Curatology for Death Cleaning

Death cleaning is not cleaning.

It is often called that because we don’t have better language. But what happens when you step into your father’s house after he has died is not a practical task. It is an encounter. The house still behaves as if he might return. Objects sit mid-use. Rooms hold habits that haven’t been interrupted yet.

You come with a task, and with a quiet urge to get it over with. To move quickly. To finish. Speed can feel protective here – a way of keeping the weight at arm’s length.

At first, nothing is touched. Not because of reverence, but because the body resists haste. You notice where you slow down, where you avoid looking, where you linger without knowing why. Some rooms feel heavier than others. Some drawers feel impossible. This is not sentimentality. It is information.

Certain objects begin to stand out – not because they are important, but because they are charged. A jacket. A painting. A book. The reaction is physical: a pause, a tightening, a warmth. These objects don’t ask to be kept. They ask to be recognised.

You start grouping things without deciding their fate. Not sorting for removal, but gathering for understanding. The relief comes not from making decisions, but from acknowledging what carries meaning.

Only later do choices begin to appear. Not about what is valuable, but about what can continue the relationship without becoming a burden. Some things are kept. Some are documented and released. Some belong to the house and will end there.

Slowly, the space changes. The house moves from lived-in to remembered. You leave with fewer objects than expected, but with a sense that the life that filled the space has not been erased – only handled with care.

Here is a way to make sense of what to do, when you are inside it:

• Choose – slow down and notice one object that stays with you. Observe its details, its marks of time, and what it stirs.

• Uncover – ask what story or memory it holds, and why it matters now.

• Reflect – linger with what it reveals about your relationship, your loss, your becoming.

• Interpret – give it form. Place it, name it, or situate it so its meaning can live on.

• Offer – share it with others, or let it move beyond you, turning private meaning into something held.

Curatology does not make this work easier.

It makes it slower — and kinder.

Filed in the Cabinet.