You open the closet door about four inches, and then you stand there.
The smell comes out the way it always does. Wool, and the back of a wardrobe, and underneath that the particular smell of a person, which is soap and skin and something nobody has ever managed to name.
The green coat is on the left where it has always been. There is a shirt still in the dry cleaner’s plastic. On the floor, one pair of shoes with the left one turned slightly inward, the way they always kicked them off.
You breathe in once. Then you shut the door and go and do something else.
That is the eleventh time this month. There is no shame in it, and there is a way through it that does not require you to be braver than you are.
The Smell Is the Reason
People think the difficulty is sentiment. It is not. It is the smell, and it should be taken seriously.
Scent goes into memory by a shorter road than sight or sound. It arrives whole and unannounced, and for a half second the person is in the room.
That half second is the reason the closet stays shut and also the reason it gets opened.
It is worth knowing that the smell is not permanent. It fades over months. It will not survive a wash. Anything you do with these clothes is happening on a clock, and the clock is running whether or not you touch anything.
That is not a reason to hurry. It is a reason to decide, early, which single garment you are not going to wash.
There Is No Correct Timetable
Somebody will tell you six months. Somebody else will say you should have done it by now, or that leaving it a year is unhealthy.
None of these people are working from anything. There is no research behind six months. It is a number that gets passed around because a number is easier to say than the truth, which is that it varies enormously and always has.
People clear a closet in the first fortnight and are fine. People leave a room untouched for nine years and are also fine.
What matters is not when. What matters is whether it was your decision.
Who Is Allowed to Give You One
Two situations are different, and it is worth being honest about them.
If somebody else needs the space — a landlord, a sale, a person living in that house who cannot open a closet in their own bedroom — then there is a real deadline, and it belongs to them as much as to you.
In that case, negotiate a date rather than being handed one. Ask for four weeks. Ask for the boxes to go to the loft rather than to a charity shop. A delay is almost always available if you ask for it plainly.
Everyone else — the friend who thinks it would be good for you, the relative who mentions it every visit — is offering an opinion. Opinions do not carry dates.
Why It Feels Like a Betrayal Whatever You Do
Here is the trap that makes this so hard.
Keeping everything feels like refusing to accept what happened. Giving things away feels like erasing them. Both options are available and both feel wrong, which is why people stand at the door and then go and do something else.
The way out is not to find the option that feels right. There isn’t one.
The way out is to stop treating it as a single decision. It is not one act. It is a long sequence of small ones, and almost all of them can be postponed individually.
Doing It in Stages, Named in Advance
Name the stages before you start. Write them on paper. This is the entire technique and it makes an impossible job into three ordinary afternoons.
The naming matters because it converts a bottomless task into a bounded one. “Clearing the closet” has no end. “Sorting the coats on Saturday afternoon” ends when the coats are done.
Do one stage. Then stop, even if you feel able to continue. Especially if you feel able to continue.
The people who get through this badly are the ones who open the door on a good day, go at it for six hours in a kind of fever, and finish it all in one go. They rarely regret nothing. They regret one specific thing, and they regret it for years.
Stage One: The Outer Layers
Start with coats, boots, work things, the anorak from the shed.
These are the easiest because they are the most public. They belonged to the version of the person that other people saw, and they carry less.
Doing the easy layer first is not cowardice. It is how you find out how this feels while the stakes are low.
Some people discover here that it is fine, and carry on. Some discover it is unbearable and close the door for another season. Both are useful information and you could not have got either without opening the door.
Stage Two: The Everyday Things
Shirts, trousers, jumpers, the ordinary middle of a wardrobe.
This is the longest stage and the most tiring, and it is where most of the actual volume is.
Do it with music on and do it in a room with daylight. Do not do it in the evening. Evening sorting goes wrong.
Give yourself two hours and a timer. When the timer goes, stop where you are, even mid-drawer.
Stage Three: The Ones You Cannot Touch Yet
Every closet has three or four items that are not clothes at all.
The dressing gown on the back of the door. The shirt they wore to the wedding. The jumper with the burn mark from the barbecue. The last thing they had on.
Leave these. Put them in one box, close it, and put the box somewhere else — the loft, under the bed, the top of a cupboard.
They will still be there in three years if you want them. Nothing on earth requires this stage to be done at the same time as the others, and a great deal is lost by pretending otherwise.
The Three Categories
Three piles. Not four, not five. More categories means more decisions, and decisions are the thing in short supply.
- Keep. Things staying in this house, for you or for another person who has asked.
- Pass on. Things going to someone else — a charity, a family member, a shelter, a stranger.
- Finished. Worn out, stained, holed. Rags and recycling.
The third pile is the one people find hardest to allow. It feels disrespectful. It is not — a shirt with the collar gone through is not a relic, and pretending it is will only mean you keep six boxes you never open.
What You Will Need
Boxes rather than bags. Bags collapse and look like rubbish, and something in you registers that.
