My parents never put their house in order. So the death cleaning fell to us

Montreal Gazette

03-05-2025

Entertainment And Life
By
Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.
– Leonard Cohen, in 2016 in The New Yorker
Late one January afternoon in 2009, a reader called to comment on a column I'd written — and we got to talking. She told me how, once her children were launched, she'd sold the house in which she'd raised them and moved to a rented upper duplex. At 80, she had just moved again — this time to a one-bedroom apartment.
With each move, she had divested herself of more of her possessions so that now, in her compact apartment, she had only essentials. She was adamant, she said, about not wanting to leave the contents of her life for her children — or anyone — to sort through after her death.
Listening to her, I saw into the future: I envisioned my parents' gracious two-level condo, with its art and furniture and rugs, its many books and endless carousels of vacation slides, the massive dining table around which so many happy meals had been shared, the storage area with its Jenga towers of bridge chairs, ladders, old suitcases and boxes of random stuff. And I knew it would fall to my brother and me to sort through their belongings once they were gone and decide what to do with them — to me, mostly, since my brother doesn't live in Montreal.
More than once as our parents aged we had suggested, gently, that they consider divesting themselves of some of what they had accumulated and moving to a smaller place on a single level, perhaps in a building with an elevator. They wouldn't hear of it. 'We'll be in a small enough space eventually,' my father would say. And that was that.
When he died in 2014, two months before what would have been his 90th birthday, my parents had been married for nearly 64 years. My mother was 92 when she died, in 2021. And the future I had envisioned during my conversation with the 80-year-old caller a dozen years earlier was now.
My parents had never put their house in order. And so it would fall to us.
The reality, of course, is that we will all die. And the prospect of our eventual demise should be reason enough to clear out unnecessary belongings and simplify our lives, says Swedish author and artist Margareta Magnusson — to figure out what is important to us and what we want to give away or discard so as not to burden others with those decisions.
Yet 'some people can't wrap their heads around death. And these people leave a mess after them,' she observed in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter (Scribner, 2018). 'A loved one wishes to inherit nice things from you. Not all things from you.'
Magnusson's slim and sage guide, which urges us to streamline our lives sooner rather than later, became a bestseller and the basis for a touching reality TV series of the same name developed and narrated by actor and comedian Amy Poehler. The eight episodes of its first season aired in 2023 on Peacock.
The practice of death cleaning is popular across Scandinavian countries — but particularly in Sweden, where it is known as döstädning. 'In Swedish it is a term that means that you remove unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet,' writes the mother of five.
'I have collected many things over the years, and it gives me such joy to go through them all. Sorting through everything is sad sometimes, too, but I really do not want to give my beloved children and their families too much trouble with my stuff after I am gone.'
Death cleaning is a concept, like spring cleaning. It is about editing, about keeping what matters to you and getting rid of the rest. It is as much about clearing your mind as anything, and as much — or more — for you as for those who come after you, says Magnusson, who is 90. She figures 65 is a good age at which to start döstädning.
'One's own pleasure, and the chance to find meaning and memory, is the most important thing,' she writes. 'And if you don't remember why a thing has meaning or why you kept it, it has no worth, and it will be easier for you to part with.'
For some, hiring a specialist to help with the task is a solution. Longtime professional organizer Samara Shapson of Sort it Out with Samara works with people wanting less clutter and those downsizing from homes to apartments or condos . 'It's emotional. It's a huge job: You are going through someone's life,' she said.
'When I go into a client's home as a professional organizer, I have no attachment to what is in the home. Clients need to realize that stuff is eventually going to have to go — if just for peace of mind, to feel light and free. We don't need a lot of stuff to live. We don't need 10 pots and 10 pans.'
Ideally, Shapson has a year ahead of a move with a client to go through belongings so that only what will be used is moved and after the move she helps set up the new place, starting usually with the kitchen and bathrooms.
The work can be tedious, but 'I love tedious work — and that is to my benefit,' she said. 'I love organizing kitchens and other spaces: It's like heaven to me. I get to meet amazing people and to help people. I love the feeling of being organized and clutter-free — and I want others to experience it. It's not easy. But once you are finally living in that less cluttered environment, it's priceless.'
While some clients are prepared to declutter when they contact her, others are not. 'At the beginning, it's a challenge. But it's a process and, after a while, they see how liberating it is,' Shapson said. 'My ultimate goal is to make you feel better — about your space and about yourself. In a way, I am part therapist.'
If possible, Magnusson advises, take your time with death cleaning and proceed, thoughtfully and methodically, at a pace that works for you: After all, it took a lifetime to accumulate your belongings.
