Words to my dead mother.

Can I talk now?

The last time I spoke to you, you were in an open casket, awaiting the funeral after which you were to go into the crematorium furnace.

You looked old, had a bit of makeup on and your hair was neatly combed.

You listened quietly to what I had to say and didn’t, with even a shiver, indicate that you had anything to add.

We hadn’t really talked much to each other during our lives, ever since you brought me into this world.

I did use this opportunity to express a few words about how disappointed I was that you had not loved me more but spent most of your life’s efforts supporting my mentally very disturbed sister.

No, I was not envious of my sister, but I was sad at your lack of happiness in life.

That’s what I told you.

You put me into this world.

The sounds of the European war were increasing everywhere, even in little neutral Sweden.

I was due to be born mid May 1940.

Denmark and Norway had been invaded on May 7, was Sweden next?

You lived in Karlshamn, a perfect invasion spot with a nice deep commercial harbour, should the Germans come.

Many of your friends had said that it may not be wise to give birth in a place that could be invaded any day. You, therefore, traveled about 400 km north and stayed at the farmhouse of one of my father’s cousins.

There wasn’t much around, no telephone in the house and only a bus that came twice a day.

I visited 25 years later, met the now very old cousin of my father and learned a few facts of your life the summer I was born.

My father wasn’t there that day. It took several days before he could come to visit, but only for a short while. He didn’t have enough vacation time that summer of 1940. He had already taken an advance the previous summer. I was conceived during your automobile trip around southern Sweden.

You told me what my father and you had been joking about; the name of your firstborn. 

You had toured in his grand 1937 Ford V8 car late in the summer of 1939. 

The Esso advertising for Essolube was everywhere. Given that that name became so imprinted you had jokingly decided that I should be called Essolube.

I wasn’t.

I have read several of the letters that you wrote to my father during your stay. You also left me some of your personal notes from the first few weeks in the farmhouse in the opening in the forest. 

It is quite clear now that you had a case of postpartum depression. 

Was that name invented yet? You worried about my health when I got a cold and about my nutrition. Did I get enough to eat?

I did know, from both of you, my parents, that my father was a bit of a health nut, as were you. There was a fad in the 1930s that too much milk wasn’t good for your brain. Milk and milk products could cause premature dementia and shouldn’t be part of the diet. 

You, yourself, paid dearly later in life for your own calcium and vitamin D deficient diet. You suffered from severe osteoporosis, brittle bones.

Perhaps you had worried about my chances to get dementia later in life too and fed me no milk or totally focused on milk-free formula.

I’m 79 as I write this and as clear in the head as can be. I have had milk every day of my life as far as I can remember. Something was clearly wrong with the no-milk diet then.

It became clear in a few months that my diet was not proper. I contracted Rickets which made my ribs stick out and slightly curved my spine. Then you were told, in strong words, to feed me more milk and calcium-rich food.

The illness subsided, but I still live with ribs that curve out and a bit of a crooked back, that makes me look as if I have a permanent potbelly, which I don’t.

When you returned to Karlshamn, the war was in full swing. Gasoline had been severely rationed, and none could be had for private cars. Your grand Ford automobile was put on blocks in a garage and stayed there for all of five years.

You and father became very good bicyclists.

You were now a proud mother and lived a life of grandeur.

We had a nanny, Svea, who looked after me, and a couple of years later, my sister, full time.

Svea, on the right

We also had a maid who shopped, cooked, served our meals and kept our apartment, on the top floor of city hall, in order. These maids didn’t always stay long, but Svea did.

Svea was with us until your marriage crashed with a bang in the month of February 1947.

Father’s best friend, Tryggwe, a lawyer who lived in Stockholm, spent a few weeks in Karlshamn that winter. He worked on a particularly difficult legal case.

He regularly came to your apartment for lunch.

One day, father, who worked at the bottom floor of the same building, had forgotten his pipe after the lunch was over.

He returned to the apartment. There he found you and his best friend in the marital bed, il flagrante.

This was the singular moment when yours and father’s quality of life crashed, forever.

Tryggwe KeyÅberg

I didn’t know anything about this until I met the man, Tryggwe, who had seduced you, some 25 years later. He was then a prematurely old man of 70, an ailing alcoholic with diabetes.

You were already married to him then, without telling me about this main event in your life.

