The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson: Top 10 Takeaways

Last month while on a gal-pal-date with my bestie Jacqueline, I picked up Margareta Magnusson’s second book, The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly that referenced her first book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

As I am updating my research for my first ever Stanford Continuing Education course in the spring, I am revisiting topics covered in Piloting Your Life and some that weren’t included, like death and grief.

While this is a quick read, we all have limited time so here are my top 10 takeaways from the book. My copy will be in my lending library if you’d like to read it while ignoring my bright orange highlights.

1. Death cleaning in advance of your own demise is a gift to yourself and to the loved ones you leave behind, and this is something that can be started at any age. It’s an opportunity to “remove unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly.” Death cleaning can be seen as a “permanent form of organization that makes your every day life run more smoothly.”
2. Death cleaning can be done for “one’s own pleasure, and the chance to find meaning and memory is the most important thing.” This can be a happy, therapeutic, and cathartic experience, rather than something morbid.
3. She also recommends telling “loved ones and friends what you are up to. They might want to help you and even take things you don’t need.” She suggests having someone special over so that “you can show them your things and chat about them, telling them stories about the objects.” I love the idea of walking through the memories with someone before giving or tossing away something that was meaningful to me at some point. It’s a form of paying homage as you say goodbye to something without guilt.
4. Start by organizing your stuff into categories. Once categorized, “start with the large items in your home, and finish with the small.” She suggests starting with an easy category. “Don’t start with photographs, or letters and personal papers.” She says that you will get bogged down with memories and your death cleaning process will be derailed.
5. “Take your time and proceed at a pace that suits you” and “go through your belongings carefully.” She found that the more she ‘focused on [her] cleaning, the braver [she] became.” And the easier it became for her. “The more you work at it, the less time-consuming it will become.”
6. Don’t “hang on to things that nobody seems to want.” From this book I learned about a fulskap, “a cabinet for the ugly” in Swedish. This is “a cupboard full of gifts you can’t stand to look at, and which are impossible to regift.” She is pretty clear that “this is a bad idea” and suggests that “if you don’t like something, get rid of it.”
7. Consider gifting some of your items as host/hostess gifts or as people leave your house. “Don’t offer things that do not fit the recipient’s taste or the space in which they live. It will burden them.” At the same time, knowing “something will be well used and have a new home is a joy.”
8. “When you have lived a long life, it is so easy to get lost among memories from a long time ago” like when going through old photos. This is why she suggests these be the last thing you go through, to give yourself the time to immerse yourself in the memories.
9. There will be things like “old love letters, programs, memories from traveling” that will only matter to you. She suggested putting this in a small box marked “Throw Away” so that “others can throw [it] away with a clean conscience.”
10. “If you cannot find anyone to give your possessions to, sell them and make a donation to charity. If you don’t death clean and show people what is valuable, once you die there will be a big truck that takes all the wonderful things you have to auction (at best) or a dump. No one will be happy about that.”

Bonus item: If there are saved items that may embarrass your loved ones, destroy them.

Even if you aren’t 80+ like the author, is this something you would consider doing now?

Even before I read the book, I was working on ridding myself of things that no longer serve me, to streamline my life and minimize clutter. While I am not a hoarder, I am sentimental. Each day, I have a goal to purge or clean one thing, and most days I mark that goal complete.

Did any of these resonate with you? Are there other words of wisdom that you suggest for streamlining and organizing your life? If so, let me know in the comments or drop me a line at pilotingyourlife@gmail.com.

Next up: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. I completely ignored this craze during the pandemic and feel compelled to understand the Kondo approach to decluttering and streamlining one’s life hoping that throwing away the book isn’t my first step.

This is not an endorsement for Bird scooters!

About the Author

Terri Hanson Mead is the multi-award winning author of Piloting Your Life, Managing Partner of Solutions2Projects, LLC, and an advocate for women through all of her platforms including YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and this blog. Terri is the mother of a college sophomore and recent college graduate, is based in Redwood City, CA and in her spare time, loves to travel, cook, play tennis, and fly helicopters around the San Francisco Bay Area, especially under the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, and she loves a good craft cocktail!