Almost a decade ago, during a visit to see her children , Margareta Magnusson had a near-death experience.
“I died seven years ago, and it happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to be afraid,” she writes in her new book, The Swedish Art of Ageing Well. Her heart valve burst, she was rushed to hospital and fell unconscious.
It changed her view of life.
“I had to take it as a gift,” she tells me over the phone from her apartment in Stockholm.
Life, how to live well, and imminent death, are the subjects of 88-year-old Magnusson’s follow-up to 2017’s hugely successful debut, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning – which was based around the idea that “we should not leave a mountain of crap behind for our loved ones to clean up when we die,” she explains.
In the introduction to this latest book, she poses the same question: “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?”
This new book addresses the years before you die (its subtitle is ‘Life wisdom from someone who will – probably – die before you’) which she started writing during the pandemic, a time when she felt forced to find out what made each day worth living.
“I like to write and I had to have something to do,” she tells me now in her matter-of-fact way. As an interviewee, Magnusson is given to blunt, somewhat unadorned answers.
“Perhaps my advice and discoveries are ‘Swedish’, in that as a nationality, we tend to be quite blunt, clear-eyed, and unsentimental. Ageing is often difficult, but it doesn’t have to be – if you approach it in a way that isn’t too filled with drama or dread,” she writes.
Magnusson grew up in Gothenburg, a city on the west coast of Sweden, and childhood summers were spent at the family’s country cottage. During World War II, she and her sister were evacuated to the countryside. She grew up to become an artist, holding her first exhibition in her hometown in the late 1970s.
It was during that decade, when she was in her early 40s, that she and her husband Lars moved with their five children to America for his work. The family would go on to live in Singapore and Hong Kong before eventually returning to Sweden.
In their final years together, Margareta and Lars lived in a small fishing village on an island on Sweden’s west coast. When Lars died, Margareta moved to the two-bedroom apartment in Stockholm where she lives now. This new book, she says, is dedicated to him.
Her career as a writer began after his death. “He didn’t know anything about it.”
Over the phone I can hear a mumbling in the background. Margaret’s youngest daughter Jane is with her as we speak, and occasionally steps in to translate, or to clarify a point for her mother – the way daughters do.
“He died in 2005, my daughter says,” Magnusson tells me, and she and her daughter share a laugh. “I’d forgotten that,” she says of the exact date. “Anyway, I know that he’s dead and I’m sorry that he couldn’t read my books,” she finishes, in those matter-of-fact tones.
Given that her own marriage lasted over five decades, does she feel there is such a thing as a secret to a happy marriage?
“That’s a hard question,” she says. “I have to think it over. I’m thinking of that old saying: ‘Don’t ever go to sleep when you’re quarrelling.’ You have to make peace before you go to sleep.”
In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, Magnusson shone a light on the fact that many Swedes try set their affairs in order before they die – a task most often carried out by older women, a group whose day-to-day lives she felt tended to be largely ignored by society.
“Yes, that’s true,” she tells me now. “I think there’s not so much interest in what my generation thinks or what we do. But old women know a lot of things.”
The reaction to that book made her realise she had much more to say. That, and also the fact Magnusson was enjoying this new career.
“I was very surprised myself, but it has been a lot of fun, and a lot of work.”
With this new book she has delved further into the minutiae of life as an older adult. She writes of the joy of a regular catch-up with a friend she has known since childhood, a person who knows “how everything used to be”.
She looks forward to these WhatsApp video calls with her friend Lola, where they catch up online – over gin and tonics. All the time, she realises that the ageing process is fraught.
“When you talk to your best friend every other day, and then suddenly he or she isn’t there anymore, that’s a terrible experience,” she laments. “But I still have a few friends that I have known since we were eight years old, and that’s a gift.”
Her book describes learning how to live in the present – a necessity once you’re past 80, she says, as “you generally don’t have that much to look forward to anyway. We have to try to find something other than the future to be happy about.”
There is an examination of coming to terms with wrinkles, and a dissection of why one should ignore plastic surgery and instead focus on maintaining your hair.
“When I wrote the first book, I was very surprised so many people liked to read it. I mean – death cleaning... it’s sort of depressing, but not the way I wrote it.
“I didn’t mean to make it depressing. I would rather people to be happy. When they death clean, that’s a good start,” she adds.
Some of her friends tell her they hate the loneliness of their time of life, but she doesn’t feel that way.
“I am quite good at keeping myself busy. Sometimes I get very tired of a lot of people around.”
It can be harder to make friends as an older adult, she acknowledges, “because if people have a dinner, they have to have pairs. Some people think it’s hard to lay a table when the members are an odd number. Which is very silly.”
In a chapter on living with the sense of doom in the world, Magnusson reflects that the world is always ending.
“I think it was more scary when I was young. Back then when there was the war and many other things happening.
“I’m not sure myself. Maybe it is because when you get this old, it doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore. And also you cannot do anything about it. You just have to take it and live with whatever happens,” she says.
I wonder how she feels about death?
“The only thing that is for sure is that we are all going to die some day. That doesn’t scare me. Life is much more scary. So many terrible things are happening these days. Wars and climate change are the most significant. It’s just terrible, and we have to live with it.
“Once we die, we don’t have to bother anymore,” she laughs, adding: “I don’t think that you live after you are dead.
“Many of my friends still believe they’re going to meet their dead husbands or friends, whatever. But I don’t think that. When you’re dead, I think you’re dead. Nothing else is going to happen, you’re not going to meet anyone.”
She describes the physical impact of age as something that makes her “a bit angry” as the realisation that she can no longer do certain things sets in.
“It might be climbing a ladder, or riding a bicycle – I don’t think I can do that anymore.”
And there are the things you must now accept you will never do. Her father, Nils, a doctor, was good at tap dancing – and she had always hoped to learn. But she accepts she’ll never learn now.
Despite, or maybe because of, such bluntness, The Swedish Art of Ageing Well is a gently uplifting and comforting read, full of stories of family life when her children were young. It’s a portrait of a life well lived.
I ask Magnusson, who has just turned 88, if she had to pick one secret of ageing well, what it would be.
“Take a gin and tonic,” she laughs. “And eat chocolate if you like. Try to make life good.”
‘The Swedish Art of Ageing Well’ by Margareta Magnusson is published by Canongate and out now
