“Oh.”
He opened his mouth, about to continue, but stopped himself. There was so much pain in his eyes. The silence in the room was deafening. We were quiet for a long time.
“Where is Andrea?” I finally asked.
Tears ran down his cheeks. “There was a car accident,” he said.
“Is she okay?”
I already knew the answer.
Dennis shook his head.
Falleció. The word stems from the intransitive verb fallecer. Fallecer. To pass away. To die.
Everything went black.
• • •
They told me later that I screamed. After the doctors had discussed the surgery with me, Dennis left the room to go to the bathroom. I reached for my phone and dialed Andrea’s number. It went straight to voice mail. Strange, I thought. I’ll try her later. It was only three months until my wedding and she still hadn’t seen her bridesmaid’s dress. It was hanging at my dad’s place in Sweden, waiting for us all to arrive. Dusty blue. I’d made a chat group with my bridesmaids: Olivia, Rose, Jessica, Mathias (brides-man!), and Andrea. We were talking in the chat group every day, planning wedding details. It had taken us forever to decide between seafoam and dusty blue. Andrea wanted dusty blue. I dialed her number again. She didn’t pick up.
I call Luigi. “Where is Andrea?” I ask. He is crying. “She was driving home from the beach,” he says. She ended up on the wrong side of the road. A truck hit her head-on. It had taken her all day to die. They sent her to the wrong hospital twice. Everything went wrong. As he is speaking, I feel myself floating away. Is this what an out-of-body experience feels like? I am listening to his words but I’m not understanding him. None of this is real. None of this is actually happening. I try to listen to what he is saying but it’s hard because what’s the point in listening to words said in a dream you’re about to wake up from any moment? Luigi keeps talking. I can tell it’s important to him that he is the one sharing this with me; I can tell that he is choosing his words carefully. He says something about surgery and the hospital and the eight hours she fought for her life. Something about that last sentence jolts me back to reality. Eight hours? I do the math in my head and the realization that follows is so gut-wrenching it knocks the breath out of my lungs. During all of the hours I had just spent in agony, Andrea was dying. The moment I collapsed at the airport was the exact moment she hit the truck. That red-hot knife I felt stabbed into my gut was her pain, too. They operated on her stomach to stop the internal bleeding. Our pain came from the same place. Her heart stopped twice. They tried to revive her. It wasn’t my pain. It was ours. It was hers.
The moment my pain went away, the moment I took that deep, full breath . . . was the moment Andrea took her last.
love
2
* * *
AWAKEN
I’ve known death since I was a little girl—my mother introduced us. On the day of my fifth-birthday party, she tried to kill herself. It happened after a celebration with family and balloons and cake and presents, and when the party was over, she said she was tired and asked my dad to take my brother and me home with him for the night. We were halfway to my dad’s house when he realized he’d left something behind (or maybe he had a premonition), and we turned back. Mom was near death when we got there. She’d swallowed two bottles of sleeping pills chased by vodka. I didn’t find the suicide letters until much later: one for family and friends, one for my brother, one for me. I love you so much and I am so sorry . . . I found the letters years later, tucked away neatly in a box in the bottom of a drawer in our living room. There were pictures of me as a baby, old postcards, some drawings, and right there among all the regular memories was an envelope marked “Rachel.” My hands shook as I opened it. I was twelve by then, and as I sat on the floor reading my mother’s final goodbye to me I remember thinking: this is probably going to happen again.
My parents met when they were very young. Mom was nineteen and waiting tables to make ends meet. Dad was four years older and already running several casinos and nightclubs in town. I remember asking my mom if she was ever truly in love with my dad. “I don’t know,” she said. “He gave me safety. And security. He wore these funny-looking suits. We never fought, but he worked all the time. I was always alone.”
