Tomorrow’s as good a day as any to kill oneself

The expression about leaving suicide until tomorrow distills a central contradiction in Ove’s story: he treats death as a settled, practical decision, yet his plans repeatedly yield to obligations and attachments in the present. Its force lies less in a change of conviction than in the distance between Ove’s methodical intentions and the interruptions that keep him living.

A maxim set against routine

The phrase appears after Ove has abandoned an attempt connected with the neighbors’ children. Rather than presenting that interruption as a cure for his despair, the narration lets the maxim preserve the prospect of suicide while pushing it into the future. Tomorrow becomes a postponement, not a promise of recovery.

That logic echoes the way Ove first responds to Sonja’s death. She dies on a Friday and is buried on Sunday; Ove goes to work on Monday because, in his view, that is how a person handles things. Six months later, managers explain that they delayed telling him about his impending retirement because they did not want to spoil his weekend. The ordinary calendar continues to organize events even as Ove’s private life has lost its center. The contrast helps explain why the expression sounds both practical and bleak: postponement is another task in a life governed by routine.

Preparation and interruption

Ove’s plans are not casual or vague. He pays the undertakers, arranges a place in the churchyard beside Sonja, settles his bills, and puts a letter and important documents—including the house deeds and the Saab’s service history—in his jacket pocket. He has no loans or debts to leave behind and even cancels the newspaper subscription. These details show him trying to make his absence as orderly as the work he once performed every day.

In another attempt, he protects the floors with plastic sheets before preparing a place to hang himself. His concern is not for his own comfort but for the damage real-estate agents might cause when they enter the house after his death. The painted stool in the room carries a trace of Sonja’s presence: she wanted a different color in one room every six months, and Ove responded by fetching the painting stool. Even his preparations are set inside a home shaped by their shared routines.

The maxim follows a further interruption: Ove recognizes that he cannot leave the neighbors’ children to suffer when their father cannot manage a basic household task. He puts away the tube, locks the Saab, checks the garage door, and goes to fetch his tools. The return to practical work is consequential, but the narration does not claim that his grief has lifted. It shows responsibility displacing his immediate plan.

Grief, attachment, and recurrence

At the railway platform, Ove has chosen a moment to jump in front of a train, calculating the timing and worrying about what the driver would have to witness. Before he acts, a man in a gray suit collapses onto the tracks. The scene sets Ove’s private intention against an emergency demanding attention from someone else; his plans repeatedly encounter circumstances that make him responsible for another person.

Later, with The Cat in the Saab, Ove sits in the garage with the engine running and considers remaining there. He misses Sonja so intensely that continuing to exist can feel unbearable. Yet when he looks at The Cat, he turns the engine off. The next morning, their routine resumes: they drink coffee and tuna fish respectively, inspect the neighborhood, and Ove shovels snow outside his house. The return to a shared morning routine does not erase the preceding crisis; it gives his care for another living creature a concrete, immediate consequence.

The idea of postponement recurs even as Ove prepares to take pills. He thinks of Sonja and cannot imagine carrying on without the familiar closeness of their life together. The Cat howls outside, and another sound—a dog barking—interrupts the moment. Across these episodes, the maxim does not announce a simple conversion from despair to hope. It names the unstable interval in which Ove’s wish to die persists, while care, habit, and unexpected demands keep opening another day.