His absence shaped me. But as my father lay dying in a Stockholm nursing home, I longed to hear him explain
My father died nine months ago and last night he drove me home in a taxi.
We knew something was wrong when my father stopped taking his insulin and started leaving his flat at night without his shoes because there were “people in the plants” and the floor was made of “muddy water”. After several tests, he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, which causes hallucinations and a rapid decline in cognition.
He moved to a nursing home in central Stockholm, and I told myself everything would end well. Dad would finally get proper medication, physical therapy, new teeth, foot care and eye treatment for his declining vision. I imagined coming by with my sons, and we would finally be able to talk about everything: why he disappeared, what we might have done differently and why I still held on to the naive hope that he would apologise.
In the first weeks in the home, he would often tell the nurses the story of how he met my mother. He was a 21-year-old Tunisian store detective, using his impeccable eyesight to catch shoplifters in a mall in Lausanne, Switzerland. She was an 18-year-old Swedish student secretary who was in the country to learn French. They met at a pub. He quoted Baudelaire. She went back to Sweden. Years of letters. A reunion in Stockholm.
