Clean Like You're Dead

I’ve read about Swedish Death Cleaning. I like it, probably because I think about death a lot. I also read about Marie Kondo’s cleaning method but have come to the conclusion that she has untreated OCD.

I’m most familiar with Jewish Death Cleaning, a concept that might be limited to my immediate family. It went something like this:

#1. Never talk about death, even (especially) when it happens.

# 2. Keep your house super clean and neat, but don’t throw anything away –  simply rearrange it.

Doing # 1 results in a daughter like me who thinks about death all the time.

Doing # 2 results in a very specialized cleaning system which I will share with you right now. I’ll break it down into a list because blogging advice says ‘make lists’.

1.    You must go room by room, closet by closet, drawer by drawer. If you go bigger, you get overwhelmed and you fail.

2.    Step into the first room of your choice – pick an easy one for starters, not the kitchen or your bedroom – open the closet door and say aloud “I’m dead”.  This might be awkward the first time, but it gets easier.

3.    Now that you are dead, say “Steph (she’s my daughter, pick your own personal heir because I don’t think she wants to clean your closet. She certainly has never shown interest in mine) will throw away these throw pillows (or my print blouses, or my collection of glass skunks – it’s your stuff)” and then you throw it into the bag you are carrying around because, of course, you have 2 bags in your hand: 1 is for throw away and 2 is for donations.

4.    Don’t overreach – only one closet at a time. You aren’t actually dead yet – there is time Close both bags. DO NOT LOOK IN THE BAGS. Carry one bag to the trash and the other bag to your car/uber/chariot; get in and drive to the nearest donation drop-off center. This must be done before regret or second-guessing sets in. Also, you can always buy the stuff back.

5.    On the way home, stop at a donut shop. You’re dead, calories don’t count.

If you are asking yourself, ‘how did she get this way?’, consider a young woman, wandering alone in her dead parents’ home, finding jars of ancestral hair (braided nicely, to be fair). Trauma explains a lot.