What in the historical coinage is Death Cleaning?

The Christmas Eve Extravaganzas ended after my mom died.

Which is the most depressing way to begin, and yet…here we are.

For my grandmother’s last Christmas, there was only one thing under the tree for the grandkids. And mine was in an envelope. I know you’re thinking: CASH!!! Which, in my case, isn’t exactly wrong. But it isn’t exactly right either.

Grandma had been doing some Swedish Death Cleaning and had unearthed a family treasure. My Christmas card contained a dirty silver dollar and a story.

 
Quick side-note in case you’re like “Pause, please. What in the historical coinage is death cleaning?”

This is basically when you declutter your entire house before you die so that your family doesn’t have to do it after you’re gone.

There’s a whole book about it that is a pretty good read with some good suggestions on how to go about it (and how to have a conversation with your loved ones about it) if you or your parents are heading into that sort of territory. I’ll drop a link to it in the PS.


It seems that this silver dollar belonged to a guy named Ben who grandma described as the half brother of my great-grandfather. I have no idea who this is.

Seems it would’ve been easier for Grandma to just say it was her uncle, right?

Unless he’s not?

I have no bandwidth for the mental gymnastics of the 23andMe involved in figuring this out.


So, Ben was just a kid when he and his mother left Germany for the US. In a surprise twist, his mother met AND MARRIED my great-grandfather’s father ON THE BOAT ON THE WAY OVER! Because apparently the part in Titanic when the steerage folks were all dancing and having a great time, culminating in a steamed-up Ford situation is as historically accurate as The Unsinkable Molly Brown’s gut wrenching, “Dear God” as she watched the ship sinking.

Anyways, I’ll skip ahead in the story to the good part because when Ben was 12, he caught a freight train headed West, looking for gold. Which I assume he never found since my family spent the next 115 Christmases exchanging emery boards as gifts.

He did, however, find this silver dollar and he kept it on him at all times because it was stamped with his birth year, 1881. It was in his pocket when he died and his wife passed it on to my great-grandfather, who passed it on to his son, who gave it to my grandma, who gave it to me. In a Christmas card with a story I never knew about a few of the people I come from.

Of all the things she owned, this is what she wanted me to have when she was gone.
 
She did this kind of thing with all five of us grandkids. I have no idea what anyone else received. And all I can say is that I love that she did this.

Not so much because of the family history being passed down, although that’s very cool.

But because none of us had to feel like we needed to keep anything else from her home because “she would have wanted us to have it.”

None of us ever had to fill our homes with things we didn’t really want just because we felt like we should.

None of us ever had to explain that “It was my grandmother’s. She would want me to keep it. She would be sad if she knew I didn’t want it. She would be so angry at me if I gave it away.”

 
We carry so much guilt around items we inherited from the people we have loved and lost before we were ready to let them go.

My grandmother made it very clear what was truly meaningful to her and exactly what she would be sad about letting go of.  She’d already decided what she wanted each of us to keep and that whole “but she would want me to have it” thing? Gone.

We knew exactly what she wanted us to have. And we knew that everything else could go straight to the auction house where it would end up in the home of someone who actually wanted it.

I love Grandma for doing that for us.

 
What if we did that for ourselves? In our own homes?

And not just with the heirlooms.

What if we did it with the random piles of “maybe someday” and the boxes full of hobbies we outgrew and the clothes that belonged to a version of us who had more interest in wearing a thong?

Because you and I both know that the inherited stuff is just the emotionally complicated slice of the pizza that makes us wail, “Why do I have so much stuff?”

Whether it came from your grandmother or from an Amazon delivery truck, the truth is the same—we keep tons of things we don’t really want anymore.

 
What if we went through all of our stuff and decided what we really wanted ourselves to have?

What if we sat down and asked ourselves: What do you want?

Not in a minimalist sense.

The minimalist question would be more like: What do you need? Which is also a good question to ask. But needing things is only one reason why we have things in our home. Wanting is another reason. And I don’t think wanting is bad.

 
I have no idea what you want.

But I’ve got a pretty good idea of what you don’t want.

You don’t want to live in a storage unit.

You don’t want to live in a museum.

You don’t want to live in a space you can’t actually live in.

You don’t want to live in a home that requires you to fight with your vacuum cleaner and the Christmas decorations and the 42 rolls of toilet paper that are falling on your head every time you try to get your suitcase out of the closet to go on vacation.

 
And you don’t do all the work of decluttering just so you can have less stuff.

You do it so that you can have more life.

So you can host your friends for book club and your family for Thanksgiving.

So you can come home and head directly to the bathroom to run a hot bubble bath and drape a sheet mask over your face.

So you can roll your suitcase out of the closet and pack it in 20 minutes because everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be and it’s all sooooo easy.

 
Maybe you’re not officially “death cleaning” because you’re not planning to leave. But you are planning your life.

And your home is either helping or it’s getting in your way.

If it’s in your way, letting go of the things you don’t want in your life so you can have the things you do want in your life just makes sense.

It doesn’t mean you’re betraying your grandmother. Or The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Or Past You who took up knitting for 20 minutes in 1998.

You’re simply making space for this version of you to come home and just. Be. Home.

 
Your friend who is suddenly curious whether this silver dollar is worth way more than a dollar,
Vivian

 
PS. The book I mentioned earlier is called “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” by Margareta Magnusson.

One of the passages I highlighted because I think it’s a fantastic idea (and it reminded me of what my grandma did with the silver dollar) is this:

“If you give an old desk to a young person, make a story about it, not a lie of course, but tell them what kind of letters were written on it, what documents were signed, what types of thoughts were entertained around this desk—and the story will grow as it is passed on from young person to younger person to younger person. An ordinary desk becomes extraordinary through time.”

I love this idea.