Post 768 - June 8, 2025

The Swedes practice something that roughly translates into English as Death Cleaning. The idea is that, before you pass, you put your house in order. It’s like a Marie Kondo decluttering to save your survivors from having to do it for you. It even follows much of what Marie Kondo recommends asking yourself as you go through your belongings. Is this thing important? Does this thing give me pleasure? Should this thing be in my life? The aim is a well-chosen, thoughtful minimalism.

My ex, Keith, who died a few months ago, did not do any death cleaning. He left a mess. He was a borderline hoarder to begin with, but as his physical and mental state declined, he seemed to have switched into overdrive. His family had somebody box up his belongings from the last place he lived in Cape Cod and move them all into storage in Hyannis.

On our way to Provincetown the day before yesterday, Michael and I stopped by the unit. With his nephews’ and heirs’ permission, I picked up some of the tribal art that Keith and I had collected during a few of our trips well over twenty years ago.

Keith’s family can’t yet figure out what to do with everything. Selling it all would be the ideal solution, but how? Few pieces are valuable enough to auction. A garage sale would yield only pennies on the dollar. Listing it all on eBay would be a full-time job. The pieces they let me take cost us next to nothing. For the right buyer, maybe they’d sell for something? There’s not much of a market for any but the highest end of tribal art. I don’t think that’s what any of this is. The shields, masks, and headdresses now leaning against the wall in the place we are staying in Provincetown mean something to me, though. They mark a time from my past. They also represent the lives of the artisans who made them.

Many cultures do not separate their secular and religious lives the way we do. Religion in many places is not an organized institution, instead, it’s simply part of life. Beliefs are wrapped into how people spend their days. Deities who watch over the people under them are honored and conversed with as events arise. Long-gone ancestors might be memorialized and made present by carving their likenesses into the supports that hold up the family house. Because of that, their strength, humor, and skills never leave.

What we in the West might consider art, the people who create the objects in remote villages throughout the undeveloped world, think of them simply as tools, decorated to honor those who’ve come before. The designs imbue the objects with the spirit of those who’ve come before. The fact that most of what I’ve collected over the years was used by people rather than just made for me, as a tourist, to buy, is something I find meaningful.

Keith, my mother, and I were a lethal combination out in the world. At the first sight of trinkets laid out on a blanket next to a road in some far-off place, we’d devolve into a delighted frenzy of shopping. We were horrible influences on each other. Michael does a much better job of keeping my impulses in check. Most of the time, anyway.

Few of the carved objects we’ve acquired over the years were meant to last. Masks would often be made for a single festival and then destroyed in a bonfire afterward. The act of making them was as meaningful to the craftsperson as watching them come to life to tell a story during a dance would be to the audience. Their burning set the lifeforce within them free.

Michael and I do not have any room for these five pieces, which, by the way, are enormous, but I feel responsible for safeguarding them. We chose to buy them and save them from the flames; therefore, it is up to us to take care of them and honor where they came from.

For months, maybe even years by now, I have been trying to clear out the excess nonsense Michael and I have managed to accumulate during our years here on earth. I’m almost as excited about clearing things out as I was about buying them in the first place. In addition to the pieces we’ve bought, my sister and I have also ended up being the repository of much of our family’s stuff. We unfortunately come from a long line of people who don’t seem to have ever been able to pass up a good bargain.

Michael collects paper. He has boxes of scripts and playbills, and cards. The little art he’s amassed has almost all found its way to one of our walls. I, on the other hand, even have extra art that we have no room for. I’ve tried to get rid of what I have that has no real meaning to me, but even so, there’s quite a bit left over that I can’t quite let go of. That should stop me from getting any more but alas, it doesn’t.

We visited my sister and brother-in-law’s house a couple of weeks ago, and I was relieved to see that they don’t have any wall space left either.

Our heirs will eventually need to deal with all our stuff. Sorry, heirs. I am trying. I’ve decided that if I can’t part with something yet, I can, at least, catalogue it so you all can know what it is you’ve been saddled with and have an idea of its basic financial worth.

Being mindful of what they’re leaving behind is something our current administration seems not to care about. At all. None of what they are trying to do is designed to take care of anything but their own immediate gratification. They all appear to be trying to amass more than the next guy so that when they die, they’ll have the most.

The more you get, the harder it is to hold on to it all. Just ask ol’ Elon. It’s as if he’s bleeding out. He and the President’s petty catfighting, while entertaining at first, has become tedious and pathetic. Elon’s dropping secrets like the fact that the President is on the list of people who made use of Jeffrey Epstein’s supply of underage girls. It wasn’t much of a secret, but I suppose it’s good to have it confirmed.

