Yesterday, Natalia Angelini blogged on a “purification grave” for students in Holland. The grave allows students to reflect on their lives, and their inevitable death. The grave serves as a very real memento mori, or awareness of our own death.
Another memento mori is the Swedish practice of “döstädning”, or death cleaning. As explained in Margareta Magnusson’s The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family From a Lifetime of Clutter, the practice calls for the decluttering of one’s lifetime of possessions so that your death is not such a burden on those left behind.
Magnusson advocates the proactive and mindful clearing out of possessions. This is therapeutic and cathartic for the cleaner, and benefits those who have to deal with a person’s “stuff” after they die.
One test of whether to discard something or hang on to it is to ask yourself whether anyone will be happier if you were to hold onto the object. This is similar to Marie Kondo’s test of asking yourself whether the item “sparks joy”.
Unlike Marie Kondo’s methods, Magnusson’s approach is a slower, more methodical one. The “gentle” process involves examining one’s possessions, one by one, and deciding whether to keep it, gift it to family or friends, donate it to a charity, recycle it or trash it. It is a slow shedding of the baggage of life.
As with other minimalist approaches, less is more: for you and for those you leave behind.
Thanks for reading.