How to Discover the Life-Affirming Comforts of ‘Death Cleaning’:

Professional home organizers are reporting a spike in calls from older customers asking for help sorting through their belongings, seeking to dole out the heirlooms and sentimental items and toss the excess. The mood, organizers say, is largely upbeat, with people eager to part with china, furniture and photographs. In some cases, the inquiries come from grown children on behalf of their aging parents, keen to get ahead on the task so they don’t have to do it alone later.

“There’s been a shift in the consciousness of people 70 and over,” said Ann Lightfoot, a founder of Done & Done Home, a New York City home-organizing company that saw its business double in 2021, and an author of the forthcoming book, “Love Your Home Again.” “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, nobody wants my stuff. I don’t even want my stuff.’”

Professionals often refer to the task as “death cleaning,” a term popularized in 2018 with the publication of the book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” by Margareta Magnusson, which posited that the prospect of our eventual demise is reason enough to purge.

I hadn’t seen this when I wrote my post on keeping my books, but I kinda think that books are different. Books aren’t just stuff. Books have a distinctive ability to hold personal but transferable meaning.