At first, I didn’t embrace my new stepfather with any love. Just imagine what his desire for extramarital sex had caused. It had inexorably altered the path of so many lives.

He told me the details about how he, still married, had slept with his best friend’s wife, you, in 1947.

His daughter, my age, who I met many years later, is a friend of mine. She told how she and her mother, Tryggwe’s second wife of four feared, a knock on the door. There would be a young lady with a baby, wanting to see the father of the child. That knock never came, but still.

You, mother, was his last wife. 

He had a well-earned reputation as a womanizer and was barely tolerated by his wife who divorced him by the end of 1947.

Little did he know or ever understand how making love to a somewhat immature, and perhaps at that moment sex-starved woman, you, could have such an impact on so many.

Yes, you had some very particular thoughts about sex, that made you very vulnerable. More about that later.

A few stories from your formative years.

You were the sole surviving daughter of a, sometimes, successful man. He owned and ran his own butcher shop, complete with a meat processing plant, for over 43 years, from 1905.

You on the left, 10 years old in 1919

Your mother passed away when you were only 14. 

Your father soon remarried one of his shop girls, a lovely woman who I, of course, came to know as my grandmother. Then you got two more little brothers, making you the sole girl among four 

brothers.

You sat in my garden once, when over 80 years old, and talked into my tape recorder for 40 minutes about your youth.

Your father was harsh on his sons, but a little softer on you, his only daughter. The boys all left home as soon as possible.

Sten, who eventually became a fighter pilot, joined the Cavalry at age 20. Olle, your younger brother moved away and got married when he was 20 as well.

Your two younger brothers didn’t feel appreciated at home and soon left.

My grandfather became much less stressed after he retired in 1948 at age 70 when one of his early investments, first made when he was a young man in business some 42 years ago, had paid off, hugely. 

He now had the means to retire as a financially secure man, keeping all his half city block properties rented and creating income.

That’s when he stopped working. After that, with all of the stress from earning a living gone, he soon became a kind and much-loved man. This was the grandfather I grew up with.

Stress is hard on all.

Back to you, my dear mother.

As a girl, you had to learn how to keep house.

When 18, you spent what seems like a very happy year at a school of home economics, an hour away by train. Your photo album shows many happy faces and quite a bit about the many activities you were involved in.

Now, at age 19 and an almost educated woman, you wanted to learn French. What better way than to go to France as an au-pair girl. 

According to the old cancelled railroad tickets and letters that were in your belongings when you passed away, you stayed there for almost two difficult years.

I've been to the building where you
lived on the third floor 1929 - 1930.

They were hard years because you worked very long hours with, effectively, only one-half day off every week. This free time you enjoyed spending with other expat Swedish girls in Paris.

The pay was meagre, and not enough for more than the most spartan entertainment. You didn’t even have enough savings after an extremely frugal two-year time to pay for the railroad ticket back to Sweden.

The great depression had made itself known in Sweden at this time (1931). Your father’s business wasn’t going all that well and he was very angry about having to send a few kronors to help pay for your ticket home, all as I have read in your letters.

It is absolutely clear that you loved Paris and all there was to see and do in the city. You and your friends loved to dance and went to dancing clubs as often as you could afford to.

Yes, this being Paris at the end of the swinging ’20s, you met many Gitane-smoking budding poets and other young men trying to make a mark on the world. I asked about Hemingway, but you couldn’t recall having met him.

You even took up smoking but found the cost of a full pack of cigarettes prohibitive and gave that habit up.

You had many devoted man-friends, who showed up at the dances where you and your girlfriends went, but none that you allowed to come close.

You had a fling, a few brief dates drinking tea, with a young man of Arabic origin, a Muslim.

He seemed very nice but, fortunately, you were told about the Muslim attitude towards women by one of your girlfriends. She had already been through a terrible experience where she found out where a woman stood in the life of a Muslim man.

Very low.

Then you went to the library to read up about Islam and came to realize that there was no way an independent-minded woman could have any place in the life of such a man.

You never saw him again.

You have told me, that this was the time that you got an idea of how married people lived. It may not have been entirely correct, but this is what you saw and learned.

"Monsieur would come home for lunch every day. After lunch Madame and Monsieur would retire to their bedroom for half an hour, or so, and have sex."

You, my dear mother, were fully convinced that this was the way married people had sex, once a day at lunchtime.

And, you have told me, this is the way you wanted to live, once you were a married woman. 

More about where that idea led, later.

