Swedish Death Cleaning
And why it's important
Not a natural topic for a knitting blog I grant you but bear with me.
If you haven’t come across the term Swedish Death Cleaning before it sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is. It’s just a fancy term for having a good clear out, as my mum would have termed it. But it goes much further than that. It involves actively embracing a different state of mind. An awareness that eventually someone you love will have to go through every single one of your possessions and decide what to do with them.
It’s not a nice thought. It’s not something we want to dwell on but it’s an inevitable fact of life. If you are lucky and have loved ones around you then it will be someone that you love and care for to whom this burden will fall. Your partner, child or siblings will eventually have to sort through every last item in your possession and decide what to do with it.
I don’t know about you but that definitely helps to shift my mindset when I’m decluttering and deciding what to do with ‘stuff’. It has also been really helpful in reframing my attitude to buying new items. Am I buying something just because I really want and will use it? Or am I just succumbing to the lure of shiny, new things that will inevitably end up gathering dust somewhere.
I definitely think this is a perspective that has come as I’ve got older and I have had to deal with the belongings of a few relatives who have died suddenly. Grief is a complicated emotion at the best of times without having the added complexities of dealing with personal effects and the hoarding tendencies of an 80 year old with a lockup storage facility he had barely looked at for the last 10 years.
I’m a little ashamed to say that in the aftermath of dealing with one particularly difficult family event I took a whole carload of personal effects to the tip and threw them in there. The guilt was almost overwhelming. There was just so much stuff and yes, we could have sorted through making careful piles for charity shops, ebay etc but our mental capacity was totally overwhelmed at that point.
In a small three-bedroomed house I can confirm that stepping around and over a load of dead people’s possessions for weeks on end is not conducive to ones’ mental wellbeing, especially in the aftermath of several family bereavements.
Flinging about two decades worth of clutter probably wasn’t the best thing I’ve ever done, but on balance I don’t think it’s the worst either.
Especially when I realised that in hanging on to all of that stuff, the family member in question had effectively outsourced his guilt to someone else. He knew that he had a lot of memories tied up in belongings, memories that he was reluctant (read: adamant) not to address and his way of dealing with that was to push the burden onto someone else entirely.
What does this have to do with yarn?
Good question. That all got a little personal there didn’t it. Apologies for that. But I think it does really highlight the fact that our possessions aren’t just physical baggage, they can be emotional baggage as well. And I don’t know about you but I don’t want people to be remembering me for all of the ‘stuff’ I left for them to deal with.
I’m sure we’ve all seen on internet forums where someone has been left a whole load of yarn or crafty items to dispose of after someone has died. Whether it’s a relative, a friend or a neighbour. If you are known to your acquaintances as a knitter sooner or later someone is bound to approach you about dealing with a stash that isn’t yours.
If the stash in question is just a few storage tubs or bags, all well and good. But I’ve seen images online of whole craft rooms, stuffed to the gills with yarn and fabric. Overflowing storage units, even whole garages filled floor to ceiling with yarn.
These are extreme examples obviously but just imagine leaving that burden for someone else to sort out? If that doesn’t help to reframe your mindset then I honestly don’t know what will.
And to me, that’s the central tenet of the practice of Swedish Death Cleaning. It’s less about removing the clutter, although that is important. It’s more about being intentional about what we leave behind.
It’s about facing up to the consequences of times when we may have bought more than we should have, or we may have been holding onto things long past when they were needed. And about actually taking action, rather than outsourcing our guilt over past purchases and depositing it on someone else’s doorstep.
In recent years I have drastically cut down the amount of yarn I have. Buying one of a kind skeins of sock yarn from indie dyers was my weakness and I ended up with an awful lot of yarn that I knew deep down I would never actually knit.
Most of it was sold or donated and now I try to restrict myself to planned purchases for projects/designs I have in mind. When I want to splurge on some special skeins I wait until a yarn show when I can do it in person and actually chat to the dyer concerned.
My yarn now fits in a small chest of drawers in the spare bedroom and I’m currently working on my leftover yarn and partial balls, reducing the amount that I have hanging around waiting for that special project.
And on a related note - if anyone wants to develop a Yarn Executor service for dealing with knitters yarn stashes after they have died I’m all ears. I think it would make for a pretty nifty business opportunity.
Further reading and links:
What is Swedish Death Cleaning
This is Essay 2 of my 24 Essays Club project, hosted by
Essay 1:
What’s my Why?
I’ve done 2 houses in the last 4 years. One, my in laws had lived in since 1963 and threw out NOTHING. The other, my mom, who is still alive, gave me sleepless nights of guilt. I’m watching my brother downsize and get rid of most of their furniture, antiques from his in laws. They are enjoying buying smaller pieces for themselves instead of carting the ancestors. After all this, we have started tossing stuff.
I cleared my stepfather’s and mother’s house. They were both hoarders and I had no help from step brother or sister bar one of them breaking into the house and removing the survival items of fridge, cooker, kettle and hoover for when I was staying and complaining when the “one item they wanted” had been taken down to the charity shop despite having been offered numerous chances to come a collect what was important to them. They lived locally whereas I lived 250 miles away and a single mother.
It took 18mths because there was important stuff in the piles of detritus. I lost valuable time with my son and never imagined it would take so much time … time I couldn’t get back and he needed me. It was an emotionally charged process, the sifting exhausting , I got to know the local tip lads on first name basis . The most painful thing was finding some paperwork of my mother’s she had saved to prove she wasn’t cheating social security from when I was a child . She had been called an immoral undeserving woman by a Social Security inspector and felt terrified he would be back every month to see she was using to her small allowance properly. She noted exactly how much money she spent on milk powder and nappies to the last penny. She kept them all in order, neatly in a box since 1963 . She took the box from house to house for decades. I wept, wished we could have shared a moment over tea and biscuits, hugged and then burnt that box of trauma. She carried it long after she ever should have done. She didn’t need to do it alone either.
We owe it to ourselves and to those who have to pack our life away to take the time while we can and curate our belongings. Letting things go is a healthy part of the flow of life as is keeping that that gives us joy.