The Great Decluttering Project

      In Swedish, it’s called “döstädning,” which translates in English to "death cleaning."

      The idea is to declutter and organize your life before you pass away. And do it when the idea of passing away is no longer hypothetical. Don’t leave it to the kids.

      Seems like a good idea, particularly at our age, except that for me and my wife—and I would suspect for many others around our age—it seems almost impossible.

      Take, for instance, this plastic bag of keys that’s on top of the filing cabinet that’s in the closet that’s in the office. There may be hundreds of keys in the bag, hundreds of keys with no piece of identification attached to them. That is, I have no idea how those keys got there, whose keys they are, what those keys are for or what they might open.

      But that very uncertainty is why, of course, we’ll keep them all.

      The idea, with the new year, had been to spend a few hours every weekend going through stuff that had accumulated over time so we could neaten up our lives, simplify how we live and finally find out if that was actually the bed hidden under all those old National Geographics.

      We had been so excellent at cluttering, such a finely tuned machine, we thought that de-cluttering would be much the same, just in reverse. But it hasn’t turned out that way.

      Decluttering or death cleaning apparently requires two qualities we do not have (or maybe just cannot find, because they’re probably stuffed under the bed):

·      The ability to actually get rid of stuff and not always say, “What if we might someday need those [keys, yogurt makers, baseball gloves, gasoline receipts, bent tomato stakes, Frisbees made out of matzoh that our daughter made in third grade]?

·      The ability to decide where exactly to put the stuff we do decide that we really do need and actually must keep [because you can never have too many pairs of children’s sippy cups, charging cables for old cell phones that no longer work and we no longer have and foreign language games of Scrabble, including the Serbo-Croat version].

      We did try with the keys. We thought that large brass one could be for the trunk that’s in the storage shed or for the diary that’s on the shelf in the extra bedroom. But they weren’t. But maybe they are for the suitcase that we no longer use because it’s so big you have to check it on every flight or the bike lock we had for the bike we got rid of ten years ago?

      So, we’re keeping the keys, at least for now. We thought maybe we could put them in the filing cabinet, but there’s no room. Or we could put them in the shoebox that’s in the closet in the bedroom, except that already in the shoebox are photos from our daughter’s 10th birthday party, cake from her 11th birthday party and multiple receipts for last-minute purchases of Cheerios.

      There are no shoes in the shoebox because there wasn’t room. They’re in the magazine rack which pushed the magazines to the basket by the end table which pushed the old pill containers to the counter in the bathroom.

      Ultimately, the decision was made to keep the keys right where they are. At least they’re not under the bed. And so it seems clear: The Great Decluttering Project of 2025 is not quite getting off to a great start and death cleaning may have to wait for after our death.