Coming home, the family situation was grim. Your father, who had always been heavy on the bottle was worse than ever. The effect of the worldwide economic depression laid heavy over the land. There was no money for you to stay at home nor to work in the family business, as if you had even wanted to.

Why is my father's hat on the spare wheel?

You hadn’t met my father Harald yet, but he had just passed the bar exam, at age 38, and was in a professional job in Stockholm.  
You first met at a theatre club in Karlshamn three years later.

Almost directly after your return from France, you went to Stockholm for two years, studying textiles and weaving at Textilinstitutet.

One student, younger than you, also studied there a few years later, May Swanström. She was the woman who became father’s fiancée after your marriage had disintegrated in 1947.

You first met May at my father’s funeral and, instantly, became sworn enemies. That soon ended. You had so much in common. 

Ironically enough, one of May’s best friends was the woman Tryggwe was married to when you and Tryggwe had your brief affair in 1947.

Ultimately, you and May became best of friends for the rest of your lives, much to my joy. You were both very important in my life.

It wasn’t easy for you. You married my father at age 25, still a virgin.

Your engagement picture, 1935

He was 17 years older than you, engaged when you met, and supposedly a good catch with a solid job, a nice 1931 model Essex car and a good apartment, housing his beloved Malmsjö grand piano.

He had just arrived in town as a lawyer.

You were back home, living with father, a stepmother who was only a few years older than you and four brothers.

You were ready to move on.

You had a grand time re-connecting with old friends and taking part of the social life of the little 12,000 people town.

Given the size of the town and its mix of people, there were many social clubs of various kinds. From the lodges, to dance, music and theatre groups.

You are in the lower right-hand corner. Father is in the triple edged hat.

That’s where you met your future husband, my father Harald, at the theatre club.

His much-loved mother had just passed away. 

His long 16-year engagement with a woman from his hometown, Jönköping, was on the ropes. She wanted to get married and have children, but he couldn’t afford to marry then. He had too many student loans to pay off first.

They broke up at about the time when the two of you met in 1934.

He felt very lonesome at the time and was seeking more out of life than just work and music.

Did his ex fiancée marry and have children after their breakup? She was 41 then. No, she didn’t. I met her some 20 years later. She had then just retired as a librarian in an even smaller town.

She had never married.

I asked her why: “I loved your father too much; He was the only man in my life.”

How sad.

Once settled as a lawyer, my father soon applied for and got the job as town treasurer. This was a high-profile position and came with a grand apartment on the top floor of city hall.

If he hadn’t married his fiancée because of lack of money, how could he marry you, mother?

There was a reason, money.

My grandfather, your father Olof was getting worried. He had an unmarried daughter at home, age 25, who was about to enter the list of spinsters, one who was almost too old to find a husband and get married.

My father’s precarious financial situation came on the table.

Olof who had a bit of a financial recovery of his business in those days offered to pay off some of my father’s loans to the tune of 10,000 kronor, about $ 90,000 in today’s money.

That clinched the deal, you could now get married.

How was the beginning of your married life?

You were now, instantly, a member of the elite society. You befriended doctors, lawyers, the headmaster at the college, and many of the outstanding businessmen and their families in town.

You started out in the small apartment – with the grand piano, near city hall.

You soon moved up to the top floor of city hall.

Suitable to your standing, you had to have a live-in maid. You held or went to dinners and other events, giving you a very crowded social calendar as I know, not only from you but also from many of your then-friends that I met when I grew up.

Then-friends?

Yes, unfortunately many, far too many, abandoned you after the illicit affair of yours that ultimately led to your divorce.

Small towns didn’t accept immorality or extra-marital affairs easily then.

You were a strong swimmer all your life and a favourite guest on many sailboats, owned by friends.

I know that my father Harald was very proud of his good-looking and sociable wife.

Unfortunately, you had a miscarriage two years before I was born and then both of you wondered if that was the end of your chances to have a child. Obviously, it wasn’t since I was born later.

You liked sex too much.

You were now married and soon learned the joys of sex. With your observations of married life in France fresh in memory, you tried the same.

My father worked on the bottom floor and you lived on the top floor.

He would walk up the stairs and have lunch with you every working day.

You had everything set up properly, first lunch, then a quick romp before your husband went back to work.

It, unfortunately, didn’t work out very well in the long run.

My father, at age 45, wasn’t quite the lover that you had hoped for. 

