For Margareta Magnusson, cleaning for one’s death was an important – if not essential – way to spend one’s life. “The only thing we know for sure is that we will die one day,” the Swedish author wrote in 2017. “Let me help you to make your loved ones’ memories of you affectionate, rather than upsetting.”

Magnusson, who has died aged 92, inspired a global movement for death cleaning (döstädning in Swedish) when, in her 80s, she wrote her debut book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

“It is a term that means removing unnecessary things and making your home nice and orderly when you think the time is coming closer for you to leave the planet,” she explained in the first chapter of the book, which was published in 2017 and became an international bestseller in 32 countries. By 2019, the term “death cleaning” was so popular that Collins Dictionary began tracking its usage and by 2023 a US reality TV series inspired by and named after Magnusson’s book was launched.

The idea particularly appealed to people who, like Magnusson, had experienced the distress of clearing out the belongings of a loved one after their death – as well as those who, after reading Magnusson’s book, felt it was unfair to leave this intimate and often difficult act to others.

Building on the mania for decluttering popularised by Marie Kondo, Magnusson also argued that death cleaning is something you should constantly do for yourself because it is a delight to go through your belongings and remember their worth, while letting go of things you no longer value.

“You are never ready with your death cleaning because you don’t know when you’re going to die, so it goes on and on,” she told her daughter the journalist and film-maker Jane Magnusson, during a YouTube interview in 2018. “What about when you’re dead?” Jane asked. “Then it stops,” Magnusson conceded.

Following Magnusson’s death, Jane informed the Swedish broadcaster SVT that – as fans of Magnusson would expect – her mother had left her little to do. “I don’t need to lift a finger. Mum had nothing in the attic, nothing in the cellar,” she said. “But she still had a very cosy home.”

Magnusson was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, and grew up there until she was evacuated with her sister to a farm in the Swedish countryside, during the second world war. “I spent my childhood climbing trees. I had a wonderful time,” she told the Times in 2023.

Her father, Nils Bothén, was a gynaecologist and her mother, Karin (nee Lindquist), a nurse. Margareta dreamed of becoming a doctor but, unable to afford the training, studied at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm instead. Graduating in 1956, she married Lars Magnusson a year later and had the first of their five children a year after that.

She eventually became an artist and illustrator, holding her first solo show in Gothenburg in 1979 and going on to exhibit internationally. Selling her art, she later said, helped her learn how to let go of her belongings, and moving abroad five times for Lars’s job – he held managerial posts at the industrial firm ESAB – made it easier for her to rationalise what she owned. The family ended up living in the US, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Magnusson first carried out death cleaning in 1969 when her mother died. She did it again following the death of her mother-in-law and again when, after 48 years of marriage, Lars died in 2005.

In her book, she argued it is mostly women who end up death cleaning repeatedly for parents and partners in this way. Yet since death is inevitable, she saw no reason to leave “a mountain of crap” behind for loved ones to clean up when you die. “Why would your family and friends want to take time out of their busy lives to clean up your mess when you clearly could have taken care of it yourself?,” she asks her readers in her typical no-nonsense tone.

After Lars died and Magnusson downsized from her spacious marital home to a much smaller two-bedroom apartment in Stockholm, she continued death cleaning – but this time, it was her own belongings she was constantly selling, shredding or giving away.

She did not realise, at the time, that this was not unusual: although döstädning only entered the Swedish dictionary after Magnusson popularised the term, death cleaning one’s belongings is a common activity among older Swedish women, she wrote.

The idea for the book came about a few years later when, over lunch in New York, a friend complained to Magnusson’s daughter about needing to take time off work to sort through his parents’ stuff. Jane revealed that she did not have that problem because her mother was always döstädning. Her friend, who worked in publishing, then asked if Magnusson would like to write a book about the practice.

It took Magnusson just three months to pen the debut that catapulted her to fame. Her second book, The Swedish Art of Ageing Well: Life Wisdom from Someone Who Will (Probably) Die Before You, was published in 2023, when she was 89. She drew the sketches that illustrate both books.

Some of her top tips for ageing joyfully included eating a little chocolate, wearing bright colours and stripes (Magnusson was well known in Sweden for wearing stripey T-shirts) and learning to enjoy kärt besvär – “cherished burdens” – for instance regular chores and daily habits such as sleeping.

Despite suffering mobility issues later in life and being unable to walk easily by the time she was in her 90s, she was working on a third book, titled Death Cleaning from the Afterlife, when she died.

As well as Jane, she is survived by another daughter, Ann, three sons, Jan, Tomas and Johan, and seven grandchildren.

• Margareta Elisabeth Magnusson, author and painter, born 31 December 1933; died 12 March 2026