I’m not much of a collector, but for the past twenty years or so I’ve been collecting chronic illnesses on my way to the big dirt nap. As a lifelong asthmatic who spent way too much of the first thirty years of my life hospitalized, I had experience with illness. But then in my forties came hepatitis C, arthritis, kidney disease, and fibromyalgia. So when I had pneumonia twice this winter — it began with a minor cold — I started thinking about how much stuff I wanted to leave behind.

The answer is “Not much.”

Moving from one state to another to another and back has helped keep my stuff quotient low, at least for a middle-class American woman. Now, at 66 years old, I hope to never move again. To make it easier for those who survive me, I need to ditch stuff they wouldn’t want. That’s the point of Swedish Death Cleaning: making things easy for those who survive you.

First, I looked at clothes I was saving for I don’t know what sort of occasion. Weddings and funerals, I guess. One wedding outfit and one funeral outfit seems sufficient, don’t you think? I don’t expect to be attending any big events unless they are outdoors, and who gets dressed up outdoors? And shoes! If I hadn’t worn them recently, I realized, that must be because they hurt my feet. Out with them! Off went a couple of bags of shoes and clothes to the Humane Society thrift store. Soon I’ll turn my fiery gaze to sweaters. I’m still culling.

But what about the greenery? I do collect plants, of both the indoor and outdoor variety, and propagating them is fun. I give many away each year. When Stephen and I were packing up to leave Idaho in 2011, I held a potted plant giveaway. Neighbors and friends snatched them up. Here in Florida, plants thrive, and thrive, and thrive. I think my nieces, friends, and neighbors would like to have the plants. Plus, plants aren’t “stuff,” right? They’re alive.

Okay, I can keep the plants.

My biggest, heaviest collection has been books. Once electronic readers became available, I thought my book collecting habits would dissipate, and they have, a little. I still buy poetry books because Kindle hasn’t figured out how to keep the line and stanza breaks of a poem intact in an electronic format. So that’s acceptable. Then I found myself buying the same hardcover version of The Idiot I read as a teenager, the one with the engravings. It’s dusty and heavy, and unfortunately the book’s sleeve (or is case the right term?) disintegrated in my hands the day it arrived. The book itself is in pretty good shape. I love to look at it and be reminded of how my [fucked-up] teenage brain worked. So I’m keeping it.

But I also had shelves of old hard cover books, some of them small enough for a small lady’s hand. Small books were fashionable in the 19th and early 20th century. Victorian stuff has always delighted me or annoyed me. I love entering past ways of thinking, and reading these old books gave me that.

But they had to go. I’m in a gifting network, and had a vague memory of someone collecting old books, so I posted a couple of shelves worth of these leather-bound classics. Someone scooped them up that very day.

What made the cut? That hardcover copy of The Idiot, of course, and a few other books that have become artifacts for me, representing a particular time and place. I also kept a couple of shelves of feminist essays, history, and theory, mostly from the 1970’s and 1980’s, plus the collected works of James Baldwin, some Winona Duke, and Ibram Kendi. We say “the internet is forever,” usually in response to a social or sexual gaffe, but anyone who’s studied history knows that nothing is forever. Rebels and their work can get suppressed and disappeared. I felt a moral obligation to keep the sorts of books that are being banned right now in Florida and elsewhere.

What’s next? It should be my poetry shelves that get the Swedish Death Cleaning Treatment. But poetry books are so small! And I keep buying them.

What do you give away? What do you hang on to, for dear life?