Narrative death cleaning

Swedish death cleaning is about discarding possessions before you die as a kindness. But in the smaller universe of personally meaningful objects, the ones you leave behind will be the last story you tell. And you shape that narrative by what you keep and throw away. If you’ve ever had to go through a late loved one’s physical possessions, you sometimes discover things they kept that didn’t fit the image you had of them. You wish you could ask them why they kept those things, and what they threw away. Because that’s the real story. Most of us aren’t worrying about what real or imaginary future people might think of us based on our physical and increasingly digital remains. I’ve thrown away meaningful pre-digital pictures because they didn’t fit the story I had of myself at a later time, or out of sheer vanity that I didn’t like how I looked. Now they’re gone forever. Whatever evidence people find of me, it won’t be the whole story. Just the one I wanted to tell.