November isn't only the month Dad was born in, it also holds Father's day (yes, I know it varies between countries, but in Sweden it's the second Sunday in November) and now also the day of his death, on the 30th.
I've had almost a full year without him now, and I don't know why it reminds me so much of that poem by Dylan Thomas. My dad was hardly a child when he died, nor did he die in a fire, he wasn't a girl and he didn't die in London...
A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Perhaps it's simply the last line, after the first death, there is no other, and knowing that dad never seemed to get past the death of his own father, or maybe it's that he never became himself after the passing of my brother. Yeah, after that first death we sieze to be innocent children, so in that way every death is a the death of a child.
In the time that has passed between now and his passing it's been a suprisingly large amount of people that seem to have seen my greif as theirs, that my loss is their personal loss. Do they know what was taken away?
He was born in 1946 in Söder, the Katarina neighbourhood. Those blocks aren't now what they were then. He used to speak of his childhood's streets the same way that Bruno K. Öijer speaks of his. That happiness was held up by the houses with history and the narrow streets and the filth. Once that disapeared life was never the same.
He had a guniea pig that chewed on an electrical cord and died. He used to talk about it every time we went to Ölands djurpark and saw the guniea pigs there. That's how I know. He started working as a running boy when he was about 11 and ate hotdog buns with mustard that cost him a couple of öre at the time. He used to do pranks, and even in his 60s he giggled about them. He's the only man I've known that giggled. I always liked it, he could fake laughs, but never giggles.
After his dad died his mother got remarried, that's where my last name comes from, that marrige. Apart from a new last name he also got two blond younger brothers. He did his värnplikt in the air force and after that was left out of his mother's house. I guess he was concidered an adult by then.
I don't know much about his 20s, other than that he worked in stores, and he hated doing returns on clothes in one of them, and just stuck the returned garments in a storage room until a boss found it and he had to deal with it then. He also got married in 1966 and had a daughter in 1967. The marrige didn't last long.
He had a couple of businesses, one lunch resturant, a sallad bar, a candy store, and a gift shop, and later on he had a women's clothing store. He used to travel to find garments he wanted to sell. He enjoyed a steak in Mexico, and something that turned out to be a monkey's brain in India, he got lost in New York and forgot to tip a waitress.
In the 70s he met my mother, married her in a civil cermony on December 27th 1973 and they first lived in an apartment that smelled like bleach and later on bought a cottage without electricity or running water. With his own hands he made it up, he even dug a sewer line to connect to the community one. Around the time the house was done I was born.
Later in the 80s we moved to another suburb of Stockholm, to a house that was half brick and half white. It had two balconies and a drive way bound to scrape your knees. Dad bought a yellow and red bus named Elin. We used it for holidays, we drove everywhere in it. Around the same time my brother was born. Dad continued his travels only occationally being home. He brought back exotic things and t-shirts with glitter.
In 1987 his first daughter gave birth to his first grandchild, a girl. She had dad's first greatgrandchild in 2007. He also has two grandsons, carried by the same first daughter.
It's easier for me to piece together what he was up to after I was born, and he was always singing, telling stories or playing the guitar. When he put my hair in pigtails they were always uneven and I was always late to daycare when it was his turn to take me. He was always the first one with gadgets. He had a cellphone in his car, the briefcase kind, so I always got to ride in the front seat in his car so that I didn't kick and break it. He started piddling around with computers then too.
About Elin, it must have been a piece of heaven that came down to earth. She had a max speed of 80 kilometers per hour and slowed down when the hills went upwards. We parked it every where and slept comfortably in her beds. Later on she also worked as a guesthouse kind of deal, parked in the driveway.
In 1989 we moved again, this time to the south. Dad and mom bought a house in the middle of nowhere, and without either one of them having jobs we found ourselves among trees, cows, sheep, chickens and pastures. It wasn't too long until dad did find a job though, with a long commute, of course, but still a job. When that company was for sale he bought it and moved it to another town. It was still doing well when he died and I felt bad when I filled in the papers to close it down.
In 1992 my brother died. Suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't know how dad really felt, I don't know what he really thought, all I know is that it became a constant thorn. Dad built a guesthouse next to our house and named it Tussebo. Elin retired then.
In 1994 dad and mom adopted my second brother.
I don't think I should tell more of his story as the rest of it is so much of mine, also I much prefer to remember how he was rather than what he became when he started getting sick.
His favorite flower was cowslip, his favorite colour was purple, his favorite food was kalops, he liked Monty Python, Benny Hill, Sällskapsresan, crime novels and Discovery channel. He always wore sheepskin slippers in the house and liked staying up late. His favorite season was summer, he hated being cold. He dreamed of opening a hotel in Greece or Spain and living in warmth when he retired, he never got a chance to.
I'm utterly grateful for having had him for a father. He's the one that taught me about the bigger perspective. He also taught me that if you fail it means that you simply found a way that doesn't work.
It's still so bizarre that he's gone, all those "never agains", and knowing that I have to figure out the rest in this life without him. In the year that's passed I've managed to forgive so many things and I've learned to see him in a different light, ironically that only makes me miss him more.
He always called me Humlan, and that's one of the "never agains". Noone will call me that again and I'll never again be suprised by his humanity.
