It's coming up on two years since my father died at age 91. I miss him terribly, of course, but his death left me with a personal struggle I had not anticipated.
While you might understandably think his death left a void in my life, it did quite the opposite.
His death left me with so … much … stuff. He'd lived in the same house for more than 30 years, and even though he'd engaged in some half-hearted Swedish death cleaning — a decluttering aimed at easing burdens on one's survivors — what he did, mostly, was just put things in boxes. Boxes I had to open to figure out what they contained after he died.
