Shannen Doherty’s latest cancer update is somber but practical. The Charmed star, who has been fighting the disease for nearly a decade, opened up about the preparations she is making “just in case” the worst happens.
“My priority at the moment is my mom. I know it’s going to be hard on her if I pass away before [she does],” the 52-year-old reflected on her podcast, Let’s Be Clear, per Page Six. To make that possibility easier on her mom on at least a practical level, Doherty said, she’s downsizing her possessions so her mom won’t have to. “Because it’s going to be so hard on her, I want other things to be a lot easier. I don’t want her to have a bunch of stuff to deal with. I don’t want her to have four storage units filled with furniture.”
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The Heathers actor added that she recently went to Tennessee to pack up her home there, and to close up the property she’d planned on turning into a sanctuary for horses. “I was packing up and I started crying … I felt like I was giving up on a dream and what did that mean for me? Did it mean that I was giving up on life? Did it mean that I was throwing in the towel? And my mom was there and she was like, ‘Don’t get rid of this place, it’s fine. You don’t have to and you can keep going.’ I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely I can,’” Doherty recalled, though she said she later changed her mind because of how much the renovation would cost. “I can still live my dream of helping horses,” she said. “I can still live that dream by really participating in rescues that are far more capable [than I am of] doing it.”
What Doherty’s doing is quite similar to the Swedish concept of “death cleaning,” a method of de-cluttering and organizing your life not just in anticipation of the inevitable but also because, in the later part of your life, you simply don’t need all the stuff you’ve accumulated.
Letting go of both property and possessions will help Shannen Doherty “leave behind a cleaner, easier transition,” and as an added bonus, the income she’s generating is helping Doherty live better here and now. “It allows me to take more trips because I’m making money…I get to build different memories and I build memories with the people that I love…I get to take my mom on vacations because I have all this extra play money lying around and I’m not digging into the money that’s in my estate that’s going to make sure that everybody in my life is taken care of once I’m dead.”
