August 26
It's right before midnight. Mom called at 6:30 this morning and said something about Dad, that the ambulance was there. Then the neighbor's wife took over. She said they were examining Dad, but that it didn't look good. I hung up and called for a taxi while getting dressed. As soon as I heard the hum of a diesel engine, I took the elevator down. It was a beautiful morning and almost no traffic, but the closer we got to the hospital, the closer the moment when my father would be gone. Daddy, Daddy, I whispered to myself as tears flowed down my cheeks. The driver understood and said nothing during the half-hour journey. I gave him a hundred kr bill and let him keep the change. A nurse in the emergency room took me to a room where my mother was lying on a bed crying. I hugged her and we cried together. A young female doctor came in and asked if I knew.
"Is he dead?" I asked.
She nodded and said it was probably a heart attack, but that they couldn't give a definitive answer until after the autopsy. She disappeared and we were alone again. Mom said that Dad had gotten up at six and was making coffee. He had been in a good mood and teased her for having bought sweets when she said she was going on a diet. Then she heard a loud thump and what sounded like a snore.
Per showed up half an hour later. He was visibly upset, but held back the tears as he hugged Mom and stroked her hair in an almost sensual way. Georg and Eleena were still on a plane returning from their wedding in Miami, and would not land until ten forty.
Two police officers approached us as we were on our way to see Dad. I thought it was a mix-up with some accident, but it was their job to ask some routine questions, which always happens when people die at home, or in a place other than a hospital.
Dad's mouth was open and his body covered with a yellow blanket and his feet tucked in. We cried again and Per touched his cheek and hair. It surprised me that he was so familiar with death, but then I remembered that he had worked in long-term care after high school. Mom's fingers gently traced the crocheted blanket until they found a resting place on Dad's hands crossed over his stomach. I myself did not know what to do. It was as if I was afraid of getting further proof that what had happened had actually happened. But Dad was gone. The body was still there, but it was abandoned. We were all abandoned.
Per drove us back to the apartment where we had coffee. We sat in silence for a while, but soon realized that there were things that had to be done. Mom started calling Dad's siblings and had to repeat over and over again the same story of how he got up to make coffee and collapsed in front of the window facing Maria Kyrka. I wrote a press release about my father, the artist, determined not to let his death go unnoticed.
About one o'clock Georg and Eleena came up. Georg was serious and composed, as if assessing the weight now placed on his shoulders. Eleena was crying openly. I returned to my father's writing desk to finish the press release, and when I was done, I read it to Mom who came over and gave me a hug. Then Georg drove me to the big newspapers so that I could deliver the news. I met colleagues and acquaintances, quickly told them what had happened and everyone was sympathetic. Mom continued to call the family.
Once back in the apartment, Georg, Per and I talked about what would happen to Mom now. I suggested that I move in with her to support her in the beginning. It was easiest for me, since I had broken up with Cecilia. Per's wife Kicki joined us around six and so did Cecilia, who said she was so shocked after I called her at work that she collapsed into a chair and sat speechless for an hour.
I had always known that my father was living on borrowed time and that it was probably his heart that would take his life. This knowledge had overshadowed our childhood, but not to the extent that we had been worrying all the time. Eleven years ago he had an artificial valve put in. I remember how pale he was when I came to visit him after the 11-hour long operation. He had a hole in his throat which a nurse occasionally drained by sucking out mucus with a device. His voice was hoarse and strained. Weak and almost fainting, I sank down on the hospital bed and took his hand, which was cold and pale and where the liver spots stood out more clearly than usual.
Dad told me afterwards that the doctors had given him a fifty percent chance of surviving the operation, which was still better than doing nothing. Dad had never showed any anxiety ahead of the surgery, taking it as something he had to do, much like when they took out his pea-sized kidney stone and cut him open, leaving a four inch long scar on one side of his stomach. It was not the first time he had stared death in the face, and he was not afraid of the encounter. If he was afraid of anything, it was the ceremonies. Mom once told me that he didn't want us children at funerals. So for us it was as if they never happened. My paternal grandfather and grandmother had died long ago, and my maternal grandmother died when I was five, but several of my father's sisters, and their husbands must have died in recent years. Even so, I had never seen a dead relative until I saw my father lying there on the stretcher.
He had always been so warm and welcoming, full of humor and seriousness, but now he was stiff and pale. His beard was thin and gray, and his face had lost most of what made him my father.
