Grief at a time of Advent

It is the first of Advent and a procession of light and song fills the room. I hold the hands of my babies, almost too old for this now, reluctant to sit still on the floor of a dark room for what seems like an odd sort of slightly underwhelming concert – but I insist. I know all the songs; I’ll never forget them. Not after years and years of rehearsals starting every August and continuing all the way through autumn leaves and dark afternoons, culminating in this very experience: me as a child, then a teenager, dressed in a white gown, clutching a candle (not too close to your face or you’ll faint), performing for parents, for nursing homes, for corporate functions to celebrate Lucia – the bearer of light. Every melancholic melody takes me back, each debated syncopation and ‘s’ held too long, and it’s strangely bittersweet – isn’t it?

There’s a new Advent countdown candle this year. Instead of the numbers one through 24, printed vertically across the candle are the names of the 24 women who were murdered in Sweden last year, most of them by men they knew.

It is the day before the second of Advent and a video call comes in from IKEA: What do you want? Oh, I want it all: the gingerbread biscuit dough, the glögg, the coffee, the gingerbread-flavoured Dumle, the pickled gherkins and the Christmas cola. I don’t even like fizzy drinks, but when you put it on the table it will all be right – a perfect Swedish Christmas, like the tradition says, like it always was, won’t it?

Someone mentions in passing the girl who was raped in a restaurant toilet for five hours straight and I don’t hear where the conversation goes next or what anyone really knows about this event because that image, the girl, five hours, it makes my bones hurt and I can’t hear anything anymore, but the ache fills every cell of my body until it all overflows and I can’t stop crying and my head hurts.

It is the second of Advent and Agnetha Fältskog is singing about Christmas mice with her daughter, who’s really too young to be singing on an album, but that’s how the perfectly Swedish Christmas is done right, and so I insist. It’s a tradition at this stage: this is what we listen to for the annual gingerbread baking session, and it’s a bit silly but I get to decide, because that’s what I did with her for the annual gingerbread baking session all throughout our childhood – and now they’re part of it, sort of, aren’t they?

It’s the second of Advent and today’s name on the candle is Dana.

It is the eve of the third of Advent and Lankum sing:

“When the young people dance
They do not dance forever
It is written in sand
With the softest of feathers
It is not writ in stone
Like the walls of the chapel
And soon it is gone
Like the soft winters at home”

I try to imagine her there, in the audience with us, and I realise that I can’t. I don’t know what her body feels like now, what her presence in 2022 would be. If she was there – if she were here – would we put our arms around each other, like we did the last time I saw her on the first of Advent 2006? I don’t know who she would be now. She doesn’t know who I’ve become.

A pandemic happens and the impossible is suddenly possible. Systems we’ve always been told are untouchable, run flawlessly by the invisible hand of the market, are touched and controlled and stopped. People’s freedoms are restricted, just like that – not without a fight, but it happens. For a period of time, the world stops. Offices close. Schools close. Pubs close. Even sport, games, matches grind to a halt. (What’s going on behind closed doors, we know now, never stopped – an invisible hand of another kind, but equally untouchable.) And now we’re back, the magical market doing its thing, because you can’t just stop life, stop businesses and capitalism from doing their thing just because women die, can you? Five hours.

It is the third of Advent and she’s been gone for 16 years. Every year, it hits me by surprise, the grief, but now it all suddenly makes sense. Approaching the tenth anniversary of her death, I wrote:

“That’s the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can’t quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.”

Now I know when it strikes. It strikes when the smells and the memories come out of hibernation. It strikes when, through melancholic melodies and tireless choir traditions, you travel back in time to when she was alive, and you’re reminded that she only exists in past tense. It strikes when you buy all the things for the perfect Christmas and it hits you that something’s always missing. It strikes when you share the memory of her with her nephews, because your memories are all they’ll ever get. You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.

He sends me a screen grab of a tweet: Grief often reveals itself as rage.

We booked a first-class flight to Sweden on the 12th of December 2006 – first-class, because that’s all that’s left when you book your flights the same day that you travel – and the first thing I heard when I woke up the following morning on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ sitting room and it dawned on me why I was there, was the sound of Sankta Lucia coming from the TV as the nation woke to celebrate an Italian saint.

Advent
noun /ˈædvent/
A coming into place, view, or being; arrival.
The fact of an event happening, an invention being made, or a person arriving.

