“My mother gave away all her possessions before passing. Everything. She felt that ‘dying empty’ was a beautiful thing,” says Ajit, a 60-year-old man who lost his mother a few years ago. She may not have known it then, but she was following the principles of the Swedish concept of döstädning, or ‘death cleaning’. In Swedish, dö means ‘dead’, and städning means ‘cleaning’.
On the face of it the term ‘death cleaning’ might sound quite morbid. When I hear it, I picture a creaky old abandoned wooden cupboard that’s covered ...
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