He had never lived with a woman and only had a long-distance, seldom consummated, relationship with his fiancée earlier.

He couldn’t or didn’t want to keep up the pace of sex-at-lunch, every day.

You have told me how disappointed you became.

Also, father had a very demanding job, causing him to spend much time in meetings and conferences, sometimes being away for many days at a stretch.

Your lifestyle was, ultimately, too rich for his income and he had to borrow to stay afloat. This led to arguments about money, not good for any marriage.

Dear reader; You already know what my mother’s desire for more sex led to, some 12 years after they married.

They divorced.

My sister’s beginnings

My sister Marie-Louise, born a little over two years after me, soon became a difficult child. She ultimately affected the path of my life and thoroughly altered yours. 

She often stood in the way of your life’s happiness, mother.

She got meningitis when about two years old.

I remember walking to the hospital, sitting in the waiting room that smelled of chloroform, while you and father went to see her in her sickbed.

When she came home again, she cried a lot, an awful lot.

You knew but never would admit that my sister's behaviour was not normal.

She had talent in observing and making pictures, ultimately studying at the Royal Art academy (Konstakademin) in Stockholm when she was in her 20s. It took her a total of seven years to graduate, with many breaks on the way.

I only learned about her full, unabridged medical history at her funeral, after she had passed away from breast cancer.  

There I met her case-worker. He gave me a rundown on her medical history, all 58 years of it.

Meningitis had, and has, a terrible chance of resulting in mental disturbances. My sister ultimately developed mild autism, paranoia, and elements of schizophrenia.

She had a terrible life with few friends and no steady relationships, ever.

How my sister's mental illness ruined your life and almost damaged mine.

Marie-Louise was a pretty girl, with blond hair and blue eyes, often an instant favourite among your friends.

You worked full days as a teacher and also conducted lessons two evenings every week, all winter long.

As a young girl, before puberty, Marie-Louise could never be left alone at home. She would throw screaming tantrums that were “out of this world”.

Your aging aunt Johanna was there, always at the ready to be a child sitter when you held your evening courses. Even she had trouble controlling Marie-Louise’s unpredictable behaviour.

Once our next-door neighbour called the police. He was at home, recovering from a heart attack and Marie-Louise’s incessant screams truly disturbed him.

She could scream until her voice cords gave up and she only hissed.

The next day, she could barely speak.

I had lived with father ever since your divorce and seldom saw any of this.

He had kept the cottage after the divorce. He was a good father, but he knew very little about bringing up children.

He loved us dearly but had to cut his interactions with his daughter to a minimum.

Unfortunately, my sister’s trips to the cottage with us became more and more rare. She would act up in a way that our then, almost 60-year old father, could not accept or handle.

Why did you, mother, never realize that something was very, very wrong? Or, if you did, why did you never seek professional help?

Your friend since childhood, Dr. Adlercreutz, a general practitioner, did her best in prescribing Psychosomatic medication for Marie-Louise.

It didn’t go well. Each new round would result in Marie-Louise feeling sluggish, and, even worse, say or feel that she gained weight.  Then the medication went out, followed by even worse outbreaks.

She never accepted any medication. Not even in later days, after Marie-Louise had committed many random acts of violence. Then the police would, on occasion, bring her into the mental health station in Karlshamn to get the once-a-month injection.

You just said: “Marie-Louise has so many enemies.”

Many of them must have been taxi drivers since for years, they refused to send a taxi to your address. You were banned from riding in a taxi.

You were spending lots of money to replace the many things that Marie-Louise lost. Sending her out with mittens didn’t always mean that she came home with any.

She had her bicycle “stolen”. Read: “forgotten”, somewhere so many times.

I refused to lend her her mine after it, too, had been “stolen”. I found it the next day, properly locked at her school bicycle parking lot. I unlocked it with my spare key. The key she had was gone forever.

You would send her on expensive ski trips with her classmates every winter. She seldom came back with her skiing equipment or, sometimes even without her skis. That cost money, funds that you could ill afford to spend on a teacher’s salary.

Once you sent her on a school ski trip to Austria, by train.

She didn’t get there, but jumped off the train, dressed in light clothes, without her wallet or passport, somewhere in Southern Germany.

You received a telegram sent by the station master. You had to drop everything and get on a 14-hour train trip to the station where she was.

