My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Adults always think they can protect children by stopping them from going to dangerous places, but every teenager knows that’s pointless, because the most dangerous place on earth is inside us. Fragile hearts break in palaces and in dark alleys alike.

It hits her so suddenly and so mercilessly that this is all she owns now, seventeen years on the planet and it fits inside one bag, that her skeleton just folds. As she slumps down in despair and starts to gather her things together, she has tears in her eyes, and when the man starts to help her, he does too. It takes a special sort of heart to feel like that about someone else’s belongings.

Everyone dies, of course, every single person, but very few get to understand that they’re dying. That’s why the artist doesn’t want people to know that he is, that’s why he’s hiding from the world, because when it comes to death, the living are pretty crazy. They don’t want to see anyone who’s ill, they don’t even want to think about illness, and if they absolutely have to, they sigh and say things like: “Oh, it reminds you not to take life for granted!”

The only thing we can take for granted is that everyone we have ever met and everyone we have ever known and everyone we have ever loved will die.

That’s all of life. All we can hope for. You mustn’t think about the fact that it might end, because then you live like a coward, you never love too much or sing too loudly. You have to take it for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

He has lived, dear Lord, how he has lived.

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

“Yes,” his friend agrees reluctantly. “Don’t cry for me, Ted. I got to experience everything. It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it I got to see something unbelievably beautiful.” Ted nods disconsolately. “That girl’s paintings?” “No. You. I got to see you.”

Art is so big, so unfathomable, that it teaches us to mourn for strangers.

And Ted has to forgive them, because in grief we are reminded that we’re human beings. In life we might be enemies, but when faced with death, we see the truth: we are one species, all we have is each other, and where you go, I shall follow.

It’s been a long, long life, and at the end of it the artist manages to make someone he loves laugh out loud, so that every single wall sings. It would take less to make you believe in God.

his parents were often told their child wasn’t normal. They believed that, sadly, which is why they missed out on the incredible joy of having a child who was special.

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught.

All his childhood the artist had seen adults destroy their surroundings, some with violence and others with silence, sometimes with clenched fists and always with empty bottles.

He was always the shortest of them, but his friends would always remember him as the biggest and bravest. His old man was the opposite, he weighed two hundred pounds but was a tiny, tiny man.

His mom grew plants that were a small revolution every day, an armed resistance of tenderness in an apartment besieged by hatred and violence.

“I’m not worried you’re going to die. I’m worried about you being dead. I’m worried about being alive without you.”

The artist’s roar of laughter echoed around the whole apartment. Not many people are blessed like that, with as many giggles and chuckles as he was in his final weeks, with the chance to feel that he stole more moments from death than death had from him. Breakfast on the balcony every morning, popcorn and old films every evening, his best person to hold his hand. Who gets all that? Hardly anyone.

And laughter, laughter, laughter. Stupid little jokes, silliness between soulmates, everything else is just meaningless gaps in a life.

“Death is public but dying is private, the very last private thing we have,” the artist had said, and there had been no fear in his voice, no bitterness. It had been a long life. Wild and precious.

It’s the first time he’s heard her sound uncertain, as if she’s worried she’s wrong and might appear stupid. Ted’s shoulders slump, it’s a burden to hear yourself in others.

“Maybe Joar was bigger in the painting because that’s how you saw him. Fish felt big to me, even though I was much taller. People think it’s bad if someone makes you feel small, but it really isn’t.”

Being a parent is so strange, all our children’s pain belongs to us, but so does their joy.

“Which will hold greater rule over you? Your fear or your curiosity?”

no doubt she did her best, and that’s the worst thing about being a parent: that almost everyone does their best, but almost all fail regardless.

He’s never liked himself much, but even less today. He regrets babbling to Louisa, the way you regret things you said when you were drinking, but in his case it was grief that dulled his judgment.

“You know what Mom always says? You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that.

Great art is a small break from human despair,

The janitor scratched his arms. “She’s tough, my mom, but damn, she really knows how to love things. She loves them with her whole body.

He got called terrible things, because children’s brutality knows no limits in its inventiveness.

“make friends with their brain,” but Ted and Ted’s brain are not friends, they’re classmates, forced to do a group assignment called “life” together. And it’s not going great.

it doesn’t matter if life is long or short, it isn’t time that’s the problem, it’s the speed. Far too much happens when you’re alive, everything goes so damn fast, how are you supposed to have time to be a human being?

he and Mom weren’t like two magnets. They were like two colors. Once they were mixed together, there was no way of separating them.”

Then he apologizes for not having the artist’s ashes with him. As if that were necessary. As if those four teenagers twenty-five years ago weren’t a love story, belonging to each other forever, impossible to separate. Ashes or not.

The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.

Children aren’t responsible for their parents’ happiness, but they still try.

And then Joar sits there under the stars and he too loses Ali all over again. That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

“Don’t be ashamed to be a human being—be proud! Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly. You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should be.”

When the townspeople find out where Kimkim is buried, there’s a line out through the gates to lay flowers there. In the evening Christian’s mother comes and helps the minister pick up the flowers and put them on graves that no one visits.