My Husband’s on a Death Clean

Purging a life of knick-knacks and tchotchkes

My husband has been a bit under the weather as of late with a bronchial infection that lingers on. He was a smoker for years and now just smokes the occasional cigar. So there is always this fear of the worst-case scenario. No, he doesn’t have lung cancer, but the lingering cough that has kept him up nights has given him pause, made him reflect on his life thus far, and what time he has left on this crazy planet.

As a result, he’s been on a cleaning mission, going through boxes, closets, and drawers, and sorting through stuff he no longer finds complementary to his current life. He made a keep-and-toss list. (I hope I’m on the former.)

He’s on a Death Clean, albeit he denies it. The evidence is in opened drawers, closets, and the piles and piles of junk scattered throughout our two-story home.

Death Clean

If you never heard of the term death clean, you probably haven’t lost a parent yet or helped with your grandparents’ junk. A death clean is a way to declutter and throw away crap that you haven’t used since your twenties and know your kids and grandkids will never use.

Basically, it’s about physical dispossession — dumping useless possessions and organizing the junk you do want so that your kids don’t have to deal with it all when you’re dead. Hence — DEATH CLEAN.

Margareta Magnusson came up with the term in her book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter. It seems easy enough, but it’s not. How do you just get rid of that pair of Frye books you owned for thirty years? Not that simple. There are lots of emotional associations involved.

We’ve raised five kids in our house and accumulated a fair share of crap. Our five bedrooms still stored soccer trophies, dusty stuffed animals, old textbooks, drum sets, toys, and teenage byproducts — not having the courage to throw anything away.

Yes, we kept it all and accrued more junk since the kids flew the nest. A lot of family members equals a lot of junk. Oh no, not just generated from growing up at home, but junk our kids no longer need or find useful now.

Maybe Mom wants an extra car seat? Maybe Dad wants a large outdoor plastic planting concoction that takes up half the driveway? Maybe they can use another table or chair to sit beside the other tables and chairs in the garage. Don’t want it anymore — give it to your parents kind of thing.

One man’s Junk is another man’s treasure.

My husband has a big job ahead of him. He’s a good guy, so he’s making phone calls to our kids before tossing it in the Goodwill pile or leaving it on the curb up for grabs for passersby. Does anybody want a busted gas barbecue? Free for the taking.

Someone did. It’s gone, along with a few busted bicycles — one missing a wheel, the other handlebars.

Nope. My kids don’t want their old junk. They don’t have enough room for their new junk. That’s why it’s been kept at our house in the first place. No room for the 30-year-old out-of-tune piano or expensive drum set.

All their crap can go! How cathartic! What a cleansing purge! This left him with only his own bric-a-brac and oddments to scavenge through.

Do you really want all these surfboards, honey?

“Yep, I do. This is your Death Clean,” I said.

The Purge

That’s the deal with the death clean. It’s about taking responsibility for your own carbon imprint, your own lifetime of consumer choices. This kind of made it easier for my husband not to have to deal with sorting through my hoarded belongings. If it was a shared ownership situation, I let him make the decision. It was a quick “Goodbye to that!”

Off he went, systematically going through memory lane, deciding what to keep, what to give away, and what to dump. Some of the old things he stumbled on brought back intense emotions from his writing career. A lifetime of TV shows and holiday gifts. I mean, who wouldn’t want to keep this lovely soccer chair from Sabrina the Teenage Witch?

The death clean process can be both practical and emotional, as it often involves letting go of items with sentimental value or things that are no longer necessary for living in the present. He has boxes of scripts, baseball caps with TV logos, Tee shirts, pens, pencils, backpacks, coffee mugs, and flashlights — all memorabilia from a successful TV career.

Beats me why he would get rid of any of it. It’s his purge.

Rebirth

As he continued his purge, my husband realized that this process was not just about dumping stuff so that kids didn’t have to deal with it. It was about embracing life thus far and all his truly amazing experiences and accomplishments. It was about seeing his success as a father, husband, son, friend, TV producer.

It was about acknowledging that his possessions should serve a purpose, either by bringing joy and fond memories or by being shared with others who could benefit from them. Goodbye, Sabrina chair, given to one of my sons-in-law, who will store it in his garage.

In the end, the death clean became a transformative experience for both of us. It was a reminder to live intentionally, cherish our time together, and let go of the unnecessary baggage that weighed us down.

As we face the vulnerabilities of aging, we know that our love and the memories we create will endure without tripping over the junk to remind us.

Thanks for sharing the purge.