You found her, dirty, disheveled and very hungry in the waiting room about two days after she had taken refuge there.

The lack of a passport was a bit of an issue when leaving Germany, but you managed to talk your way home across both the Danish and Swedish borders.

Again, this cost you. Her passport was never found, but a classmate brought the carry-on clothes back home. The checked-in suitcase and ski equipment never showed up.

Why all of this?

“A man was looking at me, and I had to escape,” said Marie-Louise.

And for me?

I had no choice, but to move in with you after my father had suddenly passed away in front of my eyes a few days after my 14^th birthday.

Your apartment was bright, sunny and well-appointed but too small for the three of us. My bed occupied the dining alcove in the kitchen. My clothes were in a small part of a closet in the hallway. 

My only private storage was to stuff my belongings inside the springs in my mattress.

You did as best you could. As for Marie-Louise, she certainly did not. She called me the “suckling pig” for taking too much of your attention. She was seldom civil towards me.

What she called you, I will not repeat.

Fortunately, this horror story, for me, ended in about two years when I found out that I could apply to volunteer to the army.

I did, and was accepted in the fall of 1956, to join as the second youngest recruit in 1957, not yet 17 years old.

On confirmation of that information, I dropped out of school for good and took a job as an errand boy at a factory. 

You were not pleased.

Mother, did you even understand how much I suffered?

Why did I repeatedly stay out of school, and finish every term with failing grades? Did I feel that you supported me? You may have tried to, but Marie-Louise took all your attention, and certainly most of your money.

I was often cold in the wintertime as I grew out of my clothes, and there were few new items coming my way. 

Did you know that I wore one pair of shoes, the only ones I had, long, long after I had grown out of them, causing my toes, in near constant pain, to deform for life?

The apartment we moved to, a few months after I had moved in with you, was much larger but very old, dark and cold in the winter. You took the coldest room. I felt so sorry for you to have to accept that.

The heating was not sufficient on cold days and it may be a miracle that the foul-smelling supplementary kerosene heater didn’t kill us.

It didn’t. I ventilated as recommended, but the smell? - It couldn’t be ventilated away.

I still remembered my life in the grand, bright and well heated apartment at city hall, that I had left less than a year earlier.

Mother, you had a very hard time during those years, I know. I once took a photograph of you coming home from work and showed it to you.

“Mother, why do you look so sad in the picture?”

“Because I have two such useless children as the two of you.”

Those words, said in passing to me when 17, still bounce and burn inside my heart.

Marie-Louise became worse. Her temper tantrums became almost unbearable. Doors had fallen off the hinges, from being slammed in anger and many things had been thrown and ruined.

You sent Marie-Louise to France.

Perhaps some time as an au pair girl in France would be good for her?

They weren’t. 

Her year away was a year of peace for both you and me, mother.

I was in the army and only came home for weekends. We did enjoy our time together and you even gave me words of advice and wisdom.

This time you didn’t have to go to Paris to pick Marie-Louise up. The Swedish embassy sent her home. She had failed and been fired from two au pair positions and was found wandering the halls of “Academie des Arts” by an embassy member.

She pretended to be a student there. She was not.

That cost another pile of money, I know. Again, Marie-Louise arrived without a stick of clothing except what she wore.

“The family had locked me out and woudn’t let me in to get my clothes.” 

In truth, she had run away and didn’t dare to go back.

What little luggage she brought “had been stolen” on the train, she said. We knew better, she had left it somewhere along the way.

By this time, I was out of the house for good.

I had finally moved on and only came back as an occasional visitor.

Marie-Louise continued to control your life.

Every time the phone rang in the next 35 years, you would jump up.

“Is it Marie-Louise? What is wrong now?”

It often was, and something was often wrong.

You did not live entirely celibate as a single mother and would, of course, have boyfriends after my father was gone from your life. I met a few and they were all very nice to me and Marie-Louise. I was happy about that.

Sure, I was a little shocked the first time I found a pessar on your night table, and then saw it moving about in your bedroom as the weeks went on. Did you not know that we had learned all about birth control in school?

Marie-Louise would, as soon as she came near, start screaming insults at the man – who soon disappeared out of your life, mother.

Ultimately, you had a longer, seven-year relationship with an artist, Bodo. In between his visits to you, he lived with his long-term girlfriend in Lund.

You must have known what a two-timing cheater he was, only visiting you in your apartment. He didn’t even once, in all those years, invite you to his place.

