When the pandemic shutdown started more than a year ago now, I hoped to come out of it with two new novels and a well-organized house.

It turns out the novels are the easy part. The decluttering is taking forever–not least because in the middle of it, I sat down to read a personal history piece by the novelist Ann Patchett. It turns out that the father of a friend of hers had died, leaving his two daughters with far too much stuff to sort. Patchett resolved to organize her house so she didn’t leave her heirs with a similar mess.

She starts out in the kitchen, filling laundry baskets with discards to take to the basement. Down go the crystal champagne flutes she’s never used and an overflow of mixing bowls. “Every table had a drawer,” she writes, “and every drawer had a story—none of them interesting.” 

Her husband, she notes, is fully behind the project. In fact, Patchett’s husband not only approves, he gets people to come over and look through her discards. This means she can get rid of stuff in the middle of the pandemic. It makes her feel lighter, she says. Shedding things she’d acquired for a life she thought she was going to live and hasn’t. 

Ann Patchett seems to be a lovely person as well as a celebrated writer, and she owns a bookstore, too–by all accounts a very good one. But as I kept reading, the husband inclined me to hate her, because speaking of my own, um. Let’s just say that when one of my friends out west decided to purge her basement, she got rid of several pairs of her husband’s unwearable old cowboy boots and belts he hadn’t been able to buckle for more than twenty years. That’s it for them, she thought happily. Except that when he realized she’d tossed them—several months later—her husband refused to talk to her for a long time, although he periodically grunted.

“The burnt-down ends of candles, campaign buttons, nickels…” Patchett writes. More laundry baskets go to the basement. A thorough definition emerges of who Patchett was and won’t be and is. And yes, I’m getting increasingly cranky, especially when more and more people arrive to pick up her discards in the middle of a pandemic when here in locked-down Toronto I have no way of getting rid of anything besides paper that can go into the recycling bin.

In any case, as Patchett’s piece continues, a charming little girl drops by for a visit. It turns out she wants—no, longs for—Patchett’s old manual typewriter. Here the author pauses. She loves that old typewriter. Used it to write her first stories. Loves to remember writing them. Holding it, she understands that she’s still the person who used the typewriter. Or, to put it another way, the typewriter is part of who she is.

Yet Patchett girds herself. She tells her husband she’s going to give the little girl the much-loved typewriter since, I suppose, what’s life without sacrifice?

Then it turns out her husband has an unwanted manual typewriter and they give the girl that one instead.

This infuriates me. Completely pain-free shedding, with everything wrapped up prettily. In my experience, shedding is painful and it takes forever. Who has so much free time they can do it in one go? It’s also boring. It breaks fingernails. And it’s distressing, since once you do as de-clutterer Marie Konda says and hold something in your hand, you can get lost in memories. Or I can, and not all of them are good. 

I’ve been getting rid of stuff for almost two years now, and there doesn’t seem to be any less than there was when I started. Lately, I’ve been going back and forth between a mess of old family papers and my boxes of archived writing, both of which seem to have been breeding in the attic.

For the past three months, I’ve recycled vast amounts of paper, meanwhile coming across inconsequential, heartrending letters my poor father wrote as his hands grew too arthritic for penmanship. Also multiple copies of his death certificate, and mother’s death certificate. Shredding the multiples shouldn’t have been hard, but it was—and I’m quite aware we’re talking about paper. Not even original documents, but copies of death certificates for people who have been gone for a long time.

Then there are the ancient out-of-focus family photographs, some of them picturing distant relatives I can’t name that have ended up here for reasons I don’t remember. I love the one of my Scottish grandmother standing on the Capilano Suspension Bridge in North Vancouver sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s. I’ve also found a couple of inch-square black-and-white photographs that are the only images remaining of two of her sisters, unmarried women without descendants. Does it matter if I keep them? Surely not. But I don’t feel Patchett’s lightness in putting them into the recycling box, and end up taking them out again. 

My son has agreed to hold one box of original documents and photos to pass down through the family. (“Just one box, please, Mother.”) That makes it painfully hard to curate them. Not to mention deciding what to do about my own early stories, written on a long-gone electric typewriter, which I’m hanging onto because archives are said to take a few boxes of files from writers. Do I want anyone else to read a particularly bad short story I wrote when I was twenty-two? Maybe a surprisingly non-bad story I managed at twenty-three? How not-bad is it, really?

Decluttering involves a series of decisions, and I think because of the pandemic I’m finding decisions difficult to make. Exhausting, actually. Writing involves constant decisions, too: choosing this word and not that one, sending a character up the road instead of down the subway, having her say yes instead of no. But I’ve found them easier to make lately because—I don’t know. I write fiction? And life has a different sort of heft.

How does one weigh the last remaining photograph of an unknown great-aunt?

I wish I knew the answer to that question.