"It's like there is no longer anyone between me and God," I told Carl.
It has been a long time since I was a child, but I have never found a place in the world of adults. It is as if I have never really grown up.
Until now.
August 28
I check the date on Dad's watch, and on my right hand I now wear his gold ring.
On Saturday, Mom and I went to the city. We walked through the Old Town, across the newly opened Riksgatan to Drottninggatan and Sergels Torg. Mom was going to buy a black coat, a skirt and blouse.
We went to different shops and she tried on different things. She found a coat at Pepita and a skirt at Hennes. She tried to find a blouse at NK, but couldn't find one she liked, so that was it.
We had a Happy Hour lunch at Hirschenkeller. It was good and very cheap. Got home around three. Georg and Eleena came up. All four of us had dinner.
Sunday. A telegram arrived early in the morning. It was a letter of condolence signed by my friends Carl and Björn. Mom was deeply moved. So was I.
After lunch, I took Mom for a walk. It was a beautiful but windy day. We went down to Lady Hutton, i.e., Mälardrottningen, and had coffee on the aft deck. Then we walked towards Strömmen and through the lower part of Kungsträdgården to the bus stop, where we took bus 46 back to Slussen and walked home. Mom told me a lot about her and Dad. She talked about how they met, about the guys she was courted by (emphasizing that she never slept with them!) before Dad. About her siblings who thought she married a poor artist. And how today they call her crying with grief. She turned down a count, an officer, and a writer who sent her a whole album of poems.
Dad was brave and charming and he won her love. After they were married, he told her to go to the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU) and get birth control (I assume it was diaphragms). He was enlightened. That's how it came to be that they waited eight years before they began to have children.
We had dinner together, all of us who are left: Georg and Eleena, me and Cecilia (who has won a few steps back into my heart by her warmth and sympathy), Per and Kicki, their son Tom, and Mom of course.
Everyone was gathered and Dad was the guest of honor despite his absence.
Yesterday the thought came over me that it was Dad who felt lonely where he lay in his coffin. I wanted to be with him.
Perhaps what I will miss most is the conversation. I will never again be able to show him anything, never again hear him praise or criticize, never again talk to him. Then you are alone in the world. Mom is still there, which is fortunate, but just as a father cannot replace a mother, a mother cannot replace a father.
The grieving process has so far gone well. But the loss is enormous. It cannot be processed. It has to be accepted.
To the painI know not if fuller joy is to be hadthan when your lips are quivering with tears,if we ever live as limitlessly as then,when the forehead of anxiety is wet.And none came so whole and cleanto the everyday room of happiness,as the one who was alone with himselfa night of harrowing anguish.
(Dan Andersson, 1920)
Dad had copied down this poem with a typewriter, and put it in a binder. It looks like he had prepared himself meticulously. All the papers are neatly sorted.
August 31, 22.25. Wednesday evening.
I took an hour-long walk with Cecilia. Dad's death has brought us closer together. Not just Cecilia and me, but all our friends and relatives. We get closer as we mourn a person we all loved. Georg takes on the responsibility as the eldest son and he does so with pride. Mom too, has grown through the death of her husband, my father.
The large table in the living room is filled with bouquets of flowers. The phone rings and letters arrive with condolences. The most beautiful letter was from A.S. who for many years was the editor of Bromma News and often wrote about Dad. He shared his sympathy in an exquisite letter written in beautiful handwriting.
Mom called him and they spoke for a long time. She got the impression that he was a lonely old man. She asked him to write a note about Dad's work.
I didn't get any reading done today either. The morning was spent searching for a poem for the obituary. I went to Vårholmen, searched my books and also visited the library, but finally settled with a couple of lines from Pär Lagerkvist's Evening Land that a friend of my father suggested.
The Dead OneAll is there, only I am no more,all is still there, the fragrance of rain in the grassas I remember it, and the sough of wind in the trees,the flight of the clouds and the disquiet of the human heart.Only my heart's disquiet is no longer there.
(Pär Lagerkvist, Evening Land, 1953, tr by W.H. Auden and Leif Sjöberg, 1975)
Stina Fridell visited. She brougth paintings from Dorotea Rosén, who sold Dad's art on commission. Stina said that my grandfather was an alcoholic. I was surprised. Dad had not given that image of his father. Then she said that Dad's family was very poor.
