In July 2022, a few months after my Dad had been admitted to a care home, my brother and I embarked on the process of sorting and clearing his house. That first day, I opened the garage door to find a huge mound of boxes, paint pots, rolls of carpet and garden furniture.

Over a tea break, as pure procrastination, I searched online for ‘advice for clearing a family home’, and that’s where I first cam across the concept of ‘Swedish death cleaning’.

Margareta Magnusson’s ‘The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’ had been an international bestseller just five years previously, but it was only too clear that the concept of döstädning – of de-cluttering one’s own life in late middle age – had completely passed my Dad by.

During those first hours of endlessly ripping and folding every cardboard box that had entered my Dad’s house over the previous twenty years, I fantasised about a woman in Stockholm entering her father’s home to sort his affairs, only to find an almost empty house, full of light and the scent of lemons.

How I envied her! A poem about her began to form in my head.

But it took many months to write, and during that time, as I sorted and cleared my Dad’s house, room by room, my feelings about this imaginary Swedish woman, whose father had scrupulously death-cleaned, completely changed.

And so the poem became completely different from how it had started. I realised that what I was doing was the opposite of Swedish death cleaning: I’m not Swedish, I was the one doing the death-cleaning on behalf of my father, who didn’t even know it was happening, and the whole process felt very far from clean.

But I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was difficult, physically and emotionally demanding work, but it was also deeply healing. I wouldn’t have missed those experiences of being reunited with childhood games, cassette recordings of family holidays, and 1970s picnicware for the world. And I felt closer to both my parents – one having died twenty years previously, the other in the depths of dementia – than I had for ages.

‘The Opposite of Swedish Death Cleaning’ became the title for my poetry collection, which is forthcoming from Seren Books in April 2025.