The Trump Memorial Library

 A couple years ago I heard about the concept of "Swedish death cleaning". Just from a brief description, I got the concept. Essentially it is decluttering your life with the idea of not burdening loved ones with too many possessions after you die.

When I heard the description, I realized this is what I done for my parents in 2011 while I was staying with them in Fort Collins. Their garage had become stuffed with possessions half packed in a boxes such that there was hardly any room to walk in it. I spent weeks and months going through their things, mostly during the winter when it was freezing cold. It was quite a task because of the lack of space. The cold Colorado winter and snow meant it was possible to take things out of the garage into the driveway to make space to sort only briefly.

Nevertheless I was determined to help them do this. In the end, I threw out almost nothing. For one thing, they weren't my possessions, except for some that were mine (to be honest, this began by my attempt to find my own possessions that were among theirs).

Mostly what I did was organize their things, finding the lost "precious" things among lots of clutter, and repacking things so they could move out more easily when it was time to do so. Since I was staying with them, it gave me a great opportunity to locate various items and talk about them with my parents while they were still in my living years.

This happened during what was a very difficult time in my own life, as I was going through a crisis of self-examination about my life. Finding things that parents owned when they were a young married couple (which is how I first met them) brought up a lot of feelings about the passage of time and the swiftness of our lives. My sisters were very appreciative of many things I found as well. In the end, the work I did made it much easier. My father passed away in the living room in his home hospice bed. My mother moved into a small apartment after that and we put their remaining possessions that I had sorted into a storage unit. She died about a year and a half after my father, alone in the night in her bed apparently. My brother-in-law--now my ex-brother-in-law after my sister's divorce---found her in the morning.

When my father died it was an excruciating process over weeks and wrecked us all pretty badly. By contrast, when my mother died, she just, well, died. Since most of her stuff was in storage, mostly all we had to do was take her oxygen tanks back to the supply. That's it? I remember saying to my sister.

Of course it still has a big impact on me, which is why I'm writing about this. It comes back to me now I am doing my own Swedish death cleaning of my own possessions in my own garage. Going through my things constantly brings me back not only to my own life, but to that difficult time fourteen years ago.  Small things trigger waves of lasting grief and confusion and humiliation of the experience of death. My top priority is to identify items of significance in family history that have come into my possession, so that my sisters, provided they outlive me (which I hope they do), would be have the chance to preserve them. 

Then there are things that are probably important only to me, but which are more important to me than my other possessions, and which would be the things I would keep if I had to get rid of most things I own. No one else---well, almost no one else, would know why they were important to me.

As with my folks, I will probably get rid of very little for the moment that isn't truly junk, since I don't have to do that right now. Mostly what I will do is organize, especially my books, which seem important to me to keep. At one point, I had them out on the shelves in the garage so that, for the first time in my adult life, I could see my whole collection. It was fun to go down to  the garage and hang out. Jessica called it the "Trump Memorial Library." I no longer need to have everything out for display, and I can use the shelf space for other things. I just need to know where to find a particular item. 

So maybe what I'm doing could be better labeled "Swedish death sorting."