He was secretive but pleasant. I met him a few times in your apartment.

Was it your love, or sex, that made you ignore his “other life”?

Or, perhaps you really didn’t know until Marie-Louise, visiting Malmö, had gone to his apartment and rung the doorbell.

A woman answered the door.

“Who are you”, Marie-Louise had said.

“I live here with Bodo, this is our home.”

Marie-Louise had run, crying, to the nearest phone and shared her newfound knowledge with you, mother.

Then you packed his belongings and took them to the post office. 

The two of you never met again.

You were getting desperate. You still wanted to get married, get a title and a higher standing in society.

You finally did.

You had read in the paper, “Famous lawyer is in the hospital with a broken leg.” That was Tryggwe, your lover of 24 years ago. He was now divorced from wife number three, the one he had married in 1948.

Tryggwe had been drunk and fallen on his own front stoop, breaking his leg.

You asked Marie-Louise, in Stockholm then, to go to see him in his sick-bed.

She did, said her name and the rest is history. Tryggwe soon jumped out of his hospital bed and was with you, mother, in Karlshamn.

But, Marie-Louise couldn't stand to see happiness with others.

She did her best to ruin your relationship from day one.

My wife Monica and I left the country a few years earlier fearing that Marie-Louise woud ruin our marriage. 

You didn’t know that, did you?

We never returned to Sweden for the same reason. I was still afraid of my sister. You did what you could to pave the road back.

You, for sure, wanted us to live nearer so you could see your grandchildren, my two daughters, more often.

Me and my daughters.

You put me in contact with the local power plant, Karlshamnsverket, and they offered me a well-paying qualified job in Karlshamn.

You were ecstatic, hearing this good news. Your son and his family would come home again.

No, that became impossible and never happened.

Once Marie-Louise was told the news about us, she disappeared into the dark night, threatening to jump into the river. You ran out the door and were gone for hours until you had found Marie-Louise and brought her home.

There was no way we could live in the vicinity of, or even the same country as Marie-Louise.

You never saw much of your grandchildren in your life. I am very sorry for that, but how could you?

Almost every time we came to stay at your apartment, there was a crisis and we had to move out, quickly. One January night, our first day in town, we were forced out in the cold street after midnight. A good friend of ours came and picked us up. We stayed with her and her family for the few days we were in Karlshamn then.

Marie-Louise needed almost constant “help” and you couldn’t leave her for long, even to visit us in Canada.

I know you would have loved to come and stay. You were with us, alone, one summer. We were looking into the possibilities for you and Tryggwe to immigrate when you were in Canada. At that time, it was very simple to sponsor your retired parents as immigrants.

Then our phone rang.

“Inga, your husband is in the hospital with a broken arm and he cannot go home. Marie-Louise has locked the door and says she will jump out the window if she ever sees him again.”

You, my dear mother, had to take the next plane back to Sweden, bring your husband home from the hospital and get Marie-Louise to move back to her own apartment again.

Marie-Louise had hit Truggwe so hard that he had broken his arm.

A few years later she pushed you, mother, down the stairs and you broke your leg, an event that greatly shortened your life.

Mental illness is horrible.

You were told by your entire family and many, many more: “Make her move away and never answer the phone again.”

We moved away – and got many angry and sometimes loving letters from Marie-Louise. I saw very little of her in person over the years. When we met, it always ended badly.

You never had, or never chose that option.

Oh, how much happiness she stole or diverted from you over your life, from age 38, when you divorced and until you passed away at age 87. You had almost 49 years of worries.

My father Harald, possibly as seen by you.

You may, or may not have loved my father, even as newlyweds. I somehow suspect that your wedding was for convention, rather than for a true and wildly expressed love for each other.

Your father Olof’s monetary contribution must have carried some weight in your minds.

Your husband, Harald, certainly never had a good relationship with your father Olof.

Harald was a highly cultured man with several professional degrees, a chartered accountant and a certified lawyer who had just passed the Bar exams. He was also a very accomplished piano player and a modest drinker.

You father, Olof, was from a totally different school.

He was the rough and tumble type businessman, a hard drinker, and a loud and boisterous lover of life.

They were both good men, but just totally opposites in so many ways.

You mentioned that father Harald felt a bit trapped in his marriage, didn’t sleep well and often snacked out of the refrigerator at night.

