Death Cleaning

Cutting up an old print made from a collagraph of hessian sandbags.

What is your legacy? It brings to mind the projects you’re proud of, the way you’d like people to remember you. It’s also about what objects you leave, your furniture and cherished mementos. This leads me to the the issue of cleaning, which I seem to have spent all January doing.

It all started when a friend said she had some old picture frames she was getting rid of. Did I want them? She was clearing out her mother’s house when her mother moved into a nursing home. When I went around there she offered me the remnants of furniture that she hadn’t yet taken to the opportunity shop. I spied a red couch and that began the whole cleaning juggernaut.

I advertised for a ‘man with a ute’ to help move the couch. This meant relocating our old couch into the garage and completely stripping and cleaning the lounge-room, right down to changing the art on the walls.

Then I started clearing out the garage to make way for our old couch, which no-one wanted, not even for free. It folds out as a bed, so it was worth hanging on to (for the moment). Other furniture I fitted into the back of the car and took to the op shop. Then I did a tip run with the old floor rug, torn cushions and clothes too full of holes to donate.

When I told a friend what I was doing, she urged me to watch “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” which is on SBS TV. I thought it sounded a bit macabre, but it is actually about decluttering; cleaning up your space while you are still alive so that you don’t leave behind a mess for others to clean up after you die.

This really resonated with me. When both my parents died within two years of each other, my brother and I were left with an enormous house full of furniture, some of it from my mother’s parent’s house after they had passed away.

I don’t know how many tip runs we did that Easter twenty years ago, but it was a lot. Then there was all the furniture we divided up between us and transported back to our own homes. It took five years to whittle down the boxes of possessions and furniture from my parent’s house before we moved from Victoria to New South Wales. I still have several crates of those possessions I haven’t opened in the last fifteen years.

My garage and studio are crammed to the roof with THINGS! I don’t want to leave these as my legacy so it’s time to do a gentle death clean. I’ve always been inspired by the decluttering done by Janice MacLeod, the author of Paris Letters, who set about selling off her possessions so she could raise enough money to quit her job and live for a year while she figured out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

Each day she set her alarm for small chucks of time, tackling one drawer, one cupboard, one room at a time. She gradually increased the time she spent on decluttering until she had stripped down her possessions. Spoiler alert: she went to Paris and began a whole new life as an artist.

While Paris isn’t on my horizon, decluttering is. Artworks have piled up over the years and filled my paper drawers. I have started cutting them up to make collages with to give them a new life. These are hard decisions which need to be tackled, one drawer at a time.

So it begins. It may take a year before I get to declutter all of my studio and the garage, pull out the photos from their albums and make decisions on what memories I wish to keep and what objects no longer serve me. My grandfather’s war effects, my father’s collection of slides, my ten heavy photo albums; all must be whittled down to one box. Wish me luck!

The red couch that started the ‘death cleaning’.