Swedish death cleaning: Old letters

“Swedish death cleaning is a decluttering method historically practiced in Sweden. It is a simple living practice, encouraging people to get rid of belongings before death to spare loved ones from having to manage them.”

— Wikipedia

At my core, I am generally a minimalist.

I would love to be able to toss everything important to me in the back of a Jeep and head for the desert ¹ (or the mountains or the ocean), should I need to.

I’ve done a great job paring down the number of belongings I own. I’ve donated or sold clothes that no longer fit, books I probably won’t read again, knick-knacks, general household stuff, and things I’ve kept because “I might need this some day,” and I think I am largely down to well-loved items and essentials in most categories.

So, minimalism: going great! But one category of “stuff” that I have decided to hang onto is personal correspondence — letters that remind me of my past and people I love. If you ever wrote me a letter, there is an extremely good chance that I still have it.

I have a small file box stuffed with letters — basically everything I ever received. Most of them are from 1990-1995, with a handful from 1996 onwards — they are mainly letters from my friends during college, and some photocopies of letters I sent them.

The vast majority of the letters are us girls going on about our class schedules, extracurricular activities, dramatically complicated love lives, and raging hormones. It’s amusing. I had forgotten so much of it. Re-reading everything has helped fill in some vital gaps in my brain, reminded me of many things I otherwise never would have remembered, and put me back in touch with Young Cute Vibrant Katy. I miss her sometimes.

By 1995 we had all graduated and had jobs, and email had been invented ² (and “ntalk,” a Unix text chat program), so the handwritten letters are few and far between after that point.

My brain doesn’t do a great job these days of responding to search requests, so if I let my minimalism get the better of me and I trashed those letters, would I even be able to remember those parts of my life? I’m pretty sure the answer is “no,” because in re-reading everything, I ran across SO MUCH STUFF that I had completely forgotten about my own damn life.

Thus I am keeping the box of letters, because they’re a fun trip back into my past (and, as Doc wisely says, every version of myself that I have ever been is still somewhere inside me). ³

But…

Some day I will die, and someone will have to deal with this box.

There are definitely… things… that I would not want my heirs and survivors to read. Immature, cringe-inducing notes of a personal nature that would embarrass both the reader and my ghostly ass. So I gave myself the very necessary project of reading through absolutely every card, letter, note, poem, etc. that I have ever sent or received, to ensure it passes the embarrassment test. If it makes me cringe, it goes in the shredder. Mostly, anyway.

But old love letters are a different story.

Should I keep them? Trash them? Oof. What to do, what to do?

I kept all of the letters I ever received from my exes. Some of them were regular general-correspondence type notes, which I would treat the same as the others I talked about above… but the rest are definitely classified as love letters. I never had a bonfire burning party for those. I just put them in a box on a shelf, out of mind.

I forced myself to read all of them, too, as part of this project.

I’ve struggled with what to do with these. Do I throw all of them away because those relationships are over? I don’t think so. Those people are a part of my story. And I’m still friends with some of them, which I think is a delightful (and rare) thing to happen after a breakup. But… I also don’t want to keep anything that I would be horrified for anyone else to read, or anything that is currently embarrassing for ME to read, and there’s plenty of that.

So with love letters, I’m going to keep a few of the tamer samples from my major pre-Doc relationships, along with a handful of photos. Everything else is getting shredded.

I learned stuff about myself!

I took extensive private notes on what I learned during this re-reading process: important details about these relationships that bear remembering, and what these experiences taught me about myself. My main takeaway is that I may have been young but I wasn’t always a total idiot, and I was SO HAPPY to realize this. Who needs a therapist? I just read voraciously, overthink everything, and write manically.

Here are some of my favorite things I learned.

• I initiated “we should see other people” talks with Boyfriend #1 at the exact point that I should have (I was in love with someone else), although we ended up staying together. ⁴ I had completely forgotten I was brave enough to take this necessary step. Go, me!
• I hadn’t remembered exactly how unhealthy my relationship with BF2 was until I re-read his 70+ ultra-intense letters, only one of which passed the keep test. The all-consuming nature of this relationship was too much for me at times, and I stood up for myself and said so. I have also worried that maybe I was totally blind to other things that were going on in that relationship, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We eventually managed to become friends, years later.
• BF3 was the “someone else” in BF1’s story. A long-term relationship was not in the cards for us but we are still friends, which I am very grateful for. I was delightfully effervescent in my communications with him; there seemed to be no such thing for me as oversharing. I gave as good as I got in arguments. Also, we would conduct our arguments through the U.S. Postal Service, which seems very quaint and charming nowadays.
• Thank god for BF4, also known as “husband!” ⁵ We didn’t send written letters, but we didn’t need to. It didn’t take me long to understand I had found my person, and that a different style of communicating worked better for us. (And he indulges my penchant for using text messages, for which I am extremely grateful!)

Now that I have read through everything — love letters and regular letters alike — I shredded anything I didn’t want to keep and sorted the rest into files by person. And I have a plan for what needs to happen to these files after I die, and a person in mind to take care of that for me. It’s kind of a relief.

1. Please note that I don’t even own a Jeep and heading out on a long drive across the desert with the one I love is a weird, long-held piñon-soaked fantasy of mine. The reality would not live up to the romance in my head and maybe that’s why I draw so many cacti and desert scenes in my art. ↩︎
2. As a side note about emails, I have kept all of them going back to 1996. There are literally TENS OF THOUSANDS of emails. If you need to know what you wrote to me in, say, August of 2002, I definitely still have it. I definitely have not read most of these emails in years. If I do, it’s going to take forever. But that’s a problem for Future Katy! ↩︎
3. Sometimes I fall into a downward spiral of wondering why I even feel this need to remember my past. Who cares? What’s the point? Shouldn’t I be looking to the future, looking ahead instead of back? Am I “stuck” in the past? I’m going to be dead some day and none of it will have mattered; it’s not like me remembering a specific incident from 1992 is going to be the key to saving the world from fascism, or anything like that. Other people in my life seem actively uninterested in reminiscing, so is there something wrong with me because I find comfort and joy in remembering? (I don’t have a good answer to any of that, by the way) ↩︎
4. Fun fact: After BF#1 broke up with me, he wrote to lecture me on morality, complaining that he left me so that we could work on ourselves as individuals, and did I really think it through when I entered into another relationship on a timetable that was uncomfortable for him? HA! ↩︎
5. You may deduce from this that I have only had four major relationships, including Doc. This is true. I dated a few other people a few times here and there, and had some unrequited crushes, but yep, just four people I would classify as “boyfriends.” ↩︎