I was Mom’s miracle baby, she said, because she was going through a dark time and having me saved her life. I heard that sentence more times than I could ever count as a child: You saved my life. My miracle, she’d say. Mitt mirakel. She soon discovered she was pregnant again, and I was two when my brother, Ludvig, was born. Not long after, my parents split up. Sweden is not a big country, but when Mom decided to study away from our home in Uppsala to become an air traffic controller, it meant I had to stay behind with dad for big parts of the week. She told me that, at one point, while she was away, my father tried to send my brother and me off to a boarding school in the States. Because, according to my mom, if he couldn’t keep the family together, he didn’t want her to have us either. Luckily, the nanny called her in a panic and she rushed home before he could get us to the airport. I don’t know if it’s true—looking back at my life, I realize there is so much that I don’t know. My mother’s version of events was always the complete opposite of my father’s.
Mom was almost a year into her studies when she fell in love with another man, a fighter pilot named Stefan whom she’d met on the military base she was training at. We all moved in together, leaving my father behind. My brother and I started a new school, and my grandmother came to live with us for long stretches of time. I think my dad went insane with jealousy. My mother leaving him, then finding someone else, taking his kids to live with another man . . . It was all too much. He once described the move to me as a “kidnapping.” He said he came to pick us up one day and we were just gone, and he had no idea where we went. That he looked for us everywhere; he wanted his kids back. I know when he finally found us he made our lives miserable. At one point he threatened Stefan’s life, and Stefan started sleeping with his military weapon in his bedside table (in Sweden this is unheard-of—guns are not a part of our society). Dad’s threats got so bad my mom started recording their phone calls in case she had to take him to court. The end result was that my mom got sole custody of us and, for a while, we lost touch with my dad.
Mom, Stefan, and I were on the couch watching a movie when I had my first-ever asthma attack. Stefan was the one who brought me to the hospital and held the oxygen mask over my face while I fought to breathe. It was only once I was an adult that I learned that asthma, though a physical and sometimes chronic illness, is emotionally connected to suppressed anger and fear. It wasn’t strange that, while on the surface things looked good, I started to develop physical ailments. My parents had separated and very traumatically so. My family was broken. And I didn’t know where my dad was anymore. What I remember most is that Mom was happy, so those other things didn’t actually matter all that much. It was the first time in my life I’d seen her that way: genuinely happy. Peaceful. She was happy, so I figured I should be happy, too. To me, Stefan was like a real, live superhero. He flew planes, climbed mountains, and skied faster than anyone I knew. And he was always smiling. That’s what I remember most about him: his smile. And the way he made my mom smile, too. One of my most cherished childhood memories is sitting on Stefan’s shoulders at an après-ski during a ski trip in the north of Sweden. We’d been on the slopes all day and Stefan used his ski to carve us a little nest in the snow, where we sat on blankets, drinking hot chocolate in the sun. I remember my mom happy, turning her face toward the sun, wrapped in his arms.
Later at the hotel there was a band playing and we danced, with me on his shoulders; Stefan holding my hands, making sure I wouldn’t fall. I was only four years old but I remember that moment so clearly, feeling like I was on top of the world. I have little snapshots of memories like that; they are all beautiful, warm, happy, but I can’t piece them together. I do remember him smiling,
all the time. It was only a few months after that day on the slopes that our lives would change forever.
Mom and Stefan were about to be married and had just bought a house together. A few days before they were to sign the papers for the house she was giving my brother a bath when our doorbell rang. I answered it to find Stefan’s best friend and flight partner, along with the captain of the air force, a psychologist, and a priest standing there. While I went to play in another room, the men informed Mom that, earlier that morning, Stefan had flown his “Drake” (the Swedish word for dragon), a high-speed military airplane, into the ocean during a training session. He was found dead outside the plane.
