Grief and Clutter. How Cleaning Gave Me Control.

When grief has you firmly by its tentacles, especially in the early stages, the last thing most people care about is whether or not the house is clean. There’s this enormous chasm in their souls so what difference does it make if the laundry is done or the dishes are washed or the toys put away? But the subject of grief and clutter oddly became somewhat of a relief to me. It began when I entered the anticipatory grief stage long before my husband actually passed. And it continues even now to provide this source of almost meditation whenever I feel faced with something chaotic inside of me. Why? Well, I think it was because the chaos existed in the first place. There were all these circumstances that I had absolutely no control over (I’m looking at you cancer) and it forced me to find authority over something inanimate, no matter how small that something might be.

Art and books have always been at the top of my list for providing me the most relief from uncomfortable emotions and thoughts. But sometimes, when those feelings were at their worst, I could no longer sit still enough to concentrate on a painting or a story. I had to move around. I had to exert some kind of force over something and it had to happen as soon as possible.

I Used to Be a Slob…

Yeah, I spent most of my life being pretty messy. It’s weird to think back on it because I’m so different now. But, I was like a lot of kids and didn’t want to waste my time folding laundry, loading the dishwasher, or cleaning the bathroom. I didn’t care if I had piles of clothes and empty soda cans everywhere. My thought process was always that painting a picture, reading a book or hanging out with a good friend was WAY more important than whether or not the car was washed and waxed. I also had a dad who was (and still is) a few steps away from being Felix Unger from the Odd Couple. Being around him often had the effect of making it one of my lifelong dreams to be freely messy and know that it’s okay to leave a dish in the sink sometimes.

I do have a few memories, however, with an inkling of having used “cleaning” when I was younger and upset about something. I used to retreat to the shower and simply sit in it with the water raining down over my head. And after I felt like the water had washed away the worst of the bad feelings, then I’d get out.

To be honest, I still think that art, books and our connections with people are more important than clutter and cleaning. But when we were living with the full blown chaos that cancer creates, I found that organization became a welcome relief.

Anticipatory Grief…

I voluntarily began to be a little less messy after my first child was born. I guess some kind of nesting instinct must have kicked in? But it reached a completely different level a little over a year after that when my late husband, Charlie, was first diagnosed with head and neck cancer. In the early years, we always thought it would go away. His doctors were always so positive about that. They didn’t promise anything, of course, but they did make it sound like he didn’t have much to worry about because it was caught in the early stages.

However, as time went on, it progressed more and more. It kept returning despite all the chemo, radiation and surgery. I started having severe depression and anxiety that badly affected my sleep. I have never been a great sleeper anyway (often borderline insomniac plus everything has to be pitch black and totally silent) but being a full time caregiver alongside the mother of four children was not compatible with sleeping (or eating either, I also learned).

It was on those nights, when everyone else was finally asleep, that a very dark, wrenching agony would seize my insides. It was the creepiest feeling because honestly, it felt like how I would imagine the Grim Reaper to feel if he was really and truly standing right in front of me. It would attack me right when I was crawling into the bed or wake me up in the middle of the night. This feeling would twist me up so badly that I had to get up and do something, anything. I tried to sit and do art or read but for the first time in my life, it wasn’t enough. I had no focus for creativity. So, here it was, 1am or so, and the only thing that might satisfy me that night was scrubbing the heck out of the kitchen floor. And I mean getting down on my hands and knees with cleaning solutions and scrub brushes and scouring every inch like I was trying to put Cinderella to shame.

This kind of thing went on for years. That horrible shadow always engulfed my soul at night. Never quite so much during the day – I guess I was too busy with the hospital or the kids to think or feel. But whenever it came after me later, I was up frantically scrubbing and organizing and sometimes crying through the entire thing. Sometimes, I was able to follow up whatever task I’d hurled myself at by doing some artwork in much more calm manner. But more often, I cleaned myself into exhaustion so that eventually, I was forced to sleep.

