do it when you’re dead.” In each episode, three Swedes—a professional organizer (Ella), a designer (Johan), and a psychologist (Katarina)—roll up to a deeply cluttered American home and meet its occupant. After some introductions and back story, they then walk through the “death cleaning” process.
A Three-Pronged Attack
It all starts with the brutal purge that is Ella’s “red dot” (RÖd Prick for you purists) system,
which tasks occupants to put a red dot sticker on everything they agree to get rid of. At first this takes some convincing, deep dives into why someone is hanging on to a particular piece of funiture or art or clothing that has no pratical purpose or appeal. As things go away, Johan comes in to rebuild the space into an environment that fits the occupant’s needs and values. While that is happening, Katarina swoops in to interpret the feelings and relationship dynamics that allowed the clutter to accumulate. Her goal for her subject is both resolution of the past and a commitment to a new, freer way forward. The whole shtick is to use this multi-faceted method of decluttering the home as a vehicle to declutter the soul.
The Revelation
The first thing that struck me while watching the episodes unfold was this: My parents were not Swedish. Once Nina had moved into assisted living, the next project was to sell our childhood home in suburbia, which meant reconciling fifty years of “stuff” that had accumulated since we’d all moved away. I hadn’t lived there since I was 12, and over the years it had become a dumping ground for everything from old sports equipment and gear to closets of “vintage” clothes and rooms full of inherited antiques and misfit furniture.
Boxes of photos, clippings, books, homemade crafts, trophies, mementos and dish sets had accumulated in what we called the rumpus room. The word ”rumpus” connotes an element of fun. This was indeed where we had played as kids—coloring; playing Pie in the Face; acting out plays; setting the room up as a “restaurant”, a Hot Wheels track, a music studio. There was, however, no such thing as fun here anymore. It was just stacks and piles and boxes of stuff nobody had the incentive to throw away.
Directly adjacent to the rumpus room was the “work room” where, presumably, a tool bench existed beneath layers of decommissioned windsurfers and surf boards, bicycles and wetsuits, kickboards, boogie boards, booms, masts, engine parts, amps and rogue boxes of unusable electronics.
All in the Family
We kids were as guilty as my parents, as plenty of our crap lived among the detritus, stashed in closets and bureaus to be accessible at our own convenience. Now, we had to reckon with it. When I say “we” let me be clear that this was almost entirely my two sisters. I flew in episodically, and spent most of my time sifting through bottomless boxes of newspaper clippings and photos that documented every fine print moment of my 20 year ski racing career. (Who knew I had finished 56th in Oberunterschlagen in 1986?)
Zen and the Art of Letting Go
At first, we thought it would be too upsetting to include mom in this (progressively less discerning) culling process. Making such wholesale decisions about these things—a record of our lives so diligently preserved, if never revisited— felt wrong with Mom right there; but, she liked to come with us and sit quietly, hands folded across her lap, and be part of the action. When we found old articles or yearbooks or college mementos with her she would look at them with interest, or sometimes delight, and smile. But when we asked if she wanted to keep anything the answer was always the same. “Oh toss it!” she’d say, as if it was silly to consider an alternative. “I’m never going to need it.
Did she really, truly not care about these physical things? A friend shared her similar unsettling feeling while sorting through her Dad’s things, when he was still living in his home, at an even later stage of Alzheimer’s. At first, my friend felt guilty deciding what to throw out without consulting him, but she soon realized it was kinder than asking him to care, or to burden him with making a decision. In Nina’s case, I think she was truly not hung up on any of it. She’d already let go of it all. Or, Nina was actually part Swedish.
Making Room For Exceptions
The “gentle art” aspect of Swedish Death Cleaning is where Ella recasts the process as “editing down” to things that truly matter to you. She probes to divine the true meaning that fuels the emotional attachment to an object. She offers the option of putting things in a “dilemma box” with a deadline by which you’ll decide it you’ve missed it or not. She preserves space for things that have an emotional value.
In each episode, the big albatrosses go away—furniture, paintings, collections; but, some keepsakes of family legacy make the cut, and are memorialized. An afghan, a mom’s sweater, a great grandmotther’s hand made hankerchiefs. Instead of gathering dust and being stashed away they are compactly preserved, infused with meaning and presented to the next generation. That reminded me of a particular dress Nina had remembered and wanted in her closet. We knew it no longer fit, and she’d never have an occasion to wear it even if it did. Just seeing it in her closet, however, reminded her of good times and made her happy. It made me happy too.
The Gift of Good Riddance
The final of the three episodes I watched featured a woman who inherited all her family’s crap when their mom went into a nursing home. Much of it included things that, to her mom, represented her own ability to provide for her family. At the end, the occupant has a revelation, a way to come to terms with chucking those things that were infused with both love and guilt, but mostly guilt: “The life you live is the inheritance and not the stuff.”
It reminded me of something I had just read in the latest “Updates from the Road” post from ski racer Tricia Mangan. She was in Chile when she learned of her grandmother’s passing, and here reflects on the significance of a funeral resumé, which is all the things talked about at your funeral: “So often, I’ve found, the most important things that people remember you for, are not what you accomplished, but instead, what you gave and how you made people feel.”
It also reminded me of the Japanese term, “Meiwaku”, which we discussed in At Home or In a Home. It translates to “being a nuisance,” and elderly people in Japan strive for a no-meiwaku existence that does not burden the next generation. To anyone out there who shares that goal, I implore you to channel your inner Swede and get rid of the stuff that weighs you down.
Up Next
A Room with a View: A major selling point carries a major unintended consequence.