My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

“Being human is to grieve, constantly.”

Ted will call his number again and again. 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?

You don’t wish for happiness when you have lost the love of your life, because you can’t even imagine ever feeling happy again. All you wish for is peace, calm, a long night’s sleep. You dream of nothing but being able to forgive time for making us old. For not letting us stay on a pier with our best friends. For letting summers end.

Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”: Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.

It is an act of violence when an adult yells at a child, all adults know that deep down, because all adults were once little. Yet we still do it. Time after time, we fail at being human beings.

That’s an extra cruelty that cancer brings, Ted thought, when you’re waiting for everything to go back to normal again. Until one day you realize that the illness has become the new normal.

It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?

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