I don’t remember opening the door. I don’t remember being told to go play in another room. I don’t know what happened to my brother—he was in the bath. Who held him? Who held me? Mom collapsed when she heard. I’ve had this story told to me so many times, but only remember bits and pieces of it myself. That’s how trauma works—our minds shut down to protect us. Too much, too soon. I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother outside during the funeral, rushing us through the church aisle, covering our ears so we wouldn’t have to hear our mother’s wailing. I remember the little cards we were given, written in my mom’s handwriting but signed by Stefan. These were the worst hours of her life, but she still managed to get creative to console us and wrote my brother and me letters in his name, explaining how much he loved us and that he would always live in our hearts. I remember a lot of family around, everyone with dark, sad faces. I was filled with questions and deep sadness, but I couldn’t rely on Mom for answers; she was inconsolable. Barely there. I didn’t want to add to her pain by telling her how upset I was. In the midst of all this trauma, no one ever sat me down to explain where Stefan had gone. Someone had mentioned that “he went to heaven”—but I knew that; he flew his plane in the sky all the time. I was almost five years old, which I think was old enough to make sense of some of it, but not old enough to fully understand. I asked a relative what happened to Stefan. She said, “Oh, honey, he loved you so much. He wanted to hurry home to see you, but he flew his plane too fast and it crashed in the ocean.” She had only good intentions, but I understood that to mean it was my fault that Stefan had died. If he had only loved me a little less, I thought, he wouldn’t have hurried back to see me, and he would still be alive and my mother would be okay. Instead, everything was dark and terrible. I’d lost my stepdad and my mom was so consumed with grief I could barely reach her anymore.
After that, we moved back to our hometown of Uppsala and I got to see my dad again. I ran to him and he picked me up. Slumping into his arms, I felt safe and allowed myself to cry, something I hadn’t been able to do with my mom because it would have upset her. “Did you know Stefan died?” I asked. “Yes, I know,” my father said. “And it is good that he died.” Hearing his words, I froze. To this day my dad claims he never spoke those words, but I remember them clearly. He spoke from pain, from jealousy, from having spent more than a year blaming another man for taking his children away. At that moment I understood: there was no one I could talk to, no one I could trust. I had loved Stefan, but no one would give me permission to grieve. Not my dad, and certainly not my mom, whose own grief had caused her to become increasingly unstable as the days passed.
With time, visits from family members became more and more infrequent and, eventually, it was just the three of us again. Caring for my mother fell to me. In the mornings before school I got my little brother up before taking Mom her favorite breakfast in bed—coffee with milk, and bread with cheese and orange jam on a tray. I was just learning to read, but I already knew how to work the coffee machine. Mom was a ghost of her former self, barely functioning, which left me to pick up her motherly duties, things like holding Ludvig’s hand when we crossed the street and blowing out the candles she lit in the evenings and left burning after she went to bed.
Her broken heart incapacitated my mother. For the longest time, when I couldn’t sleep, I would lie facedown on the bed, put the pillow over the back of my head, and scream into the mattress, because that was what my mom did. I thought she did it to help her sleep. I didn’t understand that her screams were those of unspeakable grief. I don’t think the rest of the family knew how bad things were until she tried to take her own life on the day of my birthday party. She survived, but barely, and was committed to a psychiatric institution for a few weeks.
When she finally made it home, Mom tried to pick up the pieces and did her best to start her life again. She had lost her soul mate, her best friend, and her home in the blink of an eye; she had to start a whole new life all alone. I did my best to cheer her up, and after a while I decided that I would make it my sole purpose to get her to become happy again. I truly believed that if I just tried hard enough, I could make her better. That meant doing well in school, keeping myself clean and organized, and not making a fuss about anything. I did my best to be a good girl.
With time, she got healthy enough to take a job in Stockholm at a consulting firm, an hour from our house in Uppsala. She was a single mom, commuting for hours every day and working hard to get by. My brother and I were always the last kids to get picked up from “fritids,” the after-school activity center. The teachers often stayed late with us, waiting for my mother to arrive. I loved being the last one there, helping the teachers turn all the lights off and putting everything away.
My dad, meanwhile, established a life for himself an hour’s flight away in Riga, Latvia, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. We rarely saw him after he moved away. I was eight when, out of the blue, he called to say he was having a daughter with a Ukrainian woman named Natasha, but before the baby was born, he left Natasha for an even younger woman named Inga. Dad didn’t see the baby much, but when I visited him I always went to see her. Her name was Katja and she was beautiful. I loved the idea of having a half sister. It made me feel less alone.
