What Are the Advantages of Death Cleaning?

This Swedish life hack isn’t as morbid as it sounds. It could change your life for the better.

Death cleaning, or döstädning, is a way of decluttering your life in later years. This concept originated in Sweden; however, it is becoming increasingly popular with older people all over the world.

While its name might be off-putting, there is nothing morbid about this process. It can enhance your life and make things easier for loved ones you leave behind after your death.

Let’s take a closer look.

What is death cleaning?

In its simplest form, death cleaning is a way of decluttering your life and making more physical and mental space for yourself. The process follows regular decluttering principles.

So, you go through some or all of your possessions. You decide which ones to keep, gift, donate, recycle or trash. You keep things that give you joy. You give away things that might bring joy to other people.

Younger people typically declutter to create more physical space or to better organise their lives. Death cleaning meets both of these aims.

However, it also has other benefits for older people. You consciously go through this process later in life.

What does death cleaning do for you?

As we get older, we reach certain milestones. Our children grow up and leave home; we might reduce our working hours or retire. We might move out of the family home into a smaller place.

At this stage of life, we often have a lot of possessions. Your home might be an empty nest now, but I’ll bet it is full of traces of your younger family life.

You might not have had time during your busy family or working years to think about the things you keep and why you keep them. This might be the first time in a long time that you have the time and space to actually think about yourself and what you want.

While some people find it comforting to keep this status quo, it can also be restricting. As you get older, your life changes. It is full of new opportunities; however, you might feel stuck in the past and trapped by too many possessions.

This isn’t necessarily good for your mental health:

Those overwhelmed with “memory” clutter may have an undue preoccupation with things in the past and become depressed. Peter Walsh (WebMD)

Death cleaning gives you the chance to clear the decks for the next stage of your life. This isn’t about giving up on life because you know that you are closer to death than birth.

This is a positive act. You turn to face forward.

You reset for the years to come. You make room for you in the present without being encumbered by possessions you don’t want or need any longer. You keep what really matters to you and let the rest go.

What does death cleaning do for your loved ones?

If you’ve ever had to dispose of a loved one’s possessions after their death, then you already know that this is a hard task. It can be a mammoth task.

Plus, you don’t just have to find ways to dispose of practical items. You are often left with a lot of personal possessions that are harder to deal with.

You might be emotionally or sentimentally invested in some of these things. You might want to keep some of them. For example, you might take family photo albums after the death of your parents.

However, it is painful to deal with things that you know meant a lot to a loved one but that you have no real connection with. You feel their love for items and feel guilty for letting them go.

Think ahead into the future. One day, your loved ones will have to decide what to do with your stuff. Death cleaning makes things easier for them.

If you declutter your life and remove things which you no longer need or want — things that don’t bring you real joy — then you make things easier for people when you die.

On a practical level, you reduce the volume of your possessions. They aren’t faced with the daunting task of removing a life’s worth of belongings after your death.

You can also use death cleaning to help your loved ones understand how to deal with the practical aftermath of your death. It can teach them some valuable lessons.

I’ve been trying this process slowly for a while now. It’s been a really useful way of clearing out items I no longer need but have never had time to get rid of before.

I also talked to my son about the process and how it works. We discussed how everyone attaches to certain things and how this attachment affects following generations.

My son is an only child, and I think I worry about him having to deal with the aftermath of our lives when we die. He doesn’t have siblings to share this burden.

We’ve been able to talk about letting go. About how he shouldn’t hang on to things just because they were important to us. If he doesn’t have a personal connection with an item, then he shouldn’t feel beholden to keep it.

He doesn’t need to keep all my books to remember that I loved reading. He shouldn’t feel guilty about giving them away because they will give pleasure to other readers. He knows I like that idea.

I have also been able to talk to him about what I would like him to do with some items. For example, I have a lot of my Dad’s memorabilia from his time in the RAF in the Second World War. It means a lot to me.

However, my Dad died before my son was born. He doesn’t have a first-hand connection with him.

I would hate for these items to be simply discarded. As luck would have it, these are things that my son thinks he would want to keep. If he decides not to, then we have agreed that he will donate them to a military museum where my Dad’s experiences can live on.

I know that he will do the right thing with them. He knows that he won’t have to clutter up his future life out of guilt.

So, death cleaning is making my life easier now. Hopefully, it will also help my son in the future. Why not give it a try?

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