Hoarding vs Sparking Joy

Once You’ve Read The Swedish Art of Death Cleaning, You’ll Never Go Back

Photo by Dim Hou on Unsplash

I am absolutely, definitively not a hoarder.

I remember my dad telling me the story of his mother, standing over a burn barrel in their back yard, blithely tossing in a letter she’d received from Harry S. Truman (yes, that Harry S. Truman). I don’t recall the circumstances under which she had gotten this letter, but that’s not the point. When he asked her why she would get rid of such a thing, she blandly replied, “It doesn’t mean anything to anyone but me, so why keep it?”

Fair enough. Truman surely didn’t write the letter himself, and maybe he signed it, maybe he didn’t, maybe it was a rubber stamp of his signature, but no matter — she was right. It could be two generations later, and her progeny would still be shuffling that letter around in a cardboard box of mementoes, until it dried up and someone a few decades later tossed it in the trash anyway. Better that she had done it herself.

I recently helped with the cleanout of a neighbor’s house after it was damaged badly from a fire next door. I live in Baltimore, where the row houses cozy up one after the other, smooshed together like friendly sardines. My neighbor, Miss Debbie, is 74, and she lives two blocks away, next door to a couple of younger women in their 20s. The fire started on their second…