Swedish Death Cleaning is, I think, what I'm doing in my office. I said I spend three hours a day in there and that's about all I can handle because I look at every single thing, every little piece of paper in a file. At times, it has been quite emotional. It's like a slow motion flashback of my life, as well as the lives of my parents, since as an only child, I have all of their stuff, too. My husband was helping me and he got so frustrated he decided I'd be better off going through everything alone! I'm stuck on things that leave me with a conundrum. For example, I have my christening dress all boxed up and tiny looking and as I look at it, I wonder why I have it, why I keep it? I never look at it, I never think about it. The whole Marie Kondo thing about holding an item and if it "sparks joy" you should keep it, if not, get rid of it - this christening dress sparks nothing in me at all! Yet it seems so crass to throw it out. Using the mindset of Swedish Death Cleaning, am I just going to leave this sort of stuff for my husband to worry about, should I go before him? I'm 99% sure that if I were to die before him, he'd throw it out. When my father died in 2014, my stepmother gave me three huge cartons of his personal papers. I have his thesis, so many newspaper clippings, his diplomas, his medical licenses, his awards.....all sorts of things that I never think about pulling out of the boxes and mulling over as a reminder of who he was. I know who he was! I try and live who he was, I don't need these things to remind me of what a great person he was! Do I throw them out? It's his professional life in those boxes. And again, when I leave this earth, whoever is here to sort through my stuff will throw it out!
I guess I'm not really a person who needs "things" to evoke memory or love in people who have left this earth. Being burdened with their "stuff" as I try to unburden myself of my own "stuff", has proven to be the challenge I didn't think it would be!