Let’s get this straight right now: I’m not planning to die anytime soon.

But consider: One day you’re young and in recklessly good health; the next thing you know, middle age is sliding into a fading memory as you reach for the ibuprofen bottle. That’s about the time you look around the house and realize that, despite your best intentions, you’re absolutely drowning in stuff.

As George Carlin used to say, “Your house is just a place for your stuff. If you didn’t have so much goddamn stuff you wouldn’t need a house!”

My wife, Lisa Strycker, and I have lived in the same house for the past 38 years. That means we have nearly four decades worth of stuff — all extremely irreplaceable! — that’s been relentlessly piling up in drawers, in closets, in storage bins, in footlockers and, mysteriously, hidden behind the sofa and beneath the piano. We have excess furniture. We have piles of tools we never use, making it harder to locate the tools we use regularly. The other day I discovered an entire filing cabinet drawer full of USB cords, charging devices and ethernet cables.

Then there is the paperwork. While sorting out the utility shed a few months ago I found four bankers’ boxes worth of old tax returns, all with supporting documents, dating back to the Clinton administration. Or was it Reagan’s? Cluttering my office are piles of handwritten and typed journals, letters from old friends, and file folders full of yellowing clips from magazines and publications I no longer remember writing for. 

And, being a photographer, I have photographs by the thousands. Well, actually, by the tens of thousands. Fortunately, most are on hard drives. 

Sometime a year or two ago, Lisa and I started thinning out our stuff. Bags of clothing were dispatched to Goodwill or to the clothing bin at Eugene Weekly for White Bird Clinic. Redundant tools and appliances found new owners, except for the completely non-functioning ones (I’ll get around to fixing that chop saw one of these days!) that hit the recycle pile. Financial papers were securely trashed. Books went to the library sale or to St. Vinnie’s, or were sold back to a used book store.

Deciding what to keep and what to be rid of can be a rollercoaster. Last week Lisa emptied an entire bookshelf and put the shelf itself in the discard pile. I rescued the shelf — hey, it’s ugly, but my father and I built it together when I was 11 years old — and took its contents to St. Vinnie’s.

What catalyzed this resolve was the deaths of a couple of relatives over the years. Turns out when you kick off, someone else — usually an unfortunate family member — has to deal with all your stuff. Lisa and I vowed not to impose such a burden on our son.

It turns out the Scandinavians have a word for this kind of late-life, mortality-accepting, domestic stuff-sorting: “döstädning,” or “death cleaning.” It sounds much less creepy in Swedish. And, yes, there is a book on döstädning. Margareta Magnusson’s 2017 The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter lays out chapter by chapter a program for liberation from your stuff. I bought the book for my Kindle, so it’s not taking up physical space in my office. On the whole, it’s fine, but the tenets of decluttering are pretty simple and obvious. Think Marie Kondo on steroids. I’d save your money on this one and avoid adding another book to your stuff.

The first thing that surprised me about such a deep cleaning was this: It’s a lot easier to live when you’re not surrounded by so many things. I can find tools in the workshop once again. The pantry is now full of food I can actually locate. I have a small shelf of books in my office that I actually read from time to time.

It’s not just about throwing things away. Another aspect to döstädning is getting what you keep in good order. It’s time to repair all the little nagging problems that are so easy to ignore. We need to fix the water pressure in the well, repair those holes in the garden fence, buy a new sump pump to replace the ailing one in the crawl space under the house and replace the squirrel-damaged screen on the upstairs sliding door. Why not make everything actually work now, while we’re still alive?

Death is the ultimate reminder to tidy up your life. Do it while you still can.