A Nearly Normal Family(3)

The incident with the car—it already had a name.

Ulrika made a sound of disinterest and didn’t even look up from her book. Outside, the wind had picked up enough to make the walls creak. Summer was heaving a sigh, taking a breath; August was almost over, but I didn’t care. Autumn has always appealed to me, that feeling of a fresh start, like the first phase of new love.

When I put down my novel a little while later, Ulrika was already asleep. I gently lifted her head and placed a pillow underneath. She moved restlessly and for a moment I considered waking her up, but instead I went back to my reading. It wasn’t long before the print grew blurry and my thoughts wandered. I drifted off with a great lump in my chest over the chasm that had opened between Stella and me, between the people we once were and the people we had become, between the images I had of us and reality as it looked now.



* * *



When I woke up, Stella was standing in the middle of the room. She was shifting back and forth as the gentle moonlight illuminated her head and shoulders.

Ulrika had awakened too and was rubbing her eyes. Soon the room was full of sobs and gasping breaths.

I sat up.

“What’s wrong?”

Stella shook her head as the tears ran huge and wet down her cheeks. Ulrika threw her arms around her and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness I realized that Stella was trembling.

“It’s nothing,” she said.

Then she left the room with her mother and I was left behind with an uneasy feeling of emptiness.





2


We were a perfectly ordinary family, and then everything changed.

It takes a long time to build a life, but only an instant for it to crumble. It takes many years—decades, maybe a lifetime—to become the person you truly are. The path is almost always circuitous, and I think there’s a reason for that, for life to be built around trial and error. We are shaped and created by our trials.

But I have trouble understanding the point of what happened to our family this autumn. I know it’s impossible to understand everything, and there is a greater purpose to that as well, but I still can’t find the deeper meaning in the incidents of the last few weeks. I can’t explain it, not to myself and not to anyone else.

Maybe it’s the same for everyone, but I imagine that because I’m a pastor I’m held accountable for my view of the world more often. In general, people have no problem calling my philosophy of life into question. They wonder if I truly believe in Adam and Eve and the virgin birth, that Jesus walked on water and brought the dead back to life.

In the beginning of my Christian life, I frequently went on the defensive and began a debate about the questioner’s own views. I sometimes argued that science is just one more religion among many. And I certainly had doubts; I found myself wavering in my convictions now and then. These days, however, I am secure in my faith. I have accepted God’s blessing and I let His face shine over me. God is love. God is longing and hope. God is my refuge and my comfort.

I like to say I’m a believer, not a knower. If you start to believe you know, be wary. I think of life as a state of constant learning.

Like the great majority of us, I consider myself to be a good person. That sounds arrogant, of course, if not self-important or superior. But I don’t mean it like that. I’m a person with an abundance of failings, a person who has made innumerable mistakes and errors. I am acutely aware of this, and the first to admit it. What I mean is that I always act with good intentions, out of love and care. I have always wanted to do the right thing.



* * *



The week that followed Stella’s eighteenth birthday wasn’t much different from any other. On Saturday Ulrika and I biked to the home of some good friends on the other side of town. That’s one of the advantages with Lund: it’s small enough that you can bike from one side of the city to the other in just twenty minutes.

I took the opportunity to ask a cautious question about the previous night’s incidents, but Ulrika assured me that Stella wasn’t in any trouble, that it was some boy problem, the sort of thing that commonly afflicts eighteen-year-olds. There was no need for me to worry.

On Sunday I spoke on the phone with my parents. When the topic of Stella came up, I mentioned that she was seldom at home these days, at which point Mom reminded me of how I had been as a teenager. It’s so easy to lose perspective.

On Monday I had a funeral in the morning and a baptism in the afternoon. It’s such a strange job I have, where life and death shake hands in the foyer. In the evening, Ulrika went to yoga and Stella locked herself in her room.

On Wednesday I officiated a lovely marriage ceremony for an older couple in our congregation who had gotten to know each other as they grieved their former life partners. A moment that truly touched my heart.

On Thursday I twisted my ankle playing basketball. My old friend from handball, Anders, now a fireman and father of four boys, accidentally stepped on my foot. Despite the injury, I managed to remain on the court for the whole game.

When I biked to work on Friday morning, I was tired. After lunch I buried a man who had only made it to forty-two. Cancer, of course. I never get used to the fact that people younger than I am can die. His daughter had written a farewell poem but couldn’t get through it, with all her tears. I found it impossible to keep from thinking of Stella.