SATURDAY
DAY 12,000

Thin ice

Marja and I spent Friday night in the green room, sleeping on the slippery sofas, our coats doing duty as quilts. The rest of the family stayed in our house in Shankill. At 6 a.m., the night nurse told us Bo’s blood pressure had gone down. Marja phoned Shankill and everyone arrived. We spent Saturday morning in the green room. We took it in turns to go in and out to Bo – I was there most of the time.

At about one, we were all allowed in together.

Bo was stretched on the bed, his eyes closed, his mouth stretched. I had been talking to him all along.

I go on talking. I tell him the story of his own life – all the anecdotes I remember, from his childhood on. He was always telling me about his life so I know the stories very well. About the boys’ room and the girls’ room and the room where the apples were stored in winter, giving off such an intoxicating fragrance. About his mother who tended a garden full of flowers and fruit – red raspberries and yellow raspberries – who cooked pike and perch with wonderful sauces. About Anderson’s Epicerie, the big general store not far from the Almqvists’ house in Edsgata. About running wild all summer in the forest with his friend, Yngve. About skiing to school in winter, skating on the lake. Going to school on the train, to Karlstads Läroverk. His first trips away, to Switzerland, Paris, then Iceland and Ireland. I tell him about our holidays together, I describe them, I tell him I love him, I ask him to forgive me for the times I was angry and mean, all those things. We sing ‘Santa Lucia’. I sing ‘Cuaichín Ghleann Neifín’. I talk and talk. I recite sonnets by Shakespeare. I say Fröding, Fröding, Fröding, now you’ll have to supply the rest (this Hanna, Bo’s granddaughter, tells me later. Fröding was Bo’s favourite poet, partly because he came from the same place as he did, namely the parish of Alster in Värmland. He is, or was, one of the most popular of all Swedish poets, somewhat on a par with Yeats or Kavanagh or Heaney in Ireland.).

At about ten to two the nurse tells us his blood pressure has gone right down.

We kiss him goodbye.

Me, his daughter, his sons, his grandchildren, his in-laws, his nephew Emmet, who has appeared at the last moment.

We are all still there, gathered around the bed, when a doctor comes and tells us that Bo’s heart has stopped beating. It stopped at a minute past 2 p.m. on Saturday, 9 November 2013.

I sit with him alone for a while.

Soon I get impatient.

I have lost the battle; what is the point of this? I flounce out of the ICU.

In the dreadful green room, somebody has produced a bottle of whiskey. Although I can understand this, I find it disconcerting. Just minutes ago Bo was alive. But the Irish wake is already beginning.

Ragnar takes my arm and we go back to the car.

I insist on driving.

The petrol tank is close to empty and I also insist on stopping at the garage. Ragnar fills it for me and goes into the cashier while I sit at the wheel, looking at someone driving a Volvo into the big crushing wheels of the carwash. The last time I filled the tank was in Lifford, at Daly’s Garage, on the way to Gweedore in the lashing Donegal rain. Bo beside me, reassuring me that we’d probably be in time for dinner with Micheál.

Ragnar comes back and I drive home, in bright November sunshine.