Grief After the Fact…

Once I actually lost my husband, after the threat of it for many years, this shadowy feeling didn’t really lessen for a very long time. One of my very first memories of returning to our apartment alone and knowing that Charlie was never coming back sent me straight into a cleaning frenzy. I remember standing in our bedroom, staring at the table that we’d set up on his side. It was completely covered with pain medication, antibiotics and syringes. The knowledge that he would never again need those things filled me with a strange combination of emotions. There was the awful gut wrenching darkness that had always been there but now I was touched by something new – a sense of relief that Charlie’s pain and suffering was over. Then, I felt guilty for feeling relieved.

All of these feelings suddenly pushed me over the edge and I ran to the kitchen, grabbed a big trash bag, and swept every last syringe and pill bottle off that table into the bag. Someone from our church had been kind enough to take my kids out for a few hours so I spent the rest of that day removing every trace of hospitals and medications. I hauled it all down to the dumpster and flung it in as hard as I could. Then, I crawled into the shower like I used to do as a kid when incredibly upset. I curled up on the bottom of the tub with the water raining on down on my head and I just cried and sobbed. I have no idea how long because that period of time in my life is such a blur in so many areas.

All I know is that the process of cleaning and forcing some level of organization made me like I had control of something in my reality. I could look at something out of order, set about fixing that, and voila, it was completed. I could not do that with Charlie’s cancer, no matter how hard I had tried. We set about trying to fix that for years and it never once completely worked. Seeing those medications and syringes was only a reminder of what hadn’t worked. So, I had to get rid of it.

In the first year of Charlie’s passing, someone gifted me Marie Kondo’s book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. It was probably the first and only time I found myself devouring a book about cleaning and organization. This book shows people how to effectively declutter without just endlessly picking away at your stuff and not actually doing anything. This can actually be a good book for grievers because one thing we find ourselves facing is what to do with our person’s belongings after we lose them. In fact, Marie has a whole section that covers “Sentimental Items” which would definitely apply here, maybe more than any other section. But overall, I really found valuable insight through her method, which is about paying more attention to those things that bring you joy as you should keep more of these things.

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Instant Gratification…

Besides a sense of control over something in my environment, I think that cleaning provided me with feelings of success and accomplishment. It was instant gratification to see clutter and be able to fix it so it was no longer in existence. How many times have we had any kind of trouble or problem that we wished we could instantly fix and couldn’t? It was just totally satisfying to put an enormous amount of time and effort into something and see some actual results from it. I set out to achieve a task and I was able to achieve it. It felt like the total opposite with our experiences concerning cancer.

Truthfully, this occasional need to be Felix Unger myself, has continued to stick around even though it’s been many years. There are still triggers, there is still fear, there is still darkness. And when it shows up a little too sharply, I have to fix something that is out of order in my current environment, even if it’s only that someone left that cup out AGAIN and now the cat has knocked it over :D.

Conclusion – You Don’t Have to Clean Just Because I Say So

Just so you know, this isn’t an article in which the purpose is for you to now happily get out the mops and sponges in order to scrub your grief away. No, this method isn’t going to work for everyone. Some of us are just not going to get any joy out of housework or yardwork or anything that involves the chore that is cleaning. So, please don’t think you have to try it, especially if every cell in your body is screaming in protest.

No, I just wanted to explain yet another result or reaction that can occur due to black fog that grief sometimes appears as. I didn’t realize all of this at time, I just understood that something inside me felt slightly better when I channeled my grief into cleaning and organizing clutter. It reminds of a line I saw somewhere in a story once. One of the characters said something like, “Life is easier when you’re organized.”

Do you have to distract yourself through soap and water, too? Or is there something else, possible simplistic or mundane, that you find yourself obsessed with doing in moments of great darkness? Feel free to share them with us in the comments below!

Take care, your soul matters!