Behind the Book: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff

I’m not a hoarder. I’m a collector. Most decluttering advice misses the difference, and the difference is where the damage happens. Hoarders keep everything because they can’t decide what to release. Collectors keep specific things because those things matter. A collector who gets overwhelmed by the volume and purges everything throws out the collection along with the accumulation, and the collection is the part that can’t be replaced.

What book is The Dead Don’t Need Stuff a rewrite of?

A book called Make Money by Decluttering Your Home, aimed at supplementing income from a job or social security without spending a fortune.

Practical, and narrower than what I know about the subject now.

The rewrite came after my father died.

What happens to a hoarder’s belongings after they die?

A one-bedroom apartment filled floor to ceiling, side to side, front to back.

Some of it was good junk. Some of it was bad junk. Nobody cared either way, and he certainly didn’t, being dead.

He also had two full storage units. Not partly full. Full. He was broke the entire time. How he afforded two storage units on top of everything else is a question I’ve never been able to answer, and it’s the detail that stays with me, because the storage was costing him money every month for objects he was never going to look at again. He accumulated for his whole life, and then he died, and none of it mattered to anybody.

What happens to a lifetime collection after a death?

I was three thousand miles away. I called the person who managed the apartment complex and told him to donate everything. That was the entire decision.

My father and I didn’t get along. That’s documented at length in another book and doesn’t need repeating here. My mother had died two years earlier. So the emotional weight most people would carry into that phone call wasn’t present, and what I felt about it was closer to indifference than grief.

I mention that because it matters for the reader. Somebody clearing a parent’s house while grieving is doing a harder version of this than I did, and a book that pretends otherwise would be useless to them.

What did the storage units teach you?

That the person who cares about the stuff is the person who got the stuff.

I care about my things. I’ve collected stamps since I was twelve. I have model kits, fantasy miniatures, a knife collection. Every one of those objects carries something for me, and the carrying is entirely inside my own head.

When I die, people will go through it. They’ll find things they like and keep those. Fine, and what should happen. But nobody is going to care that I built a collection of model kits. Nobody cares about the knives except as knives.

And there’s no reason they should. They don’t have the history. The history is the thing that makes an object matter, and it doesn’t transfer. My father’s apartment was forty years of that, held by one person, and when the person went the meaning went with him and left a room full of objects.

Is collecting pointless if nobody wants it later?

No. On this I part company with a good deal of minimalist writing.

I took one lesson from it: don’t destroy your life being a hoarder. The minimalist writers who tell collectors to own nothing are selling a cop-out, because they hand the hoarder and the collector the same advice, and it’s wrong for both of them.

Collecting is one thing. Hoarding is another. My father was a hoarder at a serious level, and so was my mother, and I’m describing what I observed as their son instead of offering a diagnosis. They weren’t quite at the point where the floor becomes uninhabitable, and they were closer to it than anybody should be.

Hoarding disorder is a recognized diagnosis. It was added to the DSM-5 in 2013 as its own condition instead of a subtype of something else, and treating it as a character failing does nobody any good. Somebody in that situation needs help of a kind a decluttering book can’t supply.

What a book can do is help the much larger group of people who aren’t there, who have accumulated more than they can manage, and who can’t tell which parts are which.

How do you tell a collection from clutter?

The book states the distinction. It doesn’t give a test for applying it, and it should, so here’s mine.

If it’s displayed, it’s a collection. If it’s in a box and I haven’t touched it for a year, it’s stuff.

That isn’t a universal law and it can’t be. Only you can decide what your things are, since only you have the history that gives them weight. But the reasoning underneath the rule travels: if I’m not looking at it, if it isn’t out and available to me, then it’s functionally identical to not owning it. I could keep it in a box and forget about it and nothing in my life would change.

I don’t display everything. I currently have two boxes of things to sell, and those are inventory.

What can you lose when you declutter somebody else’s things?

There’s a story in the book about photographs, and it belongs here because it’s the version of this problem nobody plans for.

When I was married to Claudia I had photographs of a previous girlfriend. Not hidden and not displayed. Just there, in a box, through inertia. I hadn’t thought about them. I wasn’t keeping them for any conscious reason. I’d simply never asked the question.

Claudia found them.

Objects you’ve never made a decision about are still objects in your house, and some of them carry meaning to other people that they don’t carry for you. A box of photographs is inert to the person who forgot it exists and is a live wire to the person who opens it.

The display test handles that too, incidentally. A thing in a box you haven’t touched in a year is only waiting.

What does a decluttering purge cost when it goes wrong?

The book opens with the moment I nearly found out.

Four complete sets of fifty Rose Parade pins each, from different years, carefully mounted and displayed. I was in full declutter mode, and in that state everything looks like clutter. Nobody warns you about that.

I told myself I could sell them individually on eBay. I was already planning how to photograph each pin. I stopped.

The same thing nearly happened with the stamps.

During an earlier purge I got rid of about eighty percent of a wall of albums, then picked up my Tonga stamps and my Disney collection and stopped cold. Those weren’t clutter. The rest was, and the difference was obvious the moment I had them in my hands, and was invisible while I was standing in a room deciding to be ruthless.

Books went the same way. Thousands of paperbacks and pulp magazines stacked three deep on shelves that had become a fire hazard. Most had served their purpose. Scattered through them were the ones I reference, the authors I love, and vintage pulps that connect me to the history of the genre.

Momentum is the enemy in a purge. You build speed and speed feels like progress, and somewhere in the acceleration you throw out the one thing you’ll still be annoyed about in fifteen years. Something else about clearing a house that belonged to somebody else.

You’ll find things that meant a great deal to the person and mean nothing to you, and you’ll have to decide what to do with them without the information that would make the decision obvious. A ticket stub. A photograph of people you can’t identify. A tool kept for forty years.

Those objects had reasons. The reasons died with the owner, and no amount of holding the thing will recover them.

Which is uncomfortable and is also freeing, because it means the guilt most people feel in that situation is misplaced. You aren’t throwing away the meaning. The meaning left before you arrived, and what remains is an object that now has to justify itself to a new owner on new terms.

Why sell your stuff instead of dumping it?

The first time I sold on eBay I made thirty-five thousand dollars.

That isn’t a typo and it’s also not a promise. Every purge since has yielded less. The first pass takes the accumulated value of decades. The second pass takes what’s left. By the fourth you’re working for small amounts and it stops being worth the photography. But the first pass is real money for most people, and the alternative is paying somebody to take it to a landfill. Selling also slows you down, and the slowness is the hidden benefit. You can’t list four hundred items in an afternoon. Handling each object individually is exactly the pace at which you notice that the fifty Rose Parade pins aren’t the same category of thing as the box of cables.

Who should read a book about clearing out a collection?

Somebody with collections and clutter who can’t always tell them apart. Somebody whose previous purge cost them something they regret. Somebody clearing a house that belonged to another person. Somebody who wants to sell instead of skip that step.

And underneath all of it, somebody who doesn’t want to leave what my father left. Moral failing has nothing to do with it. Two storage units and a packed apartment cost him money he didn’t have, for decades, in exchange for nothing he ever used, and the whole arrangement ended in a phone call from three thousand miles away that took under a minute.

The dead don’t need any of it, and the living are the ones paying for the storage. I’d much prefer the people who come after me find a few things I loved out on a shelf, where they can see why, than inherit a storage bill and a phone call.

From the author

The Dead Don’t Need Stuff
Collectors keep specific things because those things mean something to them, and hoarders keep everything. The Dead Don’t Need Stuff covers decluttering a collection without destroying the pieces you love.

Frequently Asked Questions