This is what it is, grief at a time of Advent: rising and swelling at the most wonderful time of the year; the anniversary of the loss of my sister just a few days before the serene celebration of Lucia, the bearer of light; the darkest of days during the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, as we light the stars and the fairy lights and I light a candle for you, baking like we did, singing like we did, at the most wonderful, aching time of the year.

Meet my sister

Dear new friend,

Meet my sister. Her name is Klara. The last time I saw her was on the first of advent 2006 on a train platform as she got on a train back to where she was studying photo journalism at the time. I was living in London and home for the weekend, and she’d decided to ‘come home’ to see me.

She took her own life just over a week later.

I need to tell you about my sister not because I need you to carry me and tell me you’re sorry. I need to tell you about my sister because she is an integral part of me, and one I adore, and without knowing about her you can never fully know me. And as much as I like you, the opportunity to tell you about that sister I had, who killed herself years before we even met, might never come.

We might hear a Jens Lekman song and I’ll instinctively want to tell you about that summer when we were both living at home and having friends over for drinks, dancing the night away. Or you might tell me I’ve lost an earring and I’ll have to explain that there was only ever one, but I’ll hold onto it like you’d hold onto a family heirloom because she bought it, and she didn’t care much about pairing it up. I might see a photo of one of her best friends on her due date, and it might shake the ground I walk on for days to come. Or you might end up talking about your sister and how nothing else compares, and I’ll cry; and that’s OK, but I’ll want you to know that cherishing it is great but that once you start to take it for granted I'll really struggle.

Meet my sister. Her name is Klara and she was so much to so many people: the funny one, and the quiet one; the strong one, and the broken one; the rock, yet completely lost; happiness epitomised, yet altogether sad. She wore the strangest combinations of clothes but managed to always look like she loved herself. I don’t know if I ever really realised that she didn’t.

She had the most amazing of friends: the kind of friendships you think only exist in American box-sets, except deeper; the kind of friends who laugh so hard they're sore for days afterwards, who love each other so boundlessly that they’ll break each other’s hearts if they have to to keep each other safe.

She didn’t really love herself in the end, nor did she see the charm with those rock solid friendships. She didn’t give anyone a chance to save her, and I’m not sure who I am to say that there was much left to save. I will forever miss my sister, always long for the auntie my sons never had. And boy would she have made a brilliant auntie.

But the memory of her is very much alive, still, approaching ten years since the day she died. In fact, the memory of her is so much more alive than the real-life impression of so many people I meet on a day-to-day basis. And it is talking about her that keeps those memories alive. It is laughing at the funny things she did, talking about the things we used to do, and explaining to people who didn’t know her what made her who she was, that will make her just as alive in another ten years’ time.

I need to tell you about my sister, because the grief has been coming at me at full force lately and I'm running out of excuses for puffy eyes, absent-mindedness and unexpected mood swings. That's the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can't quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.

This is why I need you to meet my sister, new friend. I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, but I need you to share those memories with me to keep them – and her – alive.

There is no '12-week rule'

The first thing you get when you go to your GP and say that you’re pregnant is a calm congratulations, and then a reminder that one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage. Not exactly fireworks.

There are reasons for this, of course. First of all, it’s true, and most people are not aware. And maybe, maybe, when you have your first miscarriage, knowing that it happens all the time can help you deal with it differently and stop you from blaming yourself. But this is part of a much bigger picture, and, the way I see it, quite a problematic one.

When Victoria, the Crown Princess of Sweden, and her husband Daniel announced the other day that they are expecting, everyone seemed to have an opinion (quite amusing, considering the number of Swedes that are critical of the monarchy). Many opinions were more or less identical versions of Peter Wolodarski’s – the Political Editor in Chief of one of the biggest liberal dailies, who boasted about the fact that he refused to change the plan for the editorial leader spread in order to write about the big news – which pointed out that it seemed a bit risky to make a big deal out of it at such an early stage in the pregnancy.

It’s the idea that it’s risky that leaves me feeling a bit confused. As if it’s only really risky once you say it out loud: if you pretend nothing’s happened, no one’s going to get hurt.