"You got the impression that the kids fought for the food so that they wouldn't have to go without," she said.
Mom later told me that Stina's family were socialists and teetotalers. They had a bakery in Norrbyhamn. Perhaps they were jealous of Dad's family? Perhaps they thought grandfather was an alcoholic since he was a big guy, and use to treat farmers who transported goods to town on their sleds to a schnapps when they stopped by his general store to buy American pork?
It was 68 degrees outside when Cecilia and I went for a walk. We turned up towards Järntorget at Club Engelen. There I suddenly saw Angela coming arm in arm with a guy. She was nicely dressed and had her hair up. She was wearing a red suit and high-heeled shoes. In one hand she held a large boutique shoppingbag. I don't know if she saw or recognized me. I was wearing my black linen suit. Afterwards, I told Cecilia that the meeting had not caused any great sensation. Maybe that was true.
What will happen to me and Cecilia? She still loves me. If only she could be a little tougher, dare to be a little more attractive, dare to be more playful.
September 1, Thursday evening
A week ago my father was alive. Life goes on, but it is much poorer now. However, I’m lucky to have a warm memory of him, many paintings, drawings and written notes to look at. He lives on through his art and we remember him through his example as a human being.
Life is big.
Café Gråmunken. September 3
Why didn't she hug me? Didn't she dare to? I had two brothers to fight with. We were five at the dinner table. They were three.
She turned inward, and got lost in a young girl’s dreams.
She rebelled against fashion for a long time, and still does to some extent.
She doesn't want to fake it, but only be loved for her own sake. She doesn't want to use false attributes to attract, not strut with borrowed feathers.
But men want to be seduced. They love the excitement and fear the safe harbor, which represents the mother.
Sexuality is alienation, but if the father represents masculinity and power, is it the child in a man that charms a woman?
So what am I then? It would be consistent with my hypothesis that I find it easier to charm when I’m drunk. A mature and confident behavior from a man can scare a woman, make her think of her father. Maybe that's why Dad conquered Mom? After all, she was practically fatherless after her father left her grandmother alone with eight children.
Dad on the other hand, probably matured early through the loss of his father (Right now, I feel the need to talk to Dad, to ask him and get these straightforward honest answers!) He was 29 when he met mom. She was an innocent 20-year-old in the early 1940s Sweden, but she started to work at an early age. She has worked for 45 years, so she is truly a professional woman.
Dad was fearless, but behind his tough surface was a shy and seriously ill man. His heart was weak. And behind Mom's innocence was a very strong woman's daughter, ready to fight. Mom and Dad were drawn to each other by love and adapted their lives to its demands.
September 4
I joined Mom, Georg, Eleena, Cecilia, Per, and Kicki for the mass at Maria Church. After the mass, the names of the parishioners who died during the week were read out.
The priest read the father's name first.
"Fredrik Johan Videmark, at the age of 71."
The priest seemed sympathetic. He gave a well-composed sermon in which he even included a poem by Fröding.
At 23.10
It is now more than a week since Dad died.
We had lunch at Mom's house after the mass. Georg, me and Per cleared out Dad’s studio on the first floor. Eleena, Cecilia and Kicki helped prepare for the funeral coffee in the library. We carried all the paintings, watercolors and drawings up to the apartment. Mom wanted as much as possible in the bedroom. She is worried about the taxman. The idea of an outsider intruding and claiming Dad's art is offensive.
Will I have to give a speech at the funeral? I would of course like to do it, but time is short and I don't know if I can do it.
What should I say?
September 5, Monday
The window cleaners were here this morning. It interrupted my work on the paper. Mom offered them coffee and sandwiches. I went downtown to check Akademibokhandeln and Fritzes’s bookstore. Looking for anything new from the US and England.
I hope that John Gardner's On Becoming A Novelist will appear at some point.
It was raining outside. Autumn is here.
And Dad is dead.
It's unbelievable. I can only see him alive, but I did see him lying there, cold and with his mouth open. I felt his beautiful gray hair.
Tomorrow, I will see him for the last time, together with Mom, Georg and Per. Mom and I talked to the priest. His name is Fridolf Luthander and he will bury my father.
A likeable man, 62 years old, with bright and friendly eyes. A little vain and a good speaker.
