My Friends

by Fredrik Backman

They stare at each other, the thirty-nine-year-old and the eighteen-year-old, with funerals in their eyes. It’s hard to cope with seeing yourself in someone else.

“Babies teach us not to be scared of death. That’s how we realize we can’t wish for eternal life. Because if no one died, we would have to ban new people from being born. And when the playgrounds are empty, when the last pair of rain boots has been grown out of, when the last puddle has been jumped in… What would we want eternity for then, Ted?”

They knew who they were, because they had families, they had inherited a belief that they belonged in every room they walked into.

Sometimes he imagines that mankind invented God just to have someone to be angry with, because you can’t be angry with a dad who’s dead, not even a little bit. Ted was most angry with God because he didn’t get more memories.

“Perhaps you should ask God yourself?” Joar stared at him in genuine surprise, as if he were expecting the minister to hold out a tin can on a piece of string, with God sitting at the other end. “How the hell am I supposed to do that?” The minister gestured amiably toward the roof. “God belongs to you as much as to me. You can ask whatever you want.” Joar pursed his lips thoughtfully for a long, long time. Then he looked up at the roof, cleared his throat seriously, and said: “Okay. Can you stop giving people cancer, you fucking bastard?”

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.

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