Death-Cleaning

The danger in our best.

Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is an oil on canvas painting by Caravaggio, from c. 1595. Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.

I’m old—or, as I prefer to say, older—but I keep forgetting that I’m going to die. Seriously. Yet not seriously enough to act on it. I would rather just write about it.

Not to worry, say advocates of “longevity escape velocity”—the point at which medical advances extend life expectancy faster than time passes. Mortality, apparently, may yet be outrun.

Memento mori means “Remember that you must die.”

Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” The Stoics returned to mortality because remembering life’s limit might free them to live more deliberately. Mortality shapes life.

History is crowded with thinkers contemplating skulls. Caravaggio had something less orderly in mind in the painting above. He knew violence firsthand: brawls, arrests, flight, a death sentence, and the killing of Ranuccio Tomassoni. His biography reads more like baroque true crime than an artist’s life.

Yet here he paints Saint Francis collapsing into an angel’s arms after receiving the stigmata. The saint looks less transported than overcome: wounded, exhausted, almost relieved. In Caravaggio, ecstasy arrives as surrender after turmoil.

His chiaroscuro does more than set light against darkness; each discloses the other. His life joined beauty and brutality, privilege and disgrace, devotion and rascality. Wealthy patrons prized his paintings while he outran the law. Moralists should proceed with caution.

Tolstoy approaches mortality mercilessly in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Ivan has accumulated the furnishings of a successful life only to discover, as death approaches, that he may have mistaken arrangement for meaning.

His house is in order. His life is not.

That is mortality in its grander form. The mundane version begins with a closet.

Feng shui, the Chinese practice of arranging surroundings for harmony, recommends discarding what is broken. The Swedish practice of döstädning, or death-cleaning, goes further: clear away what others must sort after you die.

Unlike Marie Kondo—the Clutter Queen—who asks whether an object “sparks joy,” Margareta Magnusson asks whether you use it, need it, or would buy it again. In a country seized by decluttering while storage space remains at a premium, the question is less aesthetic than moral. Leave memories, not a mess.

The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker joins mortality’s depths to death-cleaning’s mundanity. Clutter—more seriously, hoarding—can be read through his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death.

Possessions accumulate not only because they are useful or cherished but because they offer continuity to a self that knows it will disappear.

Becker raises the stakes beyond crowded closets. Careers, nations, causes, ideals, and religious convictions can become “immortality projects,” ways of attaching ourselves to what will outlast us.

The danger begins when we forget they are human constructions and demand that others live or die inside them.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has made the homeward journey a national spectacle. The story raises a question beyond the film itself: whether home and family, among America’s most cherished ideals, can become immortality projects—places where continuity seems assured and innocence preserved.

Nostalgia edits ruthlessly, smoothing what was painful or unresolved into belonging. The danger lies not in loving home, but in asking it to provide a permanence no home—or family—can bear.

That our ideals contain illusion does not make them false, any more than self-interest makes a good act worthless. Knowing this may save us from mistaking our need for an ideal as proof of its claims on others.

Becker’s grimmer point is that death cannot be sanitized by giving it a higher purpose. When ideal promises escape from mortality, devotion can harden into perfectionism and coercion.

Religion is not exempt. Christians can speak of the Crucifixion as though Easter made Good Friday less terrible—as though Christ did not fully die because he rose again.

“No cross, no crown” may name costly hope, but it can also turn agony into spiritual achievement and suffering into proof of election. Death, denied at the door, returns wearing a halo.

The cross resists that evasion. Resurrection does not cancel death but passes through it. “All things work together for good” locates the good not in suffering itself but in what God may yet bring out of it. Redemption does not justify suffering but refuses to abandon what suffering has broken.

What does any of this ask of an ordinary Tuesday? Refuse to demand permanence from things that cannot provide it. Clear the closet and spare someone else the burden of sorting what you refused to relinquish.

Letting go does not lessen the meaning of what we had. What we cannot keep is not necessarily lost.

