Over a lifetime, many of us have the urge to collect objects that connect to a happy memory of an event or special person. We don’t recognize a financial value, but the sentimental value is high. Sometimes we have a shoebox or two of sentimental trinkets, or we become hoarders, filling storage units, garages, and basements with accumulated memories.
Some collectors treat objects with the cold calculation of a high-tech day trader. To them, a rare coin, a vintage comic book, or a piece of fine art is a financial investment that has consistently beaten inflation, even outperforming a 401(k).
Before using fax machines to send shipping information to the railroads, we actually talked to the billing clerks. At the Burlington Northern, our assigned clerk was old Red, a cantankerous but lovable and thorough professional. We became friends, and he was a valued source of competitive intelligence for me. He was also a coin collector. He told me that one closet in his St. Paul apartment was filled with a coin collection he felt would secure a comfortable retirement. We lost touch a long time ago, so I don’t know how that panned out for him.
I know of folks who even collect used bricks. With several hundred members, the International Brick Collectors Association met in its 2026 Great Northern Get-Together Summer Swap in Grand Marais last month.
As the Bohunk and I contemplated moving from our home in the woods above Lake Superior to a smaller home in the Duluth area, I read a book titled “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” by Margareta Magnusson, published in 2018. As Magnusson went through her “death cleaning,” she wrote this book to help others do the same. Its subtitle is “How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter.”
Swedish Death Cleaning is the practice of getting rid of stuff, donating, selling, tossing, or giving it to someone you think should have it while you’re still above ground. The goal is to remove the burden on your survivors of sorting through your things and deciding what to do with them, and making life a bit less stressful.
Evidently, döstädning has achieved some notoriety, if not popularity. “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning” is now a television show, narrated by comedian Amy Poehler, on the streaming service Peacock. The show features three delightful Swedes (is there any other kind) dropping into Kansas City and helping a different person each episode reduce the accumulated collections of a lifetime.
Becky and I would be considered sentimental collectors. It took me more than two decades to overcome the sentimental value I attached to my high school gym shorts and shirt, which would fit me only in my dreams.
We shed much of the stuff we’d accumulated over decades before we moved to the Zenith City last summer. But some of our collection, specifically 50 years of jewelry and impromptu collections of coins and currency collected as kids, and added to as grandparents, aunts and uncles, and parents moved on to their just reward over the years.
Settled at the frontier of Proctor and Duluth last summer, we packed up all the old jewelry we had and drove to The Gold Guys at the mall. They could have told us that it was all worthless, of course, and we’d be none the wiser. But they honestly appraised the collection, paying a surprisingly large amount of money for the precious metals in some of the pieces. Energized to reduce clutter, we tossed the rest.
I tend to be sentimental about stuff I’ve collected. From Dad’s cufflinks and wheat penny collection to Great Uncle Arvid’s retirement watch from the steel company in Crosby. I even have a number of match boxes that marketed our business in the 1970s. Much of that is gone now.
Since we married in 1973, the tins, binders, and bags filled with coins have moved with us, more than a dozen times. This summer, we’ve finally cleansed the coin and currency. With three separate visits to Lake Superior Coins, an honest broker, we have managed to shed our informal collections of Silver Certificates, Morgan Dollars, and foreign coins. I wish Red had been around to assess the value of our assortment, but I think we got a fair deal.
I learned a few things in the process. For example, I always thought that 64 Kennedy half dollars were worth $32. An old joke that went over like a fart in church with the experts at Lake Superior Coins.
But I did find out that Kennedy half-dollars minted in 1964, and dollar coins, half-dollars, quarters, and dimes minted before 1965, contain silver, making even the mundane coins worth significantly more than face value. And a so called Morgan dollar, minted in Carson City in 1891, is worth $75.
