At 70, I downsized so my children don’t have to deal with my clutter and ‘sadmin’

When I turned 70 it had been 20 years since my husband died, ten years since I’d had a heart attack, and five since I’d recovered from breast cancer.

I had no partner, no pet, no car and no mortgage. I could work from anywhere – so why was I living in Hackney, East London?

My daily life was predictable and dull, my friends were either wrapped up in grandparent duties or with new partners. My wardrobe was full of London black, and the light levels in my flat were doing my head in.

My three children –  aged 40, 36 and 32 – were all gainfully employed and I needed to get out of their hair and have an adventure before I lost all of my marbles and the use of my legs. 

I needed colour and excitement. I decided to sell my flat and rent somewhere furnished in Seville in southern Spain — a city I’d fallen in love with many years before, when I commuted from Stansted to run writing holidays north of the city.

More sun, cheap sherry and a Zara on every corner. And who knows, I might meet a handsome local who wants to improve his English.

Moving abroad seemed the perfect opportunity to get my affairs in order. I’m a Virgo, I like a tidy ship, and with my health history, plus having watched my husband Jerry die at 53, I was only too aware of my own mortality. 

I decided to clear the decks for my offspring in case I had a nasty fall one afternoon while alone in Plaza De Espana.

Despite their ages, I felt guilty about leaving them and gaily skipping off into the sunset like a gap-year OAP.

I wanted to make it as easy as I could for them if the worst should happen. In Sweden, there is a name for this kind of decluttering — dostadning, meaning ‘death cleaning’.

The best-selling book on this topic, The Gentle Art Of Swedish Death Cleaning, by artist Margareta Magnusson, has even been turned into a TV show narrated by star Amy Poehler.

It might seem morbid, but I believe that getting rid of a lifetime’s worth of possessions is the ultimate act of love for children. 

I want to do this for them so they will never be stuck with the ‘sadmin’ (sad admin) themselves. I’m still haunted by the emotional upheaval of down-sizing from a semi-detached in Brighton to a smaller, terraced house a year after Jerry died.

It took four months to distil our worldly goods into piles of ‘save’, ‘give away to friends’, ‘auction’, ‘charity shop’ and ‘dump’. 

Friends and neighbours lent a hand while my kids stood around in confusion, horrified by the speed with which I rejected their family history.

Looking back, I should have stayed put in the family home and not disrupted their lives so soon after the loss of their father. The youngest was only 11 and the middle one was off to a new boarding school. But hindsight is a wonderful thing, and regret a bitter pill.

My parents both died before they were 80, within three months of each other, after a long marriage. I helped my two younger brothers clear out their Cornish home.

It’s amazing what you can stuff into a three-bedroom bungalow. It was a mammoth, heartbreaking and hilarious task, ploughing through all of the confusion and clutter that was, at times, intimate verging on blush-inducing.

There were 50 empty tins of Steradent tablets and two pairs of false teeth each. But we also discovered treasure — a shoe box with invitations and responses to my mother’s 21st birthday party; love letters; their GPO Union diaries written during and after World War II, recording in teeny-tiny writing how delighted they both were after their first meeting in 1947.

I also learned that my mother had been engaged to a Canadian airman, who turned out to have a wife, and that she and my grandmother both contracted scabies. Nice.

There was so much of sentimental value. I learnt more about my parents than I ever had in their lifetimes.

They never shared their inner hopes and fears with me. I was their child, forever to be spoken to as such. I developed more empathy with their lives and was able to forgive, if not forget, some challenging childhood experiences.

A few years after clearing out my parents’ house, I moved from Brighton to Cornwall to share a new man’s home, so my family’s big furniture and white goods went out the door to new owners.

When we separated five years later I found myself in Hackney, in a city I’d left 32 years before. There I was, back in Ikea, replacing everything I’d jettisoned along the way with featureless flat-pack.

So now, nine years later, at 70, it was surprising that I had anything of value left to sort when I was planning my escape to Andalucia.

But as well as treasured family photos, kids’ clothes, Lego, Sylvanian Families, Playmobil, Star Wars figures, soft toys — all saved for distant grandchildren — there was a ton of framed art, a teetering pile of magazines, mountains of kitchen paraphernalia and my husband’s lovingly constructed tissue and balsa wood model planes.

It was tough to suggest to the kids that it was time for them to take their personal history into their own homes.

Daughter in North London got the Le Creuset, chopping boards, coffee table, a mattress, an armchair, and my olive tree in a pot which she did her back in helping to move. Sons sharing in South London got the vinyl, books, desk, chairs and a much-loved lamp. And those flipping magazines.

I hate throwing anything away. I’d done far too much of that in the past, but this felt like liberation: both lightening my load and benefiting them.

And, after all, isn’t that what would happen when I was dead? Far better to do it now — save them the pain and give them the use of my stuff!

There were years of my notebooks and diaries, many of which my daughter had already read. Nothing has ever been ‘out of bounds’. Unlike my relationship with my parents, my children know about my life — perhaps too much — and most of my escapades during my 30-odd years working in fashion.

They have seen me at my most vulnerable. I have no fears about them discovering a different Elaine when I die, or sorting out my life story. I just wanted to make it easier for them in a practical sense.

They also got a copy of my will and power of attorney.

I wanted to arm them with information, which they appreciated. My parents left financial chaos, but death doesn’t have to cause rancour and resentment.

A couple of years after my husband’s death, my daughter asked me what music I wanted at my funeral, ‘because we don’t want the same trouble we had choosing Daddy’s’. God, I’m so proud of my kids.

And now we’re three years on. If I’ve learnt anything during my challenging but exciting time in this one-bed flat up six flights of steep stairs in an old house in Seville, it’s just how little I need to thrive. I came with two suitcases and one small carry-on.

Sometimes I visit the kids and stroke my possessions in their homes lovingly. It gives me great pleasure to see them still in the family, but I don’t actually need those items.

Maybe apart from that large orange Le Creuset…

• Elaine runs writing, walking & meditation retreats in Spain (write-it-down.co.uk/spain)

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