Often, sentimental attachment can come into play. One participant in the death cleaning TV series had lost both parents within 14 months and his basement was filled with their belongings. 'When I think about letting go of anything my parents have owned, I feel I am letting go of a piece of them,' Godfrey Riddle told the show's team of Swedish experts helping participants to pare down: a psychologist, an organizer and a stylist. They helped him realize that giving away his parents' things didn't mean giving away his love for them — that death cleaning was, rather, about finding a new home for them in which they'd be used. He donated 90 per cent of the basement's contents.
'What was stopping Godfrey from getting rid of his parents' things was his fear of losing them,' said psychologist Katarina Blom. 'What he didn't realize was that his parents live on in his memories and in the memories his friends have of them.'
My parents were not the sum total of their belongings: I knew that. Still, dismantling the house and deciding what to keep, what to sell, what to give away and what to trash was daunting, exhausting and, at times, heartbreaking.
An estate sale is an option for some, but not for me. If I had once found these events entertaining and even fun, I no longer did: Perhaps it was watching my parents age, but I came to see estate sales as sad and undignified. The old golf trophies, the beaded cardigans, the china teacups and saucers: Once these objects had had a place in people's lives; sifting through them made me feel somehow complicit in the dismantling of those lives. I didn't want that.
It was important to me that virtually all my parents' belongings pass through my hands; by choice, I worked mostly alone. Going through my parents' papers and coming upon anniversary cards with messages intended only for each other, sorting through stacks of dishes and linens, emptying shelves, drawers and closets crammed with clothing and shoes no one had worn in ages, there were times I wondered: Could they not have done some of this themselves?
My father's shirts, neatly folded, were stacked in piles. They looked new; some doubtless were. He had stopped wearing business suits years earlier except rarely and yet rows of them remained in his closet, still smelling faintly of his aftershave. I found the stunning chiffon gown my mother had had made for my brother's bar mitzvah party in 1970: She had looked so glamorous.
Both my parents were from Poland originally and had arrived in Montreal from Europe after the Second World War — my mother came in 1948 as part of a group of war orphans brought over by Canadian Jewish Congress, my father in 1949 with his parents and two brothers — and met at the Jewish Public Library, in an English class. They were married in December of 1950.
Looking through their passports at all the places they had visited together over the years brought to mind their vital younger selves and made me nostalgic. Other times, though, like when a stack of ceramic floor tiles tumbled from a high shelf in the storage area as I moved a box and a falling tile gashed my forehead, the task infuriated me.
My sweet husband hauled bag after bag to the recycling and trash bins as we tossed dozens of empty jars and yogurt containers my parents had, for reasons known only to them, held onto (along with scores of chipped dishes and broken kitchen implements). I emptied drawers crammed with socks and underthings and bathroom cabinets of half-empty tubes and expired medication.
My mother had started university once my brother and I were in school and gone on to earn a PhD in comparative literature; she taught literature at CEGEP for a time and, in cabinets in her study, I found enough foolscap to equip an entire school, if schools still used foolscap. In the freestanding unheated garage I came upon old suitcases packed with magazines and mouldering bank statements dating to the 1980s, when they had moved to the downtown condo. Did they ever throw anything out?
Household goods in decent shape — dishes, pots and linens, along with furniture, winter coats, boots, hats and scarves — were given to organizations that support refugees and others in need, including the Welcome Collective and the MADA Community Centre; the collection of cut crystal glasses went to the Collectibles Art & Antique Shop at the Jewish General Hospital. Most of their clothing and many of their books were donated to the thrift shops of NOVA, an organization which provides community-based palliative care services free of charge. I particularly like the spacious layout of the Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue branch, which has a bookstore next door.
Someone enormously helpful in the person of Patrick Lalonde, who helped to appraise collectibles and other items, contacted people he knew would be interested in, say, the mid-century teak or rosewood furniture, the small Chinese cloisonné pieces or the sword in a leather scabbard I have no idea how my parents acquired, and he dealt with them on my behalf. Although he also organizes and runs estate sales as part of his work, Lalonde respected my wish not to have one.
My brother and I each selected some belongings with meaning for us, including paintings and decorative objects, rugs and books. My mother's favourite colour was blue and I held on to some of her blue glass bowls and vases. I kept her Hermes 2000 manual typewriter, with its mint-green keys, even though the fabric-lined case had grown mouldy with years in the unheated garage: I remember its busy clickety-clack as she typed her term papers. My father was a decorated Second World War soldier, a gunner in a Polish tank corps — and I have his medals. My brother kept a large oak cabinet housing a punch clock used for years in my father's millinery factory. He took my parents' slides and some of their photographs and I have the rest. We'll tackle organizing those next.
Susan Schwartz
montrealgazette
514-386-8794
Susan Schwartz, a native Montrealer, is a longtime reporter and feature writer at The Gazette.