A marker pen. Label every box as you close it, including the date.
A cotton bag of dried lavender to go in with anything stored, which keeps moths off without the smell of mothballs. Keep it out of reach of cats and dogs, who should not chew it.
One candle, for the working itself.
And a person, if you can bear one. Not to sort — to be in the kitchen, making tea, within earshot.
A Rite for the Closet: The Naming of Three Piles
Before you open the door, light the candle and put it somewhere in the room where it is not in the way. Say out loud what you are doing today and where you will stop. “Today is the coats. I stop at four.”
Open the door and stand there for a moment before you touch anything. Let the smell do what it does. Do not fight it and do not start crying about it later while holding an armful of hangers.
Take out one item at a time. Not armfuls. One.
Hold it for a second and say which pile. Out loud. “Keep.” “Pass on.” “Finished.” Saying it aloud is the working — it makes each item a decision you made rather than a thing that happened while you were upset.
If an item stops you, put it on the bed. Not in a pile. The bed is the undecided place, and it is allowed to have things on it.
For anything going out of the house, do one small thing at the collar. A hand flat on it. “Thank you. Go and be useful.” It sounds like very little. It is most of what makes this bearable.
Stop when you said you would stop. Box what is boxed, label it, close it.
Put the candle out and shut the closet door. Deal with the bed tomorrow, or next month.
Afterward
Get out of the house. This is not optional advice — an hour outdoors after a sorting afternoon does more than anything else you can do.
Expect a delayed reaction. The afternoon itself is often oddly businesslike, and then something arrives at nine in the evening for no clear reason.
Do not go back and check the boxes that night. That is the impulse that undoes three hours of work.
Take the pass-on boxes out of the house within a week. Boxes that sit in a hallway for two months get reopened, and reopening is where the pain is, not in the deciding.
And write down what went where. One line. In eighteen months you will want to know which shop got the coats.
The One Garment You Keep
Choose one thing to keep as a thing, not as storage.
Not the most valuable. Not the one they wore most. The one that is most them — the shirt with the ink on the pocket, the terrible fishing jumper, the scarf that was always in the car.
Do not wash it. Whatever else you do, do not wash it, and put it somewhere the smell is not going to be aired out of it by an open window.
One is usually enough. People who keep fourteen garments generally find that none of them means anything, because meaning does not survive being spread that thin.
Making It Into Something You Will Use
A kept garment in a box does very little. A kept garment in use does a great deal.
The old craft practice of retiring an object into a new purpose applies here exactly — what happens when a thing passes into new hands is a real body of practice, and it is mostly about intention and use rather than ceremony.
Practical shapes that work:
- A cushion cover from the back of a shirt. Used every day, sat against, ordinary.
- An altar cloth, cut square and hemmed, laid under the candle every year on the anniversary.
- A small pocket of cloth holding a button and a pinch of dried herb, made and carried the way any charm bag is carried.
- A patch sewn inside a coat of your own, where nobody sees it and you always know it is there.
- A book cover, or a wrap for a deck of cards, or a bag for a set of stones.
If you cannot sew, somebody local can, and will usually do it for very little when they hear what it is.
Cut the piece from a part that was worn against the body. Cuffs, collar, the inside of a pocket.
Giving Things Away, and Choosing Where
Where things go matters more than most people expect, and it costs nothing to choose well.
Pick a place with a connection. The hospice. The shelter in the town they grew up in. A refuge, if the clothes are practical and warm. A charity for the illness, if that is where your anger sits.
Ask family first, but ask specifically. “Would you like something of his?” produces paralysis. “Would you like the blue jacket?” produces an answer.
Be prepared for one relative to want everything and another to want nothing. Neither is a judgment on you.
And do not sell the good coat to a stranger on the internet in the first year. It is legal, it is sensible, and a startling number of people regret it.
The Empty Closet
Nobody warns you about the empty closet.
You do the work, you get through it, and then you open the door a week later and there are twelve bare hangers and a rail and the smell is gone, and it is worse than anything that came before it.
This is normal and it is brief. It lasts a few weeks.
Do not leave it empty for long. An empty closet in a shared bedroom is a monument nobody meant to build.
Put your own things in it, badly, without ceremony. Or if that is too much, put in the boxes of things you kept. The point is that the space stops being an absence and becomes a cupboard again.
The Thing You Regret Giving
There will be one. Almost everyone has one.
The shoes. The reading glasses. The dressing gown that went out in the third bag, on the day when you were doing well, and now you would give a great deal to have it back.
It is worth saying plainly: you could not have known. The good day is exactly when this work gets done, and the price of doing it on a good day is that one item goes out that a worse day would have kept.
You do not have to make peace with it. But you can mark it. Write the item on a piece of paper, say what it was, and put it in the drawer with everything else you have written down since — the same envelope, if you keep one, that started in the first week.
The green coat is still on the left. It can stay there through another winter if that is what you decide.
Deciding is the whole of the work. The hangers can wait.