He soon went from being a slim man to being somewhat obese. He had many health-food ideas, some of which you didn’t share, you told me.

Perhaps one of his diets led to the serious kidney illness that put him in the hospital at age 45, or he just didn’t drink enough liquid to keep his kidneys healthy.

I remember him becoming dehydrated one summer. He only looked for lozenges instead of drinking water. Could that have been one of his healthy living ideas, not to drink enough?

You were a true athlete and a very accomplished swimmer, with many prizes to show.

Harald was absolutely not into any kind of sports, other than long walks. Possibly a reason for some discourse.

I have never seen a single photograph of him doing anything more strenuous than sailing a sailboat. In opposition, there are many, many of you skiing, swimming, skating, hiking, etc.

Perhaps one should not get married when the age and life-experiences are too different.

You wanted and deserved a young, lively man. He certainly was none of that, the slightly overweight, out of shape, cigar-smoking office worker as he was.

Just saying.

Unfortunately, even though there are hundreds of pictures from the private lives of the two of you, there is almost not a single one of you together. That is surprising, I know that father was an avid photographer and carried his camera so often.

Did you or Marie-Louise throw the pictures away? Nobody can tell at this point, of course.

My father offered you, for sure, a ticket into higher society, one higher than where your father’s family lived.

You played the piano well, but never at home. Harald was too much of a perfectionist to allow that. Besides, his cherished grand piano was for him, only.

You acquired a purebred whippet after your wedding, a dog that always shivered but looked good.

You now visited and fraternized with the crème de la crème of the local society on an equal basis.

After the war and gasoline could be bought again, we rode in huge American cars. One of your friends had a 12-cylinder German car.

Many had cottages and/or sailboats. There were formal and informal dinners at restaurants, where I, and later my sister, would sit at a separate table with the other children. 

We got the same food and were expected to eat the same as our parents. The same dishes, but in smaller servings. There was no allowance for our less developed palates.

At Christmas, we went to the official Santa Claus ball. For us, children, it was in the afternoon. We could have a look at the main ballroom on our way home. You and father certainly celebrated in style, with five glasses at each seat.

You probably saw father as a bit tight, not willing or able to pay for all the things you wanted.

I know that he was borrowing money already around his 50^th birthday and that those loans were never paid off, not even at his death ten years later.

Ironically, and not very wisely, I would say, why did you decide to pay all his loans and debts off at that time? You had been divorced for over six years by then.

It took all the money in his estate. You even had to take out a loan in your name to settle the final debts. That became a real drag on our economy, I now realize.

Pride, I guess.

After your divorce, you had a great professional career with many friends.

After you had split our homes at Easter 1947, you were homeless and jobless.

A new apartment complex was finished that summer and after a couple of months in a rented room you moved in there

Father was a director at the Tekniska Skolan in Karlshamn. He made arrangements for you to be hired as a teacher of weaving.

You taught weaving, material design and textile technology for 32 years.

You were always paid on an hourly basis and it was vitally important that you filled your course roster every fall.

My sister and I shared your nervousness towards the end of July, every summer, when the firm registrations started to trickle in. 

Would there be many enough to fill a class? 

There always were, and you were so successful that the school soon added evening classes too.

How did I learn about weaving and develop a life-long interest in textiles?

By osmosis.

You had a loom in the kitchen. There was always a hobby-project of yours in process. You taught me how to weave and to throw the shuttle in such a way as to make an even surface with straight edges.

I often visited you in class when I had an hour free in school.

For the first few years, your students were mostly women about to get married or newly married women. Only in later years did you get young students from high school.

I still, over 40 years from when you held your last class, can meet women who can talk with great joy about what a competent and inspirational teacher you were.

Some of your old friends, from your married days, also become students later.

I know that you made many new friends and developed quite a social life around them and their families. Some you met when they became your students, others were your colleague teachers at the school.

Märta on the left,
you, mother on the right

Your best friend for many years was another teacher at your school, Märta. She was also divorced and had two daughters, our age when she came to Karlshamn 1949. We, my sister and I, practically grew up as one family with her daughters.

We had good times when we were all together. We were on the beach in the summer or at dinners and family gatherings in the less clement weather of the winter.

I asked you once, near the end of your days, what were the happiest memories of your life.

You said: “The summers when we all went swimming from the rocks by the sea.”

I agreed.

