Tag Archives: swedish death cleaning

Analog Meets Digital: A wind-up watch, an Apple Watch, and the family stories in between.

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It’s graduation and wedding season. One of my second cousins sent me an invitation. Instead of stuffing cash into a card, I sent one of my books and, as part of my ongoing Swedish death cleaning project, one of my mother’s watercolor paintings.

Maybe it’s generational, but giving money seems impersonal.

Another kid I know made it from 8th grade to high school. I’m headed out of town and couldn’t make it to his promotion exercise.

My parents presented me with a wristwatch for barely passing algebra class. I searched through a box and gave him that wind-up watch and my first Apple Watch.

Analog meets digital.

Another second cousin is getting married.

I’m sorting through boxes of family treasures that once belonged to my grandparents. Every item comes with a story attached. I remember the story, take a picture, and cut ties with the object.

The good news is that younger family members are emerging as willing custodians. Most of my inherited “treasures” have been sitting in my office and storage area long enough to qualify for residency.

It’s time for a new lease.

As I sort through the past, I think about my own high school graduation.

My parents were practical people. They sent me off to Hastings College with a set of molded steel American Tourister luggage and a Smith Corona electric typewriter.

Not a stereo.

Not a car.

Not a television.

Looking back, I suspect they wanted to make sure I had every tool necessary to launch successfully into adulthood.

In reality, they kicked me out of the nest. “Don’t come back, unless it’s for your baseball cards and other assorted childhood stuff.”

The typewriter turned out to be one of the best gifts I ever received.

I learned to touch type in summer school before I took off for college, a prison sentence.

“Can type, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country,’ 100 words per minute. Willing to learn other phrases.”

For those under the age of 50, generations developed repetitive stress injuries typing that patriotic declaration over and over.

At the time, I thought typing was another boring skill adults insisted was important.

Turns out it paid the bills.

Over the years, typing helped me write newspaper stories, magazine articles, grant applications, reports, blogs, books, and enough emails to fill several libraries.

I still make money because I can sit down and move my fingers faster than my brain can talk me out of an idea.

The luggage disappeared somewhere along the journey. The hinges on the Pullman started to go from packing it too full over the years. I think I jettisoned the luggage in Lander. Suitcase wheels came out around that time.

The typewriter is long gone, too, replaced by computers that have more processing power than NASA had when it sent astronauts to the moon.

One thing leads to another.

I’ve collected typewriters since I watched “California Typewriters” with Tom Hanks. I’m selling those at the Wyoming Writers Conference.

As I pass family heirlooms to younger relatives, I wonder which items will matter 50 years from now.

Will it be the painting?

The books?

The family photographs?

Or will it be some random object that’s unremarkable today?

That’s the secret.

The gifts that change our lives aren’t always the exciting ones. They’re the molded steel luggage that says, “Go see the world.”

They’re the typewriter that says, “Learn this. You’ll thank us later.”

Mom and Dad were right.

I hate when that happens.

Swedish Death Cleaning II: The Violin Case

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Have you ever learned a skill, forgot it, then relearned it?

When letting go brings something back.

I was sorting through another box for my ongoing Swedish death cleaning project when I came across a stack of old violin chamber music.

Duets. Quartets. Quintets. Pages with penciled notes and dogears from another life.

I figured it was simple enough. Sell the music and two of my three violins. I’d keep the one my grandfather passed down to me, which he bought from a Sears catalog in the 1900s.

That box carried me back to Lander, Wyoming.

Years ago, when I worked at the newspaper there, I wrote a feature story about Becky, the local Suzuki violin teacher.

One Saturday morning my photographer friend Tom stopped by unexpectedly and told me I needed to see a violin he’d found at a garage sale.

We drove back across town. The violin looked worn but had character. The owner said it had once belonged to local fiddler Quentin Roberts. That mattered to me.

It had history.

Provenance.

A life before mine.

I bought it for something like twenty-five bucks.

After that, I contacted Becky and asked if she took adults. She mostly taught the parents of her younger students and people like me who woke up one day and realized they wanted to learn something difficult before it was too late.

So I learned.

Long story short, I got pretty decent.

Not concert hall decent. But good enough to play in a small local orchestra and enjoy myself.

Becky played viola and a second violinist, Lisa, played for tips at a local bar. The patrons there were more accustomed to Dylan than Mozart.

I started collecting music just because I wanted to try playing it someday.

Then life happened and I moved to Colorado.

I relocated to Boulder imagining there would be amateur groups everywhere. There were plenty of musicians, but even the “beginners” had conservatory backgrounds and college performance experience.

My violin disappeared into its case where it has sat for thirty years.

