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Death And All Your Stuff
The Grim Reaper doesn’t bring a moving van.
There’s no good way to say, “Mom, can I throw your stuff away because you’re going to be dead soon?”
The Swedes have a word for it (of course) — döstädning, or Swedish death cleaning. Which is all fine and dandy, but my 92-year-old mother is not jumping on that particular reindeer sleigh.
Thankfully, one of her three (yes, three) standing freezers gave up the ghost recently and I was able to clean it out. It contained prehistoric loaves of bread, frozen tomatoes that I grew in 2016, and little boxes of spices that I wouldn’t know what to do with even if they were still good. There’s a spice called mace? Who knew?
So there the dead freezer stands with its door propped open, I suppose to prevent small children from wandering into my mom’s basement and getting trapped inside. (This was a nightmare-inducing fear that was pounded into us in the ’70s while we wandered the neighborhood without supervision and our parents smoked unfiltered Pall Malls).
Soon the blissfully empty freezer will be filled with more dry goods than one human being could possibly need absent a zombie apocalypse.
It’s not like I’m trying to pull the couch out from under her. I just want to recycle some of the 50 grocery store food…
