My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“Do you think we’ll all still be best friends when we’re grown-up?” Joar replied calmly: “When we’re grown-up, I don’t think we’ll all be alive.”

“Life is long, Louisa. Everyone will tell you that it’s short, but they’re lying. It’s a long, long life.”

He would often try to think that perhaps that has to be the case: that our teenage years have to simultaneously be the brightest light and the darkest depths, because that’s how we learn to figure out our horizons.

The artist would remember being fourteen as feeling like he was always homesick, because he realized as an adult that that was what the emptiness in his chest was: some of us are born in the wrong place, the whole of our childhood is like being shipwrecked on a desert island, we ache with homesickness without knowing what home is yet. That’s all childhood friends are, people stuck on the same island. If you find a single one of them, you can cope with almost anything.

These were our bodies, and they were small, far too small, because they couldn’t contain all our love.

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.

I’m just not afraid. It’s been a long life,”

“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.”

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.

There Ted lies beside the love of his life, and the love of his life isn’t afraid, or angry, or even lying in a hospital bed anymore. He is lying on a pier in the sun, with salt water on his skin and Ted’s kisses on his eyelashes.

“If you were his friend, I’m sorry. Because the whole world lost an artist, but you lost your human. And I’m sorry you had to share that with the rest of us. You should be allowed to have your grief in peace.”

Ted would always remember that as the moment when Ali scared death itself into retreat. Not even death had the energy to argue with that girl.

You must live with each other, not only alongside each other.”

“Is it horrible being an adult?” the girl asked. “Unbearable,” the mother replied. “You fail with almost everything, all the time.”

I think you’ve both given each other the same amount: everything you had.”

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

“It was… it was over twenty years ago.” “Not for ME! For me she died NOW!” Louisa snaps. That’s the worst thing with stories. “For me too,” Ted whispers.

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

“How do you cope with death?”

I wanted him to remember me young. Remember me… beautiful.” “It’s hard to be an adult,” Ted says. “It’s hard to be a child too,” Louisa points out.

“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.”