On Grieving for Stuff

decluttering, robot dogs, grief

Hello.

I’ve been saying good-bye a lot recently. To neighbours and local friends, to teachers at my kids’ school, to the helpful shopkeeper on the corner, and the people at the allotments. I could give a long list of reasons for the break I’ve taken from writing this Substack, but chief among them is this: last week, we moved house.

The boxes, the packing, the endless admin - everyone knows how time-consuming moving is. And because we downsized, moving to a smaller but more central place in London, I have spent months whittling down our possessions, getting rid of stuff accumulated over eight years in sleepy suburbia.  

The Great Decluttering. I tore through the house, bin bag in hand, wresting control over the stuff that had stuffed our lives. I organised a jumble trail on our street, and signed us up for a car boot sale. I gave away everything I could, and threw away the rest. I felt shame, of course. How could we have accumulated so much? But I also enjoyed the sense of control decluttering gave me. I felt lighter at first. More nimble. I felt like the kind of person who ought to have an Instagram channel devoted to her transformation from hoarder to reformed minimalist. ‘It’s just stuff’ I intoned. But now, months later, as I look around our dramatically pared back lives, at the empty corners and carefully organised cupboards, I feel a strangely hollowed out feeling. As if I had failed to notice how precious it all was – even the broken toys and puzzles with missing pieces and too-small clothes and seized up paint cans, and saucepans with wonky handles and pens that no longer worked and – all of it told stories about a life lived together. Had I been in such a rush, I forgot to grieve any of it?

Many of us use objects to grieve with. Simone de Beauvoir described this process beautifully in A Very Easy Death, her memoir about her mother’s final days: ‘As we looked at her straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished piece of knitting, and at her blotting pad, her scissors, her thimble, emotion rose up and drowned us. Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them’. A life coalesces in objects, and leaves its residue, so that months, even years later, a comb, a pen, a leather bag with a broken strap can arouse some memory of the person long gone.

But the idea we should grieve the things themselves – however cherished they are – can seem outrageous. The Houston-based psychotherapist Elizabeth Seabolt-Esparza describes how some of her patients had seen all their belongings swept away during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. This experience had caused them great pain, yet they hardly knew how to describe it, and quickly followed each mention of losing their belongings with a comment about how lucky they were to have survived. It’s just stuff, they said. They did not want to seem unduly emotionally invested in objects. They feared being judged. They suspected they were not allowed to feel the grief they felt.

So many forms of grief are illegitimate. In my book Bad Friend (coming Spring 2025), I wrote about the grief of choosing to end a friendship. There is also the loneliness of grieving a beloved pet, or the grief felt by fans towards a celebrity they might have never met. Grieving inanimate objects seems especially alien to many of us raised with Western cultural values. We live in a Capitalist culture which encourages us to invest a great deal of emotion in acquiring objects, yet makes no room for sorrow when we lose or give them up. We are simply supposed to replace them.

Some cultures do recognise the sorrow of lost things. Last year, at a conference in Warsaw, I heard a paper by a young designer Michal Majdak about Japanese funerals held for robot dogs. I confess: at the beginning of the talk, I thought the whole idea of a robot dog funeral seemed hilariously bizarre.  The speaker explained that Aibo dogs - which can beg, roll over, and, in later versions, even talk - went on sale in the late ‘90s, but never really sold in the numbers their manufacturer Sony had hoped for. Production ceased in 2006. But some people had brought Aibo dogs and developed powerful attachments to them.

Over the years, Aibos succumbed to technological glitches, or became damaged. In 2014, Sony ended repairing old Aibos, and Aibo owners turned to one another, meeting online and forming groups to swap parts and help each other repair their beloved robot pets. Eventually, as owners ran out of options, these groups turned into spaces of mutual grief and consolation, as they accepted their Aibos could not be saved. In the Shinto tradition, dolls are thought to be ensoled, and when they are no longer played with, funerals are held for them. So it is no surprise that in a centuries-old Buddhist temple Kōfuku-ji, in Isumi, more than eight hundred Aibos have received sincere goodbyes and thanks for their service in funeral ceremonies complete with chanting and incense.

It seemed bizarre to commemorate and grieve for an object, even a highly anthropomorphised one like Aibo. Yet, as I contemplate all the belongings I have intentionally shed over the last few months, I wonder if I might have taken a little more care over them. The anthropologist and cognitive scientist Dimitris Xygalatas writes in his book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living that rituals are an important part of life in all cultures. These shared events help people move through anxieties and fears, and connect with one another. As the Covid pandemic showed, whether a graduation ceremony, or a Halloween trick or treating, or singing happy birthday, without shared rituals, we can quickly feel unmoored and disconnected.

Did I remember Marie Kondo’s famous advice to thank each object before you pack it away in a charity shop bag? I did not. And though we meant to conduct some kind of goodbye ceremony on the morning we left our old house, what actually happened is that my husband and I rushed about gulping down coffee and barking reminders to each other before the removal men arrived at 8am. The kids went about saying goodbye to everything, instinctively recognising the importance of marking the moment. But us adults couldn’t catch our breath, and still haven’t. We are caught in that oddly liminal space, with that ‘permanently provisional feeling’ C.S. Lewis found accompanied grief. We are excited for our new life, but have not quite managed to let go of our old one yet. We have said goodbye to so many people. But I think we may need to improvise a different kind of ritual now, to thank all the things we left too.