He had asked us to visit him when we shook hands after mass. We sat down and he took a newspaper clipping out of a notebook. He had tried to read up a little. It was my text he had read, but he didn't know that. We talked for a while and he got some more information about Dad. I told him that Dad was never very religious, that he had no concept of God (where did I get that from?!) We understood each other quite well, I think. Mutual respect.
If I were to (and I will!) give a speech about Dad — what should I say?
September 6
It's Tuesday, isn't it? Yes, it is.
At nine we were at the morgue to see Dad for the last time. It was Mom, Georg, Eleena and me. Per was supposed to come at nine, but he never showed up, so we went in to see Dad without him. He had after all seen him dead at Södersjukhuset.
We entered the room with a representative of Fonus, the funeral home.
The coffin lay in a small rom, and in it lay a dead man with clasped hands, and a white handkerchief over his face.
Then the Fonus representative lifted the handkerchief. There lay a man in eternal sleep. It was not easy to recognize Dad in the body that lay there with blue fingertips and nails. His beautiful curly hair had faded and his mouth was so pale and wide and clenched and unlike itself.
I was supposed to take a picture, but I couldn't do it. That's not how I wanted to remember him. He was so different from how he looked when he lay dead at Södersjukhuset. His face had taken on a strange fullness.
We cried and didn't stay long. Afterwards we went home to Hornspuckeln. Per called at eleven. He had been waiting at the Karolinska Hospital morgue, instead of morgue of the Karolinska Institute.
Georg and Eleena left and Per arrived at eleven.
To balance the unpleasant image of Dad in the morgue, I sat down to look at a color portrait of him that I took in May.
A thought floated to the surface. He didn't have a mustache — what if they mistook him for someone else?
I told Mom who quickly picked up on my suspicion. The man in the morgue had no beard or mustache.
She called the funeral home and they promised to look into it.
Meanwhile we felt relief by the thought that it was not Dad we had seen. We decided that the man we had seen must have been twenty years older than Dad, who was good looking, had a fine, narrow face with a beard and mustache that had been recently colored and neatly trimmed.
Soon a Professor Josephson called. He had gone to the morgue to investigate, and he confirmed that there had been a mix-up.
"It was a very serious error," he said and apologized.
I got hold of Georg, and a new appointment was arranged for half past three.
Professor Josephson assured Mom that he had seen Dad and that he was so handsome with his beard and mustache.
We were looking forward to another visit. It would be so nice to see Dad as he was, as we knew him.
Georg called at two and said that Eleena was sure it was Dad we had seen, and that she had seen the name tag on his wrist. Georg was sure that the man we had seen that morning had a beard.
"There's only one way to be sure and that's to go there again," I said.
At half past three we were there again. Another Fonus representative met us. He was nice and apologized. He said that there were two coffins on the premises and that there had been a mix-up.
All five of us went in, plus the man from Fonus.
The oak coffin was in the middle of the room with it’s lid ajar.
He went around to the head end and removed the handkerchief.
It was the same man, I thought, yet he was a little more like Dad than in the morning.
The man from Fonus had put three red roses in the coffin. Mom took them and put them on Dad's chest. Georg muttered that it was the same man.
I took the photos.
Mom touched Dad's hair and tried to make it stand up before I took the pictures. It was really Dad lying there. He was just so dead and changed. Georg and Eleena had not seen Dad dead until today, so it was easier for them to accept the image of the dead man.
After a day like that, it's no wonder your head hurts.
September 9
There were over a hundred people at the funeral in the Maria Church. We first gathered in a small room to the right of the entrance so that the priest could go through the ceremony with us in advance. After the eulogy, the hymns and Gudmund Höök singing poems by Dan Andersson and Bengt E. Nyström, the priest led Mom to the coffin. For a moment it looked as if she would faint, but she supported herself with both hands against the coffin’s lid and kept her balance. It looked like she wanted to reach through the lid to her beloved husband.
Then it was our turn.
Pair after pair, we walked forward with grief on our empty faces, turned to the coffin and laid down our red roses. Then it was time for Dad's sisters, Mom's siblings and our cousins. They passed the coffin one by one or two by two, and a small mountain of flowers grew on top of the lid. Then it was the friends' turn. 83-year-old Dorotea Rosén was the first of Dad's friends to come forward. She held a bunch of yellow carnations which she kissed before putting them down. Many bowed and some fellow artists made small speeches or recited verses. Some friends cried openly.