While Dad was busy trying to keep up with his much younger girlfriend, my mom met Calle, a handsome, bearded sailor from Stockholm. They fell in love, or so I think. I don’t know what kind of love is possible when you’ve just lost your soul mate. I can only imagine. I do know I liked Calle, and didn’t mind having him around. After a little while Mom got pregnant and we moved in with Calle and his daughter from a previous marriage, who lived with us every other week. Living in Stockholm was different. I was so nervous to start school I could barely sleep the whole week before. What if nobody liked me? What if I didn’t fit in? The day before school was to begin I fell on a railing and broke a bone in my hand. I had to go to school with a cast on and the mere thought of it made me mortified. I didn’t want to attract any attention, and now I’d have to show up with my arm in a sling! Turns out, the broken bone was a godsend. I made friends on the first day—everyone wanted to know how I’d gotten the cast and what had happened.
Mom gave birth to my little sister Hedda when Katja was a year old. Now I had two half sisters. I loved Hedda an unbelievable amount—she was so little and so fragile, and she needed me. I took it upon myself to care for her as much as I could. I learned how to change her diapers, and how to dance around the kitchen with her when she was fussy and didn’t want to sleep. Even though I was only ten, sometimes it felt like Hedda was mine.
Life was pretty stable for a while. Our new family had settled in and Dad even visited occasionally to take me to dinner, or shopping for a new winter jacket, or to go on ski weekends. Mom and Calle seemed happy enough, but apparently all was not well because, when Hedda was just seven months old, Mom left him for her coworker, who was named, serendipitously, Stefan. Life was about to turn upside down again.
Mom moved us from Calle’s place into a new apartment with Stefan in a nice part of Stockholm. It was huge, with five bedrooms, big enough for the three of us kids and his twins from a previous marriage. They soon married, but I don’t remember much of the ceremony, except that when they said their vows, rather than repeating after the priest and sayin
g, “I promise to love and cherish you for as long as I live,” my mother said, “I want to love and cherish you for as long as I live.” Looking back at it now, I know she really did want to promise, she just couldn’t. She lost something when Stefan died and I don’t think she knew how to get it back. That same year, my dad married Inga in a much more extravagant ceremony. I gave a speech in front of 275 people. “The year 2000 was the year my parents finally got married,” I said. “But not to each other.” The crowd laughed.
Within months, both sets of parents were expecting. My two new baby sisters were born within three months of each other: Emelie to Dad and Inga in May of 2001 and Maia to Mom and Stefan that same August. The whirlwind of events meant an abrupt change in my family tree. Now I had an ex-stepsister I didn’t see anymore, two new stepsiblings, four half sisters, and, of course, my brother. If that wasn’t enough to send me reeling, Mom and Stefan had decided to move us out of the city to a big white house on the nearby island of Lidingö.
I didn’t want to go. I was growing into my own and had only recently realized there was more to life than a crazy family that was constantly morphing into something else. I was just a tween but had secretly started smoking and made friends who showed me how to sneak alcohol from the liquor cabinet without anybody knowing. My friend Stephanie taught me how to wear mascara and eyeliner, and I added tops that showed my midriff and big silver hoop earrings to my look. I padded my bra to make it look like I had breasts, even though I hadn’t yet had my first period. I looked more like sixteen than twelve. And I was angry. I challenged my mother’s rules and rebelled against everything that was expected of me. For entertainment, I went to big department stores and shoplifted makeup, and clothes, and underwear, and stuffed animals, and key chains. Things I didn’t need. I did it for the thrill and never got caught—but I did have to run from a store security guard once. It just felt like icing on the cake. My friends were my accomplices. They were hesitant and nervous. I was ballsy and cocky, always going for bigger, pricier items or the things closest to the register. In short order, I had gone from a quiet, proper, straight-A student to a rebel who was always seeking out drama.
To Love and Let Go Page 2