Cleaning after my mother’s death taught me about what can’t be replaced | Canada Voices

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A few months after my mother died, I opened one of the boxes she left behind. Inside: a half-used chapstick, an unsent postcard of the Northern Lights, and a grocery list written on the back of an overdue bill: Heavy cream / Stapler / My religion is kindness.

It made no sense. Which is to say, it reflected her.

I’m the kind of person who cleans out her inbox. I keep my desk clear. I throw out underwear with holes. I purge instinctively, with the fervour of someone who believes in the virtue of simplicity. In fact, I’ll be cleaning out my front closet this afternoon.

My mom kept everything. Letters, tax returns, scribbled thoughts on napkins. Old envelopes with to-do lists. She wasn’t a hoarder. She was just someone who couldn’t stand the idea of a version of herself being thrown away.

There is a Scandinavian philosophy making the rounds called Swedish Death Cleaning. It suggests that as we age, we should begin discarding our things to lessen the burden on others. Clean it up. Throw it out. Make sure nothing is messy when you are gone.

I understand the appeal. But I think it’s a kind of lie.

Swedish death cleaning and the art of decluttering before you die

I teach property law, which means I spend my days explaining concepts such as possession, title, control. I talk about the “bundle of rights,” a metaphor that imagines ownership as a collection of discrete powers. My students learn that property is about control. That it ends cleanly. That it can be passed down in a will and checked off a list.

But then I held one of my mother’s letters. It was folded into thirds, soft at the creases. Her handwriting had faded in places, but I could still feel it: her presence, alive in the marks she made.

One letter was from 1976. “I will teach my children to sing and dance,” she wrote, in the hopeful voice of a woman who had no idea what her life would come to demand of her.

Another, written while passing the Rock of Gibraltar 10 years earlier, when she was half my age: “I did not know that it was possible to have such depth of feeling over something one has heard about but never seen… ships from many countries gliding like slippery rays of light through a window curtain, rich purple velvet at the bottom.”

I read them slowly, like scripture. I wasn’t ready for all of them. I’m still not.

For the last several years, I’ve also been researching what people without housing own—and what they lose. I’ve sat across from people in drop-in centres and shelters and asked them about their belongings, trying to understand what property means when there’s no permanent place to put it.

I had to learn how to mourn my mom and still make Christmas fun for my kids

One man showed me his backpack: a change of socks, a coffee cup, a laminated health card. “This is my citizenship to the world,” he said.

A woman lost her mother’s photograph during an eviction. “They were framed. I had them all set up nice. Now they’re just gone.”

Someone told me he buried his most important things – pictures, tapes, his father’s jacket – underground in a ravine. “It’s not just stuff,” he said. “It means something.”

They were speaking about loss. But more than that, they were speaking about value — the kind that doesn’t accrue interest. The kind that stays in your chest.

The law doesn’t know what to do with this kind of value. It can’t measure it. It can’t enforce it. And so, it forgets it. Just like the residue of a Swedish death clean.

But my mother didn’t.

Her name was Florence, but she was called Fluff. She was expansive. Curious. Often late. She moved across the country countless times. She was a social worker, a traveller, a Raging Granny, a single mother, someone who lived by the mantra, “those who wander are not lost.”

She didn’t want to be tidied. And she didn’t want her things to be either.

After she died, I found myself thinking constantly about what’s left behind, and who decides what matters.

Missing our beloved family dog, who was grumpy to the very end

We are told to make things easier for the people who survive us. We are told to pare down, throw out, erase our own ephemera so the living can carry on unburdened.

But maybe a burden is not always a bad thing.

I used to think my mother’s inability to sort through her papers was a kind of failure. Now I think it was something closer to truth.

In my class, I still teach the “bundle of rights.” But now I also ask my students to bring in an object they consider valuable. The items they choose are almost never expensive: a childhood blanket, a parent’s old watch, a decades-old photo. They speak, tentatively at first, about what can’t be replaced.

The law says ownership is about exclusion, control, market value.

But love doesn’t work that way. Neither does grief.

They both reveal themselves over time. And sometimes in fragments, in the clutter we resented, in the chaos we now hold, grateful for existence.

Alexandra Flynn lives in Vancouver.