My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

Time is a strange concept once you’ve been abandoned. If you’re five years old when your parent leaves you, the leaving didn’t happen on one particular day, it happens every day. It never stops.

He was good at seeing the beauty in everything, that happens if you’re no good at seeing it in yourself.

That’s the very hardest thing to understand about death: nothing. That the world shrinks without him, because instead of him there is just emptiness. The vibration of his laughter, the smell of his skin, his phone number. How can someone who meant everything to Ted become… nothing at all? It’s the incomprehensibility of death that drives people mad, so that we forget how to breathe and how to walk, until we spend whole nights stumbling about in dark rooms, calling and calling, trying to understand how there can be a phone number that no longer belongs to anyone.

His death belongs to the whole world now. Louisa will never quite be able to forgive the world for that.

Angry at himself, angry at the artist, and most of all angry at death for having such good taste. Always taking the best first.

You can’t love someone out of addiction, all the oceans are the tears of those who have tried. We’re not allowed to die for our children, the universe won’t let us, because then there wouldn’t be any mothers left.

“What I hate most isn’t that people die. What I hate most is that they’re dead. That I’m alive, without them.”

Yet the most remarkable thing about losing a parent is that you don’t even need to miss them for their loss to be felt. The basic function of a parent is just to exist. You have to be there, like ballast in a boat, because otherwise your child capsizes.

ouch

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?” “Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

That’s the worst thing about death, that it happens over and over again. That the human body can cry forever.

Vincent van Gogh wrote: ‘I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.’ ”

They walk close to each other and see their friends everywhere all day long. Winks from Heaven.