Jenn McKinlay: Recently (last year, the year before, I have no idea), I listened to The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson. It is exactly what it sounds like, a book about cleaning out your possessions before you die so that the people you leave behind don't have to.
My best friend is Swedish and we talked quite a bit about the book while I was listening to it. My friend confirmed that this is how most Swedes are - thoughtful about not leaving behind problems for others. I can vouch that this is true because she and I are the same height and weight and every time we visit, she gives me shoes or clothes because she's also 12 years older than me and in constant death clean mode. I'm okay with this because she has excellent taste and takes care of her things so it's a win win.
What I loved about Magnusson's book was that she made the death cleaning easy and straightforward and then you get to the final chapters and she talks about the one thing that makes even death cleaners stumble -- photographs.
Well, I was determined not to falter. Armed with a trash bag, a shredder, and the misplaced confidence of someone who has watched exactly one episode of a home organization show, I opened our storage unit.
You know the one. The Indiana Jones warehouse of my past where between the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy Grail were seventeen boxes labeled “PHOTOS—IMPORTANT!!!” (Apparently, I felt very strongly about that in 2009.)
Here’s the thing about old photos. You don’t simply “go through” them. You time travel. One minute you’re tossing duplicates, the next you’re misty over a blurry snapshot of a long-gone dog who, in that photo, is mid-zoomie and eternal.
I found hairstyles that should have come with warning labels. Seriously, I think my bangs in the 80's are solely responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. Outfits that were clearly chosen during a period of temporary insanity, I mean, were shoulder pads that doubled as pillows really necessary? Entire vacations documented before smartphones, when I took 24 photos and 19 of them featured my thumb or a sunset that looked beige.
And yet.
There were the Hooligans dressed up as toilet paper mummies. The Hub's grandparents dancing at our wedding. Friends tailgating at the college game where the keg was featured but we're all there in our day-glo highlighter hued clothing, holding red Solo cups.
I’ll confess: the shredder remained tragically underfed.
Yes, I mailed a decade of photos to an ex so he could remember what he looked like in the 90's. Yes, I let go of the mysterious landscapes that simply didn't translate their awesomeness to a faded 4 X 6 inch print. Yes, I bravely discarded photos of people I absolutely couldn't identify. Who are you, sir, and more importantly why are we hugging?
Still, knowing that my Hooligans (bless their hearts) are never going to care about the 20,000 photos that document their Dad's and my lifetimes, a solid dent was made. Many giant boxes have been distilled into several much smaller ones with their contents to be digitized at a future date. The rest? Well, progress is best measured by hefty bags and I have many to go before I sleep (nod to Robert Frost).
How about you, Reds and Readers, what do your photo archives look like?
It would take me the next twenty years [at least] to digitize all the photographs we have . . . I'd consider digitizing them except for the fact that there's something quite satisfying in holding a special photograph in your hands . . . .
ReplyDeletePhotos are so hard. Before we moved from Maine in 2011 I went through all my photo albums. It was a walk down memory lane, and I'm so grateful I took the time. All the old-style big book photo albums, mine, my parents', my grandparents', were in one box and never arrived in Florida. In this case, all I have are the memories. What's funny, the important ones I can still see in my mind's eye. Nowadays, my photos are on my hard drive and my physical and cloud backups. I still have some smaller photo albums that survived, but everything is online.
ReplyDeleteOh that's a tragic story Kait!
DeleteI am such a big fan of this book. I’ve read it twice and sent copies to multiple friends.
ReplyDeleteFor my photos, such a mix - last 15-20 years are safely (I hope) backed up in the cloud. Before that a mix of albums and photos that I meant to scrapbook but never did.
My best friend lost her house in the Eaton Fire last year. She’s the kind of person who documents everything. Her work scrapbook survived because it was in her office. I volunteered to digitize that one for her since 3 of the years covered were ones that we worked together. I had copies of some of the photos, but it was a joy to reminisce about the others.
I'm Norwegian, so anything Swedish is suspect! But moving house after 30+ years helped ... with everything but the photos. they may be left for my poor children to deal with, though this post does inspire me to, at least, get those travel landscapes gone.
ReplyDeleteBe honest, who sits looking through their photos stored on the cloud? Even the ones on the computer?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the bulky, old-fashioned photo albums on the shelf are fun to take down when the grandkids visit.
I have my brother's photos, my parent's, my husband's parents and our own. When a task looks that big and messy, it is hard to set time aside to attack it. I do love going through the photos I organized and put in albums.
When my step sister's house burned last year, I went through all the albums from when we were together and pulled out photos of her kids and some of our earliest escapades and adventures when we were single. I gave them to her last Passover. She was delighted.
Sigh. I am incapable of sorting photos. I start and then get paralyzed with that trip into the past. I need a Swedish Death Cleaning doula. Are there people for hire who could come over and be organized and ruthless for me? I think that's an important new career for somebody!
