Swedish Death Cleaning Made Easy for Americans – by Greta Gunnarsson

In Sweden, there is famously the tradition of doing much of one’s own house-clearing in advance, rather than leaving it to whoever will administrate your estate after your death.

It’s easy to think “well, I don’t know what they’ll want, so I’ll just leave everything for them to sort out”. However, the truth is—as you’ll doubtlessly know if you’ve previously been the one responsible for administrating someone else’s estate after their death—it can be quite overwhelming.

Reviewer’s example: when my mother died, I was the only person left to deal with it. I found myself so up to my ears in death-bureaucracy and legal requirements, that when it came to the physical stuff in her house… It was so overwhelming, I took one thing (a stuffed toy that had been mine as a child) and just abandoned everything else for the housing trust to dispose of.

You probably don’t want that to be your legacy. So, this book guides us through deciding for ourselves how we want to be remembered, curating what will be left behind, prioritizing memories we want to last when we are gone, and honestly, eliminating the things we don’t.

The book is, thus, half Marie Kondo and half a very specific kind of therapy.

Of course, there’s lots we’ll keep around just because we want/need it while we’re alive, and that’s fine. We don’t have to die with an empty closet, after all. But, there’s lots we can, upon examination, get rid of now, meaning that when our kids or whoever it may be go through our things, they’re not put in a position of being unable to see the wood for the trees.

Gunnarson talks us through the practicalities and the sentimentalities, the things we might not think of, and the things we should probably tell somebody about. And, for that matter, the things that might be better left unsaid!

Bottom line: if you care at all about your legacy, then preparing in this way is important, and this book can help make it all a lot easier by walking us through the process.

Click here to check out Swedish Death Cleaning Made Easy for Americans, and curate your own legacy!