When the woman stopped over to pick up the sheet music, we talked. I asked her why she wanted it.

Turns out she and her husband were in the exact same predicament I was.

Former players. Rusty musicians. People who once loved playing but drifted away from it over time.

Except they had taken the next step. They had found a few other “hackers” like us to play together for fun.

Then came the best part.

She lives two blocks away.

I had been preparing myself emotionally to part with the music and the violins, thinking Swedish death cleaning meant dismantling old identities.

Instead, the process handed one back to me.

Now I’m thinking about restringing the fiddle.

Maybe the point of Swedish death cleaning is figuring out which possessions are still attached to joy, memory, possibility, and will find new homes when the time is right.

Who would have thought that lightening the load could also put something back into my hands?

The image at the bottom was taken at a fiddling workshop led by one of my high school classmates Bob Mathews.

Swedish Death Cleaning for Pack Rats

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Have you heard about Swedish Death Cleaning?

Where sentimental value meets Facebook Marketplace.

There’s a television show called the “Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” where three cheerful Swedes descend upon cluttered American homes like minimalist Viking spirits.

They smile politely while staring at your collection of commemorative beer steins and ask questions that cut straight to the soul.

“Will anyone want this after you die?”

“Why do you own 17 extension cords?”

The premise is simple and terrifying. Swedish death cleaning (döstädning) is the practice of gradually getting rid of your stuff before someone else has to do it for you.

I don’t want my grieving friends and relatives to stand in my garage holding a box labeled “miscellaneous cables” and wonder if I was building a radio station or hiding evidence.

I’ve been Swedish death cleaning for years without realizing it had a name. I thought I was slowly becoming the old guy muttering, “Why do I still own this?”

The Marshall Fire accelerated the process for me. Watching entire neighborhoods go up in a puff of smoke changed my relationship with possessions in a hurry.

I started thinning out decades of sports memorabilia, political collectibles, souvenirs, and enough paper ephemera to start my own presidential library or baseball museum.

At first, it was hard.

I had convinced myself that every object contained meaning. I took pictures of everything significant. I got rid of the item and kept the memory.

“This ticket stub is history.”

“This bumper sticker might be valuable someday.”

“This faded Rockies pennant represents an era.”

If I wanted a replacement, I could buy another.

Eventually, I realized my heirs are not going to lovingly curate my life’s treasures. They’re going to rent a dumpster.

Now I’m down to the nuisance phase of death cleaning. The weird objects. The things that survive every purge because they’re too sentimental to toss.

Which brings me to the Sony micro television.

This tiny set came from my grandmother’s estate over forty years ago. She had hauled it all the way from Japan sometime in the 1960s, back when electronics from Japan felt futuristic and exotic.

The little monitor looked like something NASA might issue astronauts to watch Walter Cronkite on the moon.

I’ve carried that little TV through apartments, condos, moves, closets, shelves, storage bins, and several rounds of “I really should get rid of this.” It became less of a possession and more of a hostage situation.

The TV held me hostage.

I dug out the box and posted it on Facebook Marketplace.

Immediately, two kinds of people appeared.

The first guy messaged me within minutes.

“I can come right now.”

That’s slightly alarming. Nobody has ever urgently needed anything good from Facebook Marketplace. Usually, it’s either haunted, illegal, or both.

Then another user chimed in helpfully to explain that old electronics are worthless.

Thank you, internet stranger. That was comforting.

But the first guy arrived today, and it turns out he’s part of a group called the Colorado CRT Connection. These people rescue old cathode ray tube televisions and monitors.

They restore them, tinker with them, keep retro gaming systems alive, and host meetups that benefit the Children’s Hospital.

Who knew there was an underground network of people lovingly preserving obsolete television technology?

This guy looked at my grandmother’s tiny Sony TV the way an art dealer might inspect a lost Picasso.

“The guys are going to be so jealous.” He knew exactly what he bought.

He appreciated its history.

He was genuinely excited.

This object I’d been schlepping around for decades wasn’t junk anymore. It had found its next chapter.

That’s the beauty of Swedish death cleaning. It’s about getting rid of things and releasing them back into the wild while they still mean something to somebody.

All our treasures eventually become mysteries to the next generation.

“Why did Grandpa keep this?”

“What is this thing?”

“Can we throw this away?”

Every once in a while, the right person shows up. The object finds its tribe again.

My grandmother is smiling that her quirky little television, carried across the Pacific Ocean 60 years ago, is still sparking curiosity instead of gathering dust in my basement.

I still have a box of cables I’ll take to Goodwill soon, 2028 at the latest.

What would the Swedes think?