ReplyDeleteYes there is such a person Edith! I hired a professional organizer ($70/hr) and she was very helpful. The thing for me is having someone who is there to keep me focused, make suggestions, and keep me moving forward and not letting me give up. We sorted through boxes and boxes of memorabilia, organized everything and put it into marked boxes. It was expensive but it gave me peace of mind.
DeleteSO worth it! Anon, are you in New England, perchance?
DeleteHi Edith, no I am in San Diego. But if you are looking for someone - some organizers give free talks to various groups like at libraries, genealogy groups, etc. That might be a way to find someone other than word of mouth.
DeleteMy physical photo archives consist of 3 large blue Rubbermaid totes filled with albums.I did not get rid of them in The Great Purge of 2024. They made the move and are in a bedroom closet. I was going to put them in the lower shelves of my bookcases that have doors on them, but they don’t really fit and my husband quickly commandeered those for his baseball making supplies…except for the one shelf I claimed for puzzles and games. Since we went digital there’s no telling where the photos are…various computers and sticks and things I guess. I also have a small stack from when my grandparents died.
ReplyDeleteAnything that was photo related when we cleaned out my parents’ house in 2018 went to my sister’s house to be tackled later and there they still sit.
Jenn,
ReplyDeleteFor myself, I have a few photo books but nothing approaching what you describe. I'm sure some of them could be purged.
But I'm sure my mother has tons more. I wouldn't even want to begin to figure out what should be purged from the photos that she has stored away. I'm sure it will have to be done at some point but in the interest of being a world-class procrastinator I have not even really formulated a plan to start.
I have stuff to go through, but not too many photos. Since I seem to be undergoing two basement disasters at the same time 1) Furnace outage and 2) plumbing problem where the plumber didn't reattach the laundry hose and my first load dumped all the water on the basement floor, I am very motivated to go through the boxes in the basement and have been trying to do a box a day. The pictures for the most part are already upstairs, in a cupboard in my dining room. However, I found a couple of nude photos of pregnant me with my twin...I had totally forgotten about those. They were in an envelope in a box with a bunch of papers from our equal pay lawsuit of 1994. Huh. I definitely didn't want someone stumbling across them.
ReplyDeleteStacks of boxes of print photos and slides. Yes, it's time to digitize.
ReplyDeleteWhen my mother died, I divided her photos into three shopping bags, one for each sibling. And then our kids went through years of memories. It helped their grief.
Oh, my gosh, this speaks to me. I have always loved taking photos, plus I have boxes of family photos taken generations before me. I did at least pass a good number of those on to my nephew, who's deeply into genealogy and is our designated keeper of the family history. But can I part with the gazillion photos of cats and horses who have long since crossed the rainbow bridge? That's a big NO. I've digitized some, but it's a slow process when you have to stop and reminisce for ten minutes before moving on to the next.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, I suck at Death Cleaning.
Wow! Apparently this is something that I am succeeding at. I've had - and still have - multiple photo albums. There was a time, maybe 15 or 20 years ago that I started digitizing them. Not all of them, you understand, just the ones I thought I'd always want. They are saved to the cloud, or at least I think so - that isn't something I check. But they are on my computer and have become my screensaver. The grandchildren can sit in front of my laptop for hours, just watching. It is set to random, so no one knows what will be next, although they can always go to the grouping. I've arranged them by events or seasons. It is a simple thing now to add more pictures as they happen, which is not as often as it used to be.
ReplyDeleteNow consider my father who was camera enthusiast, always taking pictures and then developing them himself. Then he branched out into slides. Not exaggerating, there must have been millions of them. Sadly, many deteriorated but there were plenty in good enough condition. My sister and husband put them all on discs and gave them to people. Now I can only view the discs on my old PC but I have copied and saved the best photos to my current laptop. Some of those pix have solved family arguments! But so many memories are saved.
When we cleaned my mom’s house to sell it (she was still living), we got to a room that had boxes of photos. I was overwhelmed and told my husband that I was going to throw them all away without looking. He told me to get them scanned and make into photo books which I’ve been doing with my photos the last few years. (I take lots of digital pictures of birds and other wildlife.) I got the photos scanned at a local place and made three books with themes as my summer projects. Then I cleaned out my photos from the days when our kids were little and you could get three for the price of one, got those scanned, and made a couple of more books. . . Did I actually throw away the photos I scanned? No, but they are organized and in one place. So my survivors will have lots of photo books that they can keep or toss, but I feel like I’ve done the heavy lifting. And I have a substack blog for bird photography so I’m creating fewer photo books.
ReplyDeleteMany of my photos were of my son growing up and I decided years ago to give them to my grandchildren so they could see what their dad was like when he was young. Other photos have been culled each time I've moved. I know a lot of you prefer to hold on to pics, but I only keep the ones that really touch my soul and those are few and far between. -- Victoria
ReplyDelete