Pregnancy books all say that it’s up to you when you start telling people about your good news, and that many people choose to keep it a secret until after the first trimester, since the risk of miscarriage decreases significantly then. As a couple with no previous experience of pregnancies, you get a pretty clear message: if you go and tell the world you’re pregnant and you end up miscarrying, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

But this fear of jinxing it is built on the idea that we shouldn’t share painful experiences, and that if you do, it’s a little bit embarrassing: you’re a failure, and you’re putting everyone else in an awkward position. What more is, it completely disregards the fact that there are no guarantees. If we are so scared of having to grieve publicly, what about when the unexpected happens? Should we have to apologise for going through hell? Should we actually feel GUILTY?

We live in a world where whoever is happiest wins. Subsequently, we live in a world where happiness must be measured, because otherwise we’ll never know just how well we’re doing, and hence we’re constantly chasing points: partners, houses, careers, promotions, exotic holiday trips, babies. It’s like life is a never-ending merry-go-round where every spin gets better and better, until we’re so manic and everything’s so shiny that we can’t even see that the sun is shining.

I don’t think true happiness equals constant elation, and I don’t think make-believe surface-level happiness does anyone any good. Whatever they tell you, there’s no right or wrong time to tell people you’re pregnant, there are no guarantees, and there certainly isn’t any ’12 week rule’. If you choose to wear your heart on your sleeve, and your grief with it, I hope that the people around you will carry you through and admit that life has its ups and downs – not turn a blind eye, think ‘I told you so’, and wish you’d put on a brave face and kept your embarrassing misery to yourself.

How the predictable can be sad

Who would have thought that some sympathy would face so much criticism?

When Amy Winehouse died on Saturday, we didn’t just lose one of the greatest singers of our time. Her parents lost a daughter, many lost a friend. Yet, most of Amy’s obituaries, along with endless angry tweets and facebook updates, were preoccupied by pondering the apparently surprising scenario that her death left thousands if not millions of people shocked, sad, almost speechless. Amy’s destructive lifestyle had been well-documented by the media: we shouldn’t be surprised, so we shouldn’t be sad.

As if the death of a young person could ever really be comprehensibly predictable, because of addictions or depressions or self harm or long lists of pills you don’t even know the names of. I knew back in 2006 that my sister was thinking about killing herself, because she told me. Still, when she did, it shocked me to the core. Because no matter how sick you are, how many demons you’re struggling with, the unthinkable remains unthinkable.

As if the predictable can’t be sad; as if fact equals acceptance. Would you have said the same thing to me the day before I went in to give birth to my fatally ill son? I knew that he wouldn’t survive, but that never stopped me from mourning the loss of my firstborn.

But Amy was just a drug addict. She brought it on herself. (Or, as someone said on facebook, “I couldn’t give a shit about Amy Winehouse. She was an idiot and she brought it on herself, so zero sympathy.”)

Focus on Norway. Now that’s a tragedy. (Yes, many people were seriously offended by the amount of attention given to the death of the troubled singer, because they felt that it should have been over-shadowed by the much more devastating events in Norway.)

As if an addict doesn’t deserve being paid tribute to. As if losing a miserable, self-destructive daughter would somehow be easier than losing one who is happy, generous, blissfully unaware of what’s to come. As if it’s a competition and you have to choose: pick no more than one terrible incident at any one time, and grieve that. And don’t you dare mention that mess of a drug addict called Amy.

People can be as cynical as they like about it all and say that sad things happen all the time. I’m aware of that, and I don’t mind them taking the piss out of people like me, who are shocked again and again by bad news. I don’t even mind if they feel the need to compare and say that Norway is worse – because even if I don’t see how comparing loss is possible or even appropriate, I understand that it comes from fear and not ignorance: it was a deliberate attack on democracy; many victims were innocent teenagers; and, that notion that’s so hard to digest – that they were all just normal, sane people, just like us.

What bothers me is the narrow-minded view of addiction: the idea that a girl who goes from eating disorders to self harm and addiction only has herself to blame and that she’s somehow worth less than other people, in extreme cases the opinion that she actually deserves to die. It makes me feel physically sick that there are people in my online network who genuinely don’t understand that self harm and addiction are more complicated than the thing we call choice. It’s not only a heartless stance, but one that says a lot about the society we live in.

The death of a 27-year-old woman is a sad thing no matter how predictable you insist that it was. The death of Amy Winehouse was perhaps particularly sad, because of the hostility and ignorance it exposed in us.