After I requested my mom what she may like for her birthday this 12 months, she rapidly texted again: Nothing. We’re downsizing.
My dad and mom already stay in a small home — a former fishing cabin on the sting of a lake. Our household moved a couple of occasions when my brothers and I had been rising up, our childhood belongings pared down at every step. My dad and mom relocated after we graduated from school, stripping their belongings down additional and transport what furnishings was left to every of us children. I obtained the Sellers Hoosier, a picket hutch with a built-in tin flour bin and a metallic bread kneading shelf, now greater than 100 years outdated, that my great-grandmother used to bake on.
I puzzled what was left for them to downsize. After which it hit me: Have been they doing the Swedish dying clear? “Döstädning: The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is the bestselling e-book that sparked a TV present and popularized a decluttering approach that has folks clear up their belongings earlier than they die, so their family and friends received’t need to. My mom can be 80 this 12 months, my father 82 — was there one thing they weren’t telling me?
My mom didn’t suppose it was acceptable to throw any of it away, not whereas my aunt was nonetheless alive. “She asked that some of the Princess Diana things be sent to you,” Mother confessed. “But,” she whispered, “I don’t think you’d want it.” She’s proper, I don’t, however the bigger query is: Who does?
The thought of döstädning (and the truth that my aunt clearly didn’t get round to it) made me take into consideration all of the stuff I’ve collected through the years. After I moved from New York to Los Angeles greater than 20 years in the past, I couldn’t afford to ship most of my books, so I despatched solely essentially the most treasured, signed editions I had. I additionally despatched the journals I’d written in for years, full of the small particulars of my life in New York Metropolis. What I wore on a primary date. A promotion. An unrequited crush. I used to be transferring to Los Angeles for love, however I couldn’t half with these chronicles of all my earlier relationships.
Now these journals stay within the storage of my household’s Los Feliz home. I do know precisely which plastic bin they’re in, although I haven’t learn them since I left New York. If I had been to die tomorrow, how would I really feel about another person studying them — my dad and mom, my son, my husband? And if I don’t need anybody studying them after I’m gone, why have I saved them?
This led me to ask my family and friends: Is there something that you’d need routinely destroyed after your dying, earlier than your family members discovered it? A lot of the solutions revolved round intercourse: bare pictures, intercourse toys, pornography, soiled notes and sexts. Different solutions had been extra comical: A pot stash they didn’t need children to seek out; particularly, weed butter within the freezer. The key household in New Jersey (I believe he was joking).
Some folks revealed that that they had pacts with a good friend or relative to destroy sure objects after their dying. I liked the concept of a trusted good friend tossing all my buried secrets and techniques, till I remembered what occurred to Franz Kafka. His good friend and literary executor, Max Brod, had been entrusted to burn all of Kafka’s letters and manuscripts after his dying — a want Kafka put in writing, although Brod informed him he wouldn’t do it. Certainly, Brod printed the fabric, and we’d not have “The Trial,” “The Castle” or different nice works had he adopted Kafka’s directions.
Did Brod have the proper to overrule his good friend? Maybe it’s higher to ask if Kafka had the proper to ask that the manuscripts be destroyed. As an artist, do you owe the world your work, even after dying?
My good friend Cecil, a novelist, says: “As artists, it’s our gig to keep the embarrassing things that inspire us around. We are complex, and hopefully everyone gets that.” She says her journals would make a “boring read” — but when she requested me to destroy all her works after her dying and I discovered some stunning piece of writing amongst them, I’d be torn about the right way to proceed.
Regardless that I’ve printed a memoir and works of fiction that permit readers a glimpse into my life, I nonetheless have elements of myself that I don’t need anybody to see. On this age of over-sharing, speaking about what I’d need worn out after my dying has given me a greater understanding of döstädning and its enchantment. It’s much less about saving our households from having to do the cleaning-up work, and extra about making use of some small measure of management over how we’re remembered by these we liked. Maybe it’s additionally a nudge to stay a life worthy of remembering — intercourse toys and all — whereas we nonetheless can.
Cylin Busby is an writer and screenwriter. Her newest e-book is “The Bookstore Cat.”