It is the first of Advent and a procession of light and song fills the room. I hold the hands of my babies, almost too old for this now, reluctant to sit still on the floor of a dark room for what seems like an odd sort of slightly underwhelming concert – but I insist. I know all the songs; I’ll never forget them. Not after years and years of rehearsals starting every August and continuing all the way through autumn leaves and dark afternoons, culminating in this very experience: me as a child, then a teenager, dressed in a white gown, clutching a candle (not too close to your face or you’ll faint), performing for parents, for nursing homes, for corporate functions to celebrate Lucia – the bearer of light. Every melancholic melody takes me back, each debated syncopation and ‘s’ held too long, and it’s strangely bittersweet – isn’t it?
There’s a new Advent countdown candle this year. Instead of the numbers one through 24, printed vertically across the candle are the names of the 24 women who were murdered in Sweden last year, most of them by men they knew.
It is the day before the second of Advent and a video call comes in from IKEA: What do you want? Oh, I want it all: the gingerbread biscuit dough, the glögg, the coffee, the gingerbread-flavoured Dumle, the pickled gherkins and the Christmas cola. I don’t even like fizzy drinks, but when you put it on the table it will all be right – a perfect Swedish Christmas, like the tradition says, like it always was, won’t it?
Someone mentions in passing the girl who was raped in a restaurant toilet for five hours straight and I don’t hear where the conversation goes next or what anyone really knows about this event because that image, the girl, five hours, it makes my bones hurt and I can’t hear anything anymore, but the ache fills every cell of my body until it all overflows and I can’t stop crying and my head hurts.
It is the second of Advent and Agnetha Fältskog is singing about Christmas mice with her daughter, who’s really too young to be singing on an album, but that’s how the perfectly Swedish Christmas is done right, and so I insist. It’s a tradition at this stage: this is what we listen to for the annual gingerbread baking session, and it’s a bit silly but I get to decide, because that’s what I did with her for the annual gingerbread baking session all throughout our childhood – and now they’re part of it, sort of, aren’t they?
It’s the second of Advent and today’s name on the candle is Dana.
It is the eve of the third of Advent and Lankum sing:
“When the young people dance
They do not dance forever
It is written in sand
With the softest of feathers
It is not writ in stone
Like the walls of the chapel
And soon it is gone
Like the soft winters at home”
I try to imagine her there, in the audience with us, and I realise that I can’t. I don’t know what her body feels like now, what her presence in 2022 would be. If she was there – if she were here – would we put our arms around each other, like we did the last time I saw her on the first of Advent 2006? I don’t know who she would be now. She doesn’t know who I’ve become.
A pandemic happens and the impossible is suddenly possible. Systems we’ve always been told are untouchable, run flawlessly by the invisible hand of the market, are touched and controlled and stopped. People’s freedoms are restricted, just like that – not without a fight, but it happens. For a period of time, the world stops. Offices close. Schools close. Pubs close. Even sport, games, matches grind to a halt. (What’s going on behind closed doors, we know now, never stopped – an invisible hand of another kind, but equally untouchable.) And now we’re back, the magical market doing its thing, because you can’t just stop life, stop businesses and capitalism from doing their thing just because women die, can you? Five hours.
It is the third of Advent and she’s been gone for 16 years. Every year, it hits me by surprise, the grief, but now it all suddenly makes sense. Approaching the tenth anniversary of her death, I wrote:
“That’s the funny thing about emigrating: as you move away from those you love, escape the things that annoy you, and run away from all that which you can’t quite put your finger on but which gets under your skin, you also leave behind all the places and smells and memories that would otherwise remind you of your past. Along with the chance to reinvent yourself comes a life without all those people who know who you were at 15. At the same time, grief goes into hibernation and you never know when it might strike.”
Now I know when it strikes. It strikes when the smells and the memories come out of hibernation. It strikes when, through melancholic melodies and tireless choir traditions, you travel back in time to when she was alive, and you’re reminded that she only exists in past tense. It strikes when you buy all the things for the perfect Christmas and it hits you that something’s always missing. It strikes when you share the memory of her with her nephews, because your memories are all they’ll ever get. You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.
He sends me a screen grab of a tweet: Grief often reveals itself as rage.
We booked a first-class flight to Sweden on the 12th of December 2006 – first-class, because that’s all that’s left when you book your flights the same day that you travel – and the first thing I heard when I woke up the following morning on a mattress on the floor of my parents’ sitting room and it dawned on me why I was there, was the sound of Sankta Lucia coming from the TV as the nation woke to celebrate an Italian saint.
Advent
noun /ˈædvent/
A coming into place, view, or being; arrival.
The fact of an event happening, an invention being made, or a person arriving.
This is what it is, grief at a time of Advent: rising and swelling at the most wonderful time of the year; the anniversary of the loss of my sister just a few days before the serene celebration of Lucia, the bearer of light; the darkest of days during the darkest of times in the northern hemisphere, as we light the stars and the fairy lights and I light a candle for you, baking like we did, singing like we did, at the most wonderful, aching time of the year.
