The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, a review by Joanna

I’m not yet the target age for this (the author suggests beginning at 65 – although clearly it’s only too late once you are actually dead!) but given how hard I find it to let go of things, it could take a few decades. While there are certainly more comprehensive decluttering books out there, I liked how this gently and unsentimentally covers how to let go of everything from clothes to furniture to utensils as you downsize in later life, working out what you actually need now, rather than keeping them as links to your past. You also don’t need to do it all at once, it’s a philosophy rather than a one-off task, and that makes it less daunting. The key point is that it’s not fair or kind to leave the task to your loved ones once you are gone – all that stuff may be precious to you, but to your kids it’s probably mostly junk.

I always remember visiting my stern German grandmother in the years before she died, and her showing me her collections of treasured objects and asking me which things I would like to have when she passed: she had little stickers and a notebook ready so that it would be clear to everyone when the time came who was to get what. That way, everyone got things they liked to remember her by, and there were no arguments. I still have a couple of her tortoise ornaments – although made it very clear that I could not take over her whole collection – I’ve seen what happens when people discover you collect animal things – my mother ended up with frog themed gifts for every Christmas and birthday for decades, just because she admitted to liking actual live frogs and didn’t know how to tell people to stop. (We took most of the frog ornaments to her funeral and asked every attendee to take one to remember her by, which everyone was delighted to do, and was a neat way of getting rid of them without throwing them out.)

The author is an artist with a gently wicked sense of humour. She does use a few personal or family anecdotes to get her points across but this isn’t overdone as in so many self-help books. I”m not sure I needed the recipes she throws in somewhat randomly but overall this was a satisfying listen which I will probably play again in a few months when I need to restart my decluttering kick. I gather there’s a TV series based on this, which sounds helpful if you like that kind of reality TV, but I’m not sure that it’s available here in NZ.