What is Swedish death cleaning? Margareta Magnusson, who taught the world to tidy up before signing off, dies at 92

What Marie Kondo is to tidying, Margareta Magnusson is to dying.

Japanese organising consultant Marie Kondo taught the world to ask whether something “sparks joy,” while Margareta Magnusson, the Swedish author who died this week aged 92, asked readers to grapple with a harder question: who will have to deal with this when you are gone?

Magnusson’s 2017 debut,The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, introduced the world to the term döstädning (pronounced duh-STAD-ning).

It refers to the Scandinavian practice of deliberatelysorting through one’s possessions in later life, so that one’s grieving family does not have to deal with the herculean task of sorting through a lifetime of objects.

The book became an international bestseller, and went on to be published in more than 30 countries, and eventually inspired a reality TV series narrated by Amy Poehler.

Where Kondo’s method is rooted in self-discovery, advising that one only keep what delights you, and release the rest, Magnusson’s is rooted in consideration for others.

She felt the impulse to sort out her belongings after the death of her husband of 48 years, whence she faced the enormous emotional and practical weight of clearing out their family home, writes Emma Loffhagen for The Guardian.

Death cleaning, she argues, is a final gift to the people one loves.

Her motto was, “if you don’t love it, lose it.

If you don’t use it, lose it.”
📌 Start around the age of 65, when one is not so old that the energy has gone, but old enough to take stock.📌Begin with large items and work toward small ones.📌Leave photographs until last, or else one risks disappearing into them for days.📌Be ruthless about clothes, realistic about books, and honest about the kitchen drawer full of things you have not touched since 2003.📌Keeping a small, clearly labelled box of deeply personal mementos – old letters, dried flowers, private keepsakes – with a note instructing your family to throw it away unopened.

While most people struggle to reconcile with the inevitability of death, and avoid thinking about it, if they can help it.

Magnusson dealt with the subject with warmth.

“Death cleaning is not a sad thing,” she told the i Paper,  a British national newspaper.

“I want it to be joyful and interesting.”
Practicing what she preached, she published her second book,The Swedish Art of Aging Exuberantly,at 88.

Magnusson was born in Gothenburg, trained as an artist and illustrator at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, and spent most of her life making art, becoming an author only in her eighties.

She is survived by five children, and, almost certainly, considerably less clutter than most of us will leave behind.