When the ceremony was over, the priest took Mom by the arm and led the congregation out. A little later we had funeral coffee in the building's library. Dad's friend and pianist Franz Lieberman gave a short speech before playing two of Dad's favorite composers on a grand piano, Chopin and Beethoven.
Then it was my turn.
"On July 17, 1912, a baby boy was born to the wholesaler J.E. Videmark on the south side of Norrbyhamn. The mother of the boy, who was later named Fredrik, was Carolina Eulalia, née Carlsson. As far as I know, it was a healthy and normal child."
This was the beginning of the book my father had only began to write. A few pages later, the little boy was stricken with double-sided pneumonia and his fever stayed close to 42 degrees Celsius for over a week. The town's three doctors were powerless.
"Father sat by the bed with his arms over the arm of the chair, and I clearly remember tears running down his cheeks! I fought the disease for a long time, it looked very bad. The doctors had given up, but a friend of my mother told her that 'as long as there is life, there is hope.' The two women wrapped me in wet sheets and that was the turning point (...) So one beautiful spring day the doctors could only say that a miracle had happened."
The disease had lasted six months, which is a very long time for a child, but it took its toll in the form of a severe heart defect.
There is a saying that you should live like every day is your last. For Dad, this was a painful reality, and one that reinforced the sense of life that shines so brightly in his art, and in our memories of him. For him, a beautiful summer morning was never a given, but a gift, a miracle.
On July 29, 1945, 35-year-old Fredrik Videmark writes in his first diary:
"I am now a full-time painter and can no longer compromise."
The boy who had dreamed of becoming an inventor, or a boxer like Jack Dempsey, but was told leave school to become an apprentice hairdresser for health reasons, had now become an artist. Like all people, he dreamed of an end to compromise and was immensely proud of his profession. Nevertheless, he was not prepared to sacrifice everything for art, because it was not an end in itself, but to enrich people's lives.
If faced with the famous choice between saving a small child or a masterpiece, he would certainly have chosen to save the child. In this sense, he did not accept the slogan l'art pour l'art. For him, art must always be on the side of life.
When he made drawings of a dying French man during his stay as a patient at the convent hospital in Chalon sur Saone, it was not death but life he captured with his pencil.
The illness gave him a good heart and a penetrating gaze. But to this must be added the professionalism and determination to give us a true picture of the artist and human being, Fredrik Videmark.
On his 36th birthday he wrote:
"If you knew what lies behind a single tree or a small part of a work of art, of study and humility before nature, before you can paint what you feel is the only real thing."
Dad was predicted to have a short life.
It turned out to be 71 years, a life filled with love, work and travel.
September 10
My father loved to travelbut it was his shortest tripthat took him furthest away.He walked upto the windowlooked at the thermometerand then he was gone.When I came homeafter seeing himat Södersjukhusethis slippers remainedin front of the windowat the dining room table.
*
It’s the day before the tenth anniversary of the coup in Chile. Druze forces hold 40,000 Christians captive in a town in Lebanon. The Red Cross is not allowed in. Mini submarines are chased in the middle of Stockholm. Soviet TV interviews the pilot who shot down the Korean civilian airplane with 269 passengers on board. They obviously feel a strong pressure to justify themselves.
Anything new?!
My numbness to the world is apparently wearing off.
Caught up with Cecilia at konditori Christina before lunch. I bought Sven Delblanc's new novel Jerusalem's Night. Björn and I had coffee at half past four at the Eclair patisserie. We sat for a long time talking about customs and rituals and deaths. Later we walked over to my house. Mom was happy to see us and invited us to dinner.
Björn suggested that he and I set up a consulting company focused on China. He knows law and I know economics.
In a black attaché case, I found three poems written by Dad. A touch of Fröding and Ferlin over them.
September 11
I have now attended the funeral of my father. The thought feels unreal. He has been dead for over two weeks now. It is unbelievable.
We are all struggling to fill the void. It's a big one.
No one can open the door to Dad's room anymore.
It feels as if he still exists, as if he continues to think. But I am the one thinking his thoughts.
Reading Delblanc. The intended but unspoken link between the first Christian "party" and today's communist parties is striking and accurate.
Cecilia told me on the phone about a rumor that was going around. According to this, she had moved away from me after I became a member of the Liberal Party!
Love without a Compass is the second part of draft novel with the working title Shifting Passions.
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