First of all, the relatively good news. As far as I know there’s no reason to think I’ll be dying any time soon, despite my health fright early this year. That’s still receiving attention, thank you NHS, but is getting less life threatening with every check up.
However the fact is that before many more months have passed I’ll have reached my three score years and ten. Once considered to be our life expectancy, before so many of us got into the habit of calling any age beyond forty “middle aged”. Well I’m not. So it’s high time I was getting on with what Swedish people call “Döstädning” meaning “death cleaning”. Generally defined as the art of clearing up the stuff you’ve amassed in your life so you won't burden your friends and family with sorting it all out after you’ve died.
In fact, without calling it that Swedish word I’ve been sort of doing that for a good few years now. Sarah and I even wrote some blogs about it called “Clearing” (our preferred word for it all) a few years ago - all the links are below). After which death clearing became even more of a habit than it already was. Which I’ll detail below.
Then there has also been the renovating of our home last year. Having to move out and put all our stuff into storage while the work was done led Sarah and I to keep asking each other, even after loads of clearing “Are we seriously going to pay out good money to store that?” Stuff we’d stopped noticing until we took it out to store. Followed by multiple drop-offs at charity shops, then even a few to the council’s recycling version of a Döstädning centre, with skips.
So that’s the stuff you can pick up and carry away. But for us clearing has also and always been about what we spend our time on, as much as about what we’ve spent our money on. And over these past several years I’ve particularly been paying attention to that. Stopping the stuff long-time readers might already have read about on here, plus a few extras not mentioned ’til now.
Like…deep breath: being self-employed; ending A Sense of Place the business; driving and owning a car; all the cameras, kit and software we’d use to make films and run gigs; cupboards and shelves of it; stopping the PhD, the university and that whole academic adventure; no longer having a laptop and hard drives full of files, theses, proposals, invoices, accounts and tax returns (I write on a much more portable little iPad and keyboard these days). All looking for work and volunteering now stopped; as is being on committees; trying to be social at them large gatherings I never liked anyway; drinking alcohol (that stopped six years ago now); all going to parties; going to Quaker meetings; Utopianism, other belief systems and all forms of ideology, stopped. And then of course Twitter has been recently ditched and its would be replacement Threads is looking like it could be next. Oh and there was clearing out all my clothes when I decided to lose the weight I’d put on, in the pandemic and just because I had. And finally, just remembered there’s the long gone stereo equipment, LPs and most books. All long gone. Some sold, some freecycled, charity shopped but all gone. For a mixture of reasons. Loss of interest or enthusiasm, some health, some annoyed me and all because of time. Life moves on and that’s that. We don’t always want, need and do what we used to.
So after all that? I feel great. Lighter because there’s literally less of me. But also because I’m not weighed down by responsibilities, possessions, or by all that stuff I’m no longer interested in doing or having. Or in filling up my time with the detailed carrying around of a life and diary that needed more than a bit of clearing. Which they’ve had.
And that’s just my list. Only some of that stuff being Sarah’s too, who could probably make up her own just as long a clearing paragraph. But you get the idea. Even from a life I’d thought of as minimalist, loads.
So is it done now, this Döstädning?
Well no, because that’s part of its point. It’s a life thing, for while I still have one. And not just for the sake of others when I die. But for me to have the kind of life I want now.
Which is? Well I have thought about that, a lot, but I think that’s best kept for Part Two. This part’s said more than enough for now.
Except, here are those earlier Clearing blog posts I mentioned. From back in 2017: