Real Swedish Death Cleaning

Most people of Scandinavian ancestry, inklusive mig on my mom’s side, are aware of what the Swedes refer to as “death cleaning.”

We’re not talking here of the sanitized version popularized by Margareta Magnusson in her 2017 book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, which is really a helpful guide to decluttering at any age.

Her method is supposed to shift your mindset from “Does this make me happy right now?” to asking “Will anyone else care about this later?”

Dour Lutheran traditionalists, by contrast, are perpetually shifting their minds from death to cleaning and back to death. With possibly a quick nod to Roxette or Ace of Base on Saturday nights.

I should mention right off the hop that death cleaning sounds less forbidding in the original Viking language: “Wiggly wiggly kom here, yoo betcha! Børk! Børk! Børk!”

(Magnusson refers to it as döstädning, but once again, this is for rank amateurs. And possibly Norwegians.)

The basic concept is that as one heads into The Long Goodbye before The Big Sleep, to borrow a couple of suggestive Raymond Chandler titles, basic courtesy requires that we clear out our personal things so others won’t have to go through them after we die.

If that means burning diaries or throwing out precious caches of love letters, so be it. For if you don’t do this while you still can, you risk having others (and above all, your posthumously alienated children or startled surviving spouse) finding out things you never wanted them to know.

Even if you haven’t accumulated anything of a nefariously covert nature, you can spare others needless grief by getting your affairs in order and chucking out debris from what T.S. Eliot once referred to as the butt-ends of our days and ways so that no one else is stuck with the dirty work.

This doesn’t mean you consign your entire past willy-nilly to a dumpster. Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood offered some prudent advice about this in her 2025 memoir Book of Lives, where she manages to include a humble-brag about learning in a note her mother purposely left behind that her teacher had wanted clever young Peggy to skip Grade 2:

Be careful what you destroy. In parallel, be careful what messages you leave behind. Who is the message for? Will the right one find it, and open the envelope, and understand the message, and have a moment of heartbreak and rare weepiness in among the old boots and shoes in the cellar?

If so, you will have done a bang-up job of going out with a bang. But what a job it is! Or to quote a lyric from ABBA: “Mamma mia, atsa some spicy Swedish meatball. There’s a fire within my soul!”

The first thing you discover when you begin death cleaning is that you have been living with a great many objects whose original purpose has been lost to the mists of time.

There are cables, for example. Nobody knows what the cables are for. They are kept in a drawer, usually in a plastic bag along with other cables, some of which appear to have been manufactured before the invention of electricity. You cannot throw them away because the moment you do, you will discover that one of them connects the television to the satellite receiver, or possibly the satellite receiver to a small device that your children gave you in 2009 and which they now deny ever having seen.

The sensible thing would be to ask the children. But the children are busy, and anyway they have already informed you that the small device is obsolete. They say this with the serene confidence of people who have never had to pay $79.95 for a cable that turned out to be the wrong cable. So you put everything back in the drawer. Just in case.

This is how death cleaning works in practice. You start with the intention of simplifying your existence and end up preserving a bag of electronic equipment for the benefit of future archaeologists.

Clothing presents a different problem. There are garments you have not worn since a Canadian team last won the Stanley Cup (the Habs in ’93 if you’re sorting this out at home), but which you cannot discard because they might come back into fashion. This is particularly true of trousers.

You remember a time when these trousers fitted you, and you retain them as evidence that this was once possible. Getting rid of them would be an admission that the past is over, which is not something one wishes to do on a rainy Thursday morning while standing in one’s underwear holding a pair of corduroys.

You even remember a time when people called pants trousers. And when underwear did not hold pairs of corduroys.

There are also the clothes that are too good to throw away but not good enough to give to charity. These occupy a mysterious intermediate category, like actors who have been nominated for Oscars but never actually won anything. They remain in the closet indefinitely, waiting for an occasion that never arrives. Much like Glenn Close and Bradley Cooper.

I have a theory (well, actually my wife does, but it applies only to my stuff) that most of us could eliminate half our possessions without noticing, provided we were prevented from looking in the boxes or bins afterward. The difficulty is that we are not permitted to do this. We must inspect every object, at which point it becomes invested with significance.

As a hands-on test of this hypothesis, I am writing to you from our basement and standing directly before a blue plastic bin. I open it, and inside are three keys, a Canadian Tire receipt, a button, a 10-cent Jamaican coin and a photograph of somebody standing beside a car.

Who is the person in the photograph? I have no idea. Is it a relative? A former neighbour? A person who sold me the car? Why did I keep the photograph? Was there a story attached to it, a story that seemed so important at the time that I carefully placed the photograph in a box?

I stare at it for several minutes, hoping that the face will trigger a memory. It does not. Eventually I put the photograph back in the box, because I have just spent five minutes thinking about it, which has somehow made it more valuable. I don’t know what any of the keys are for, but they don’t take up much space. Why tempt fate? The Canadian Tire receipt from 1997? That could probably go. The button. Hmm. Might be from one of the antediluvian, Paul Bunyan lumberjack shirts in my closet, next to Bradley Cooper. I’ll put it in my pocket, next to the 10-cent Jamaican coin, for safekeeping.

This is the great trap of death cleaning: the more useless an object appears, the more determined you become to establish its usefulness.

A practical person might simply ask, “Have I used this in the past five years?” A less practical person asks, “Could this conceivably be useful in a situation that I cannot presently imagine but which might occur during a future emergency?”

Why, yes. Yes it could. You can’t gainsay logic.

This is how one ends up with 12 mismatched screws, an empty jam jar, three instruction manuals for appliances one no longer owns and a cardboard tube that might be needed for some sort of plumbing operation.

It is also how one ends up keeping old paperwork. I have documents whose only remaining purpose is to prove that something happened. I do not remember what happened, but I know it must have been important because there are four copies of the documents, each bearing a different handwritten annotation.

Say, anyone see what I did with that darn Canadian Tire receipt?

One of the universal discoveries of old age is that the human brain can forget almost anything, but a filing cabinet can preserve it indefinitely. Unfortunately, the filing cabinet does not provide a search function. Nor, once you get north of 60, does the human brain.

Then there are the photographs. Sweet Annie Leibovitz!

Digital photography has supposedly solved the problem of photographic clutter, but it has merely moved the clutter into a cloud that can hold 47,000 pictures of the same sunset. Or maybe it’s a sunrise on a different day. No way to know, really.

Somewhere in my collection are photographs of meals I have eaten, parking spaces where I left the car, and a large number of pictures taken by accident while attempting to answer my wife’s telephone.

There are photographs of people whose names I once knew. There are photographs of people whose names I never knew. There are photographs of buildings that have since been demolished, restaurants that have since closed, and pets that are now dead but who continue to appear in my digital life with a frequency that suggests they have not entirely accepted the situation.

Deleting these photographs would be the obvious course. But what if a descendant wants to know what the family looked like in 2016? What if some future historian needs to establish whether I really did sport impossibly insouciant, devil-may-care bangs as late as 1968?

And so the photographs remain.

As indicated earlier, the more serious business of death cleaning involves the things we have written. Diaries, letters, notebooks, old correspondence: these can contain revelations that may be of great interest to the living, but not necessarily in a way that improves their day.

A diary entry that says, “I am deeply troubled by the behaviour of (insert relative’s name here),” might be interpreted by descendants as a fascinating historical document. Or it might cause a family gathering to break up before dessert.

One must therefore exercise judgment. It is possible to destroy too much. A person who eliminates every trace of his existence leaves behind a curious problem for the survivors, who must then reconstruct his personality from a collection of tax returns and a 1989 warranty for a refrigerator from The Brick.

But it is also possible to leave behind too much. There is no need for future generations to discover every foolish thing one ever thought (that’s what blogs are for), every unwise purchase one ever made or every occasion on which one expressed a strong opinion about a neighbour who was, in retrospect, perfectly pleasant.

The challenge is to leave a record that is honest without being needlessly destructive. This is difficult, because one cannot always predict which things will matter to other people.

A grocery list might be meaningless to you but precious to a daughter who remembers accompanying you to the store. A letter you considered trivial might become the last surviving evidence of a friendship. A photograph of a perfectly ordinary afternoon might turn out to be the one your family treasures most.

This suggests that death cleaning (“Vergoofin der flicke støøbin mit der børk-børk yubetcha!” in Norwegian) is not really about getting rid of things. It is about making decisions on behalf of people who will eventually have to make decisions about you.

This brings us to the most difficult category of all: the things we keep because we imagine somebody else will want them.

There are books. There are collections. There are tools. There are boxes of assorted memorabilia, carefully labelled in handwriting that becomes less legible with each passing decade. There are objects that were expensive when purchased, objects that were inherited and objects that are valuable only because we have spent so long refusing to discard them.

We tell ourselves that the children will want these things. They will not.

The children have lives of their own. They have furniture. They have books. They have cables. They have children of their own who are producing additional cables at an alarming rate. They do not necessarily want the carved wooden bowl from the sideboard, the encyclopaedia set from 1974 or the collection of commemorative teaspoons from 1953. They may love us dearly and still have no use for commemorative teaspoons marking the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

This is a difficult truth to accept. We have spent a lifetime acquiring possessions, and we naturally assume that our possessions will retain some of the affection in which we hold them. But sentiment is not transferable by inheritance. A thing that evokes 50 years of memories for one person is just an oddly shaped piece of stained thingamabob to another.

The answer, I think, is to identify the objects that genuinely tell a story and make the story available to the people who might care about it. Write a note. Label a photograph. Explain why the battered old chair matters, or who owned the ring, or why a particular book has a folded corner on page 143. (P.S. Sorry about the lutefisk stain on p. 372.) Otherwise, the object arrives in the next generation without instructions, like a parcel delivered to the wrong address.

This is the point at which death cleaning becomes something more generous than tidying up. It becomes an attempt to distinguish between what we want to preserve and what we merely cannot bear to release.

I have not yet achieved this distinction. I still own the cables. I still have the trousers. I still possess a cardboard box containing assorted objects that I have been meaning to sort through since we were panicking over the approach of Y2K.

But I have begun to understand that there is a difference between keeping something because it matters and keeping it because throwing it away would require a decision. The first is an act of remembrance. The second is procrastination with a lid on it.

So from time to time, I will continue. I will fill a box for charity, another for recycling and a third for the landfill. I will examine the old photographs and write down a few names. I will put important papers where somebody can find them. I will leave behind a few letters, carefully chosen, for the people who might someday want to read them.

I will try, at least, to ensure that no one who comes after me has to spend an entire afternoon asking what a particular cable is for. But if you think for one second that I’m ditching my perfectly good Classic Nylon 89 Reebok vintage runners just because the soles are shot and I can poke two toes through a size 13 hole, well, as a much-loved Swedish chef is wont to say …