Loosen, too, the grip of causes, possessions, grievances, and self-images through which we try to outlast ourselves—and the versions we impose on others.

Remembering death does not make every choice profound or turn tidiness into wisdom. It may expose the difference between what helps us avoid life’s limits and what sustains us.

Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa advised carrying two sayings, one in each pocket: “For my sake was the world created” and “I am but dust and ashes.” Mortality requires both truths: one guards against despair, the other against self-importance.

We do not merely live by illusions. We resist the full truth of life and resent the ambiguity of being human.

Accepting that ambiguity may mean judging others with less certainty. Criticism remains necessary, but every life contains something hidden from us, perhaps even from the person living it.

To live with that knowledge is to stop demanding that life become something it never promised to be—and to remember, as a poet put it, that “Nobody’s lantern can be held entirely responsible for sight.”

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Notes and reading

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). Darwin explains the development of life through natural selection, and Nietzsche interprets human striving through the will to power. Becker gives the denial of death a similarly far-reaching place in human behavior and culture. Even worthy convictions, he argues, can serve our desire to outlast death. Recognizing that motive need not diminish conviction but may help us hold it with less self-righteousness.

The Desire to Be—Maximus the Confessor offers a counterpoint to Becker: every creature possesses a “natural will,” an innate desire “to be and to live” and attain its proper fulfillment. The longing to continue may become illusion, but it may also express life’s elemental appetite for more life.

Can Anything Become Nothing?—Emanuele Severino, The Essence of Nihilism (1972; English translation, 2016). In its foundational essay, “Returning to Parmenides,” Severino argues that Western thought becomes nihilistic when it treats beings as emerging from and returning to nothing. Nothing that is, he maintains, can finally become nothing; appearing and disappearing are not the same as entering and leaving existence. The claim is powerful, though it comes at a price: if everything is eternal, genuine becoming, loss, freedom, and renewal become difficult to account for.

Disillusion, the Last Illusion—In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Wallace Stevens writes of “disillusion as the last illusion.” Recognizing our “immortality projects” may not free us from illusion but only give it a more sophisticated name. Illusion can become endlessly recursive; where one ends and another begins, no one quite knows.

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning—Margareta Magnusson (2017; English edition, 2018). Practical, unsentimental, and funny, Magnusson treats decluttering not as a cult of tidiness but as consideration for those who survive us—and as a way of deciding what has truly belonged to a life.

The Trouble with Home—Patrick J. Deneen, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals About Our Divided Souls (2026). Deneen reads Homer’s violent, intricate epic through concerns familiar from his broader critique of liberalism, finding in it the American tension between restless movement and attachment to home. His interpretation is richer than a simple opposition between mobility and rooted order, but it can still press Homer’s ambiguities toward an ideal of civic recovery centered on homecoming. That emphasis risks romanticizing “home” and softening the brutality and hierarchy of the world Odysseus reclaims. The book gives Deneen’s political thought a more mythic form, while leaving open questions about the exclusions of localism and the plural forces that shaped the American republic.

The Value of the Irretrievable—In “The Immortal,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic.… Everything has the value of the irretrievable and the perilous.” Death may inspire fantasies of permanence, but it also gives weight to what happens only once. Rainer Maria Rilke makes a related claim in the Ninth Duino Elegy (1923): “But this having been once, although only once, to have been of the earth, seems irrevocable.”

The Value of What Does Not Last—John Carney’s Once (2007; 86 minutes) gives the idea human form. A brief encounter between two musicians becomes a relationship the audience longs to see endure, yet permanence is not its measure. What they create together remains meaningful without becoming theirs to keep. A heartbreaker. Its stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, later became a couple; after their romance ended, they remained friends and musical collaborators.

Rabbinic Saying—joins Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5—“For my sake the world was created”—to Abraham’s confession in Genesis 18:27: “I am but dust and ashes.” Retold by Martin Buber, Later Masters.

“Nobody’s lantern is entirely responsible for sight.”—Alina Stefanescu, “Self-Portrait with Shadows and Turgenev,” Cable Street, forthcoming.

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