That revelation likely won’t make a difference to the Christian Right. They will keep on adoring the man anyway. None of those people seem aware of anything that’s in the Bible, which they so vehemently claim to live their lives through. They are all in on this petty god-forsaken grifter. Bless their hearts.

The President, for his part, is threatening to cancel all of Elon Musk’s government contracts, which are worth billions. Musk’s companies have already taken major hits from people around the globe in response to his ill-advised and unthought=out DOGE cuts. If we are lucky, the President and Elon will both do each other in and leave the rest of us to concentrate on opposing the next idiot in line.

Not for nothing, but Elon Musk could end world hunger – BY HIMSELF – if he chose to. That’s how much money he has. Had. Has. Say, by a miracle, he manages to avoid overdosing on one of the many drugs he’s reportedly mainlining, he still only has a couple of decades in front of him. I don’t care how rich he is. He’s just as mortal as the rest of us. What’s the point of hoarding all that wealth? He should Marie Kondo it all. Does this pile of cash bring me joy when the lives of so many people could be made better by using some of it? I can’t begin to imagine the depth of the emotional hole he is trying to fill with all that cash.

While countless constructive programs have been slashed by this administration, President Biden’s Infrastructure Bill is still active law. That Bill was a piece of legislation designed to improve our lives. Talk about leaving behind something we could all use. There was plenty to criticize President Biden for, but not that. The Infrastructure Bill will benefit everyone in the United States. President Biden may not even be around to see many of those projects completed, so the bill won’t necessarily affect him directly. Unlike everything our current President is doing, however, the Infrastructure Bill wasn’t designed to line President Biden’s pockets. It was something legislated for the good of the nation.

For the good of the nation. What a quaint, antiquated idea. I remember when our elected officials acted on our behalf and tried to improve our lives. Not all of them did that, of course, but many used to. We don’t see much of that anymore.

Michael and I are driving up into the Canadian Maritimes after a few more days here in Provincetown. We are going to leave the carvings with a friend while we are up north and pick them up again on the way back down. There’s very little room left in the car when they’re all in there. I gave them a good cleaning yesterday, but still, Ziggy’s going to have a field day with the array of new smells, not to mention the myriad dangling bits.

When we got to Hyannis, I was nervous about opening the door of the storage unit and being confronted with the remains of my ex’s life. When I pulled up the gate, though, and saw all the boxes and things that were piled up in there, my only reaction was a kind of relief that none of it was mine. Little of it felt like it had a connection to the man who’d left. It was just a bunch of stuff stacked up high into the rafters.

I may have a deeper emotional reaction to the experience later, I am, after all, a champion compartmentalizer, but I honestly don’t think I will. The carvings do remind me of Keith. They come from two fantastic trips we took with my mother. The first was to Iryan Jaya, which is the western half of the island of New Guinea. We took an incredible multi-day hike through some of the most remote villages any tourists can get to. The second was our mind-blowing trip through Mali and Burkina Faso in Western Africa. Those memories, unlike some of the later ones I have with my ex, are all good.

You may be wondering how we got it all home. The airport in Bamako, Mali, had a shrink-wrap machine for luggage. We made three or four monstrous piles of things and bound them all together in clear plastic and then just checked them in as extra bags. I still can’t believe the airline took them or that customs let us through without a second glance.

We’d decided that if anything got broken that we’d be okay, given how little everything had cost. Miraculously, there was almost no breakage even though we’d had to change planes in Paris. There was one thing that was almost pulverized. We had to put it together like a jigsaw puzzle once we got into the apartment. When we’d finally reassembled it, neither one of us recognized it. It was a kind of round wooden disk with little carved animals stuck to it. I hadn’t bought it, and neither had Keith, or so he claimed. I didn’t see it in the unit just now, but maybe it’s in there somewhere under something.

Michael has been an incredible sport about all this. He did look somewhat horrified when he first saw how big everything was. One of the objects is a shield from Iryan Jaya. It’s roughly in the shape of a surfboard and just about as tall as I am. I am over six feet. The other things aren’t that much smaller. One of the masks we picked up in Mali is big and round enough to be the top of a table.

As beautiful as I find these objects, I’m going to need to store at least some of them. Just at the point where I’ve cleared out most of the excess in our storage units, too. Oh well. I’ll just get rid of something else.

When I move on, if nobody in the family is interested in them, the pieces will either be dispersed or destroyed. That’s fine by me. I won’t be in a place where I’ll care anymore. None of us really owns anything. We are, at best, temporary custodians of everything we have. We don’t need to hold onto it all quite as tightly as we sometimes do.

At the end of the day, it’s just stuff. It may be the memories of a life lived, but it isn’t life. Is this thing important? Does this thing give me pleasure? Should this thing be in my life?

We could be asking the same questions of the people running our government. The answers, of course, are already clear. It is high time we threw them out, too.