For many of your students, you became almost a substitute mother giving advice and tips for their future life after school. I sometimes felt a little left out, you were more chummy with your newfound friends than with your own family.

You were very nice to all my friends over the years and opened our home for them to come to visit.

A few are still around, and they still talk with pleasure about how kind you were, and with all right. You were lovely.

You always had a few very close friends.

Hugo Ahlqvist

Hugo, the man you had secretly admired since you were both teenagers, and perhaps secretly wished to marry when of age, was one. He had gone on a working trip to Denmark in the early 30s and returned with a Danish wife, Gesse.

She soon became a best friend of yours and I have many, many happy memories from when our families socialized, for as long as I lived in Sweden. One of their son’s, Per, was my best friend for life.

For rather obvious reasons I don’t remember this;  

You have told how the two of you, new mothers, would sit in Gesse’s garden, drink coffee and rock your babies in our cradles.

Yes, Per and I were friends from cradle to death, which came too early for him, at only 71.

In the early 50s, you befriended a young weaving teacher, Ulla-Britt. She lived and worked a few km outside town.

She had one evening class to teach at your school every week. Then she’d come by bus, and you’d have dinner before she went to school.

Sten, your eldest brother was still a hard-drinking alcoholic at this time. But, sometime before his 50^th birthday he stopped drinking and was dry for several years to come. He had met Ulla-Britt at our place.

She, 26 at the time, and he became a couple. She only agreed to be his girlfriend for as long as he didn’t touch the bottle.

Ulla-Britt Karlsson and my uncle StenRosholm, ca 1956.

Those good times, for all or us, ended after Sten had gone to Berlin around 1958 to meet some of the German officers that he knew since WW2. 

He returned home drunk. That was the end of his sober life. His love for the bottle continued for as long as he lived.

I truly loved to be with Ulla-Britt, and she always has a special place in my heart.

Ulla-Britt dropped Sten then and her visits to our home ended. She continued her life in Ronneby. I met her there once when she was an old, retired teacher. She had never stayed in touch with you and remained unmarried. I never found out why, and now you cannot tell.

I was always sad that you never talked to father.

Another observation, mother. You and father never spoke to each other after 1947, but exchanged only letters, sent by mail from one block to the next in town.

I saw you speak to each other once, and only that one time. It was in the summer of 1953 when you both had happened to come to see me perform at the Hällevik gymnastics camp.

Father offered you a ride back home in his car, and you accepted.

I fell asleep that night, rejoicing the fact that “you were now together again”. You weren’t, I and I never knew of you talking to each other again, ever.

He passed away the next spring.

The city owned the apartment and behaved in an inexcusable way after father’s funeral. They gave you two weeks to empty an apartment that had been lived in by the same family, ours, for 16 years.

You lived in your small place and had very little chance to remove anything other than a few small pieces of furniture.

In those few days, you had no choice, I know, but you threw out most of the books and all of my father’s life history.

Gone.

Years later I found a box of photographs and a few letters, nothing else.

Was there no way to keep at least a little more?

Now, what I know about my father comes from his photographs and memories of what his friends told me over the years. I only knew one single relative, his older cousin, and he passed away all too soon to tell me much.

 

Your son’s summary

My life may be nearing its end, and I felt that I had to share some thoughts with you.

You had a long, but not always happy life in little Karlshamn. Why you stayed, nobody can tell. I think we all would have lived better had you moved on, met a nice man and remarried.

You at the cultural house, Blekingestugan

The summer of 1948, you worked as a hostess at the Skansen culture park in Stockholm. There you met a man, a well-known professional photographer of your age.

He proposed marriage to you after a few months of intense courtship that summer. He truly loved you and desired to marry you, but you didn’t accept him.

I have a couple of this man’s love letters and many, many beautiful pictures that he took of you and the, then, cute little girl Marie-Louise.

You still carried the narrow hope that Tryggwe would still be there for you, once his divorce was final. This is surprising since you had no contact with him at all that summer, even though you only lived a few city blocks from each other.

When you went to Tryggwe’s apartment in Stockholm after your divorce was final one year later, in 1949, he met you outside the door: 

“Inga, you are too late, I got married last week.”

Then he came back, 24 years later, and you married him.

Dear mother, you chose the wrong man, all your life.

Rest in peace.

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This one story of two, about my parent's somewhat troubled lives.
Read my father's story here:

https://ayoungboysjourney.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-letter-to-father-father-you-died-too.html