Death knell for clutter – Eugene Weekly

To be clear: I don't plan on dying any time soon.

But remember: one day you will be young and in incredibly good health; The next thing you know, middle age becomes a fading memory when you reach for the ibuprofen bottle. This is about the time when you look around the house and realize that, despite your best intentions, you are completely drowning in things.

As George Carlin used to say, “Your house is just a place for your stuff.” If you didn’t have so much damn stuff, you wouldn’t need a house!”

My wife Lisa Strycker and I have lived in the same house for 38 years. This means we have almost four decades of material at our disposal – all absolutely irreplaceable! – that keeps piling up in drawers, in cupboards, in storage bins, in lockers and is mysteriously hidden behind the sofa and under the piano. We have surplus furniture. We have piles of tools that we never use, making it harder to find the tools we use regularly. The other day I discovered an entire filing cabinet drawer full of USB cables, chargers, and Ethernet cables.

Then there is the paperwork. When I was sorting out the economic shed a few months ago, I found four bank boxes full of old tax returns, all with receipts that dated back to the Clinton administration. Or was it Reagan's? My office is stacked with handwritten and typed diaries, letters from old friends, and file folders full of yellowed clippings from magazines and publications I no longer wrote for.

And as a photographer, I have thousands of photos. Actually, tens of thousands of them. Fortunately, most of them are on hard drives.

Sometime a year or two ago, Lisa and I started thinning out our stuff. Bags of clothing were sent to Goodwill or the clothing drop Eugene Weekly for the White Bird Clinic. Unnecessary tools and equipment have found new owners, with the exception of the completely non-functional ones (one day I'll fix the chop saw!) that end up in the recycling heap. Financial papers were safely disposed of. Books went to library sales or to St. Vinnie's or were sold back to a used bookstore.

Deciding what to keep and what to get rid of can be a roller coaster ride. Last week Lisa emptied an entire bookshelf and placed the shelf itself on the discard pile. I saved the shelf – hey, it's ugly, but my dad and I built it together when I was 11 – and brought its contents to St. Vinnie's.

The trigger for this determination was the death of some relatives over the years. When you get started, it turns out that someone else – usually an unhappy family member – has to take care of all your things. Lisa and I vowed not to put such a burden on our son.

It turns out that the Scandinavians have a word for this kind of late, mortality-tolerant domestic sorting: “dozing,” or “death cleansing”. In Swedish it sounds a lot less scary. And yes, there is a book about Döstädning. Margareta Magnussons 2017 The gentle art of Swedish death cleaning: How to free yourself and your family from a lifelong mess lays out a program for getting rid of your junk, chapter by chapter. I bought the book for my Kindle so that it wouldn't take up space in my office. On the whole it's fine, but the principles of tidying up are pretty simple and obvious. Think Marie Kondo on steroids. I would save your money on this book and avoid adding another book to your book.

The first thing that surprised me about such a thorough cleaning was this: it's much easier to live when you're not surrounded by so many things. I find tools again in the workshop. The pantry is now full of food that I can actually find. I have a small shelf in my office full of books that I actually read from time to time.

It's not just about throwing things away. Another aspect of döstädning is making sure that what you have stays in order. It's time to fix all the little annoying problems that are so easy to ignore. We need to fix the water pressure in the well, fix the holes in the garden fence, buy a new sump pump to replace the dilapidated pump in the crawl space under the house, and replace the squirrel-damaged screen on the upstairs sliding door. Why not make sure everything works while you're still alive?

Death is the ultimate reminder to clean up your life. Do it while you still can.

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