Sounds intense? That’s because it is.
We’ve all heard of Marie Kondo – the entirely agreeable and eternally wise Japanese woman who has helped millions of people around the world reorganise their homes and, by extension, their lives.
Never has throwing out a load of junk a person doesn’t need been so therapeutic.
If it doesn’t spark joy, then what’s the point?
The Swedes have got a similar method of decluttering with the intention of bettering oneself. It’s called ‘death cleaning’, and yes, it is just as intense as it sounds.
But not half as harrowing. Don’t worry.
Back in 2018, artist and author Margareta Magnusson brought the art of death cleaning to the public sphere.
Writing in her book, THE GENTLE ART OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING as shared by TIME magazine, she explained exactly what it means to engage in a bout of death cleaning.
Rather than being concerned with the removal of rotting corpses and/or dead bodies, death cleaning is more about looking forward to one’s own inevitable demise and decided what one would want to still be around when the end is so crucially near.
Magnusson wrote that many adults in Sweden are afraid to talk about death, but that they must start… And that death cleaning may just be a good way to begin the conversation.
“Dö is “death” and städning is “cleaning,'” she said.
“In Swedish it is a term that means that you remove unnecessary things and make your home nice and orderly when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet.
“This is something that we will all have to face sooner or later. We really must if we want to save precious time for our loved ones after we are gone.”
Magnusson wrote that death cleaning can be carried out no matter how far – or near – a person may be from death.
For her, it simply means getting rid of things that she no longer needs anymore, making her home nice and tidy in case the time were to come a lot sooner than expected.
“It is rewarding to spend time with these objects one last time and then dispose of them,” she said, finally giving us a justifiable reason to dump all of the unnecessary things that we keep near for purely nostalgic reasons.
They won’t miss us when we’re gone, so why should we miss them?
You can find out more about death cleaning here.
