Arren

My confirmation gift was a trip with my grandparents to visit my uncle Arren abroad, flying to Copenhagen on a plane filled with smoke from desperate nicotine addicts that still enjoyed the luxury of lighting up as soon as the light on the 'No Smoking' sign went dark. Everybody smoked.

3 hours inside a metal tube, inhaling various types of toxic smoke from different brands of cigarettes, cigars or pipes. It's hard to imagine that today as acceptable for anyone.

Inevitably, I became violently airsick at the end of that journey, my first international air trip punctuated by vomiting uncontrollably into a small paper bag that quickly flowed over and everything became a mess.

I stepped onto Danish soil dressed in my grandmother's shirt, as my own was reeking.

For some reason, I kept with me the memory from that day of one of the other passengers glancing sideways at my misery, he wasn't yet well known in Iceland at the time but he would later become a famous celebrated news anchor at the only public TV station licensed to operate there. This was then followed by a long career in politics as a left-wing parliamentarian, using his celebrity status as the jumping point.

Every time I watched the news over the next years, I was for some reason reminded of this incident and his sideways glance. Perhaps I was puzzled by an expression I hadn't recognized, was it compassion or disgust?

Copenhagen in the early 80's was a relaxed place and the reality that bad things can happen to good people hadn't been discovered yet. I was even allowed to take the bus to Tivoli all by myself after going there accompanied by my grandparents once. The freedom of those solo journeys was intoxicating, even bus trips were unfamiliar territory to me but I was a fast learner and managed well, complemented by my adequate control of the Danish language that I had learned from the Donald Duck subscriptions that my grandparents had generously supplied me with over the last few years.

We stayed there for close to a week, with my grandmother's older sister that had a small apartment there. It was a World Cup year and I was able to watch a few games on TV when the adults weren't using it.

My uncle and his sister were both studying on the Danish mainland, the trip over there was only a couple of hours by car.

Following in their father's footsteps, both he and his brother had become electricians but to my grandparent's delight Arren then also educated himself further and later graduated from a Scandinavian university as an electrical engineer.
My aunt studied mathematics and computer programming and would later become the dean of one of the Icelandic universities.

My uncle was a giant of a man, with a thick mane of blonde, curly hair and a warm smile. The curly hair would later gradually recede in the latter part of his 20's, as he had apparently inherited my grandfather's baldness genes. Thankfully, those genes don't seem to be a part of our common heritage.

What strikes me is how similar our paths through life have been, with regards to life and our choices of partners.

We are both loyal and selfless to the point where it starts being unhealthy, we've both made choices to distance ourselves from family members for extended periods of time to avoid conflict.
We've also been able to eventually find partners that deserve our loyalty and respect, even if it took us a few failed attempts to learn the difference between co-dependence and independence.

He has been a solid point in the sea of chaos that has been my family for the last three generations. I don't know if he knows how much it meant to me as a child to have him there, but I try to tell him as much whenever we meet.

When my mother and brothers passed, my uncle was always there and it has meant everything to me.

I hope I can be there for him when he needs it the most, he deserves my loyalty and respect.

Orren

Orren was usually a quiet man who didn't drink or do drugs, play politics or engage in arguments. As one of the few farmers who abstained from alcohol, he was frequently called upon to police local balls where spirits flowed freely and violence was the rule rather than the exception.

His two passions were Chess and Football, in the isolation of the rural north he would often wind down a busy day of farming by sitting at his desk and puzzling to overcome chess riddles in a chess magazine he subscribed to.

He'd grown up on the farm with his grandparents, as they took him in after his mother disappeared from the picture when he was very young. My mother and he met in a chance encounter at the hospital where she was working as a nurse, he had been admitted with an inflamed appendix that needed an emergency operation and she a young divorcee with two young children in tow.

He was the son of a neighboring farmer and German girl that had arrived as a refugee in Iceland shortly after the second world war ended. He never talked about her, nor did anyone else in the family.

Something must have happened at any rate, as he was raised by his paternal grandparents that lived on a neighboring farm. To me, they looked like a pixie had married a troll; she was frail and small while he was stocky and built like an ox and only lacked the fangs to fit the label the imagination of a child had applied to him.

Where I grew up in the fishing village further north, there was a strange lady that all the children knew about but none of us knew her name. The reason we were aware of her at all was that it was a game to us to sneak up to her door, knock on it and shout profanities about her dubious German heritage and alleged political opinions and then sprint away to the nearest hiding place somewhere close by and watch her come out fuming and shouting something we couldn't comprehend.

I don't think I ever participated directly on those occasions, but as a young kid it gives you a sense of belonging to be a part of a collective that is doing something together as a group - even if only a handful of the members is taking active actions.

At the time I didn't understand how unfair or cruel this must have felt to her, we were just playing a childish game and our reward from it was the rush of fear combined with the excitement of getting away with something forbidden, as we were able to provoke a response from her without suffering any repercussions.

It was only later that I started thinking that maybe this was his mother that had lived there, to a child every adult is either old or ancient and in my memories she was ancient, as would his mother likely have been by then.

Perhaps she was one of the survivors of one of the worst atrocities at the end of the war, when an overloaded passenger ship containing 15 thousand German refugees was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the middle of winter as they fled westwards. 

Only a handful of souls survived the sinking, the icy embrace of the Baltic sea in January will take even the strongest and the refugees on the ship were mostly women, children and the elderly fleeing the wrath of the Soviets who were expected to show no mercy to their invaders after four years of bloody war.

War never changes and neither do refugees, only the names and nationality of the people suffering change.

What effect this would have had on Orren's childhood, I can only imagine, growing up as a child in a foreign country with a German parent. People from the losing side of any war of aggression are rarely popular at the end of it, and children will take what signs they pick up from their parents and exaggerate them into a microcosm of emotions and violence.

It would be easy to just label him a bad person based on his actions as an adult towards the vulnerable children who were ultimately in his power after we arrived at the farm - but life is an infinite shade of grey rather than being the simple difference between black and white that we prefer it to be.

I can imagine him as a young, frightened boy being singled out for his heritage, beaten or called names no child should ever be called, or worse.

Sympathy for the devil or empathy for the evildoer, I believe we all start out with good intentions and evil is what happens when we get lost along the way to grandmas house when there isn't a woodsman to come to the rescue.

Imagining his childhood and what it must have been like, I can sympathize with him, feel empathy to a degree and come close to forgiving or at least letting go of the hatred I felt for so long.

Whether my brother and sister would have agreed with that, I cannot say.

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

The morning after mother's burial, we had planned to go to a storage facility in the next fjord, she had been renting storage space there for a few years.

With the van being empty now, the plan had been to go there and fill it with whatever had been in storage and drive with it south to hand it over to the local county museum for processing.

One of mother's last wishes was that her collections of collections would be donated to a place where they would become an exhibit. I sometimes think that in her mind she had been envisioning a whole museum dedicated to just her art and collections, and was feverishly working to collect enough things to fill it up before her time was up.

During her last days in the hospital, while she was still conscious, she had had a couple of visits from a couple that ran a local boarding house that had expressed an interest in her collections and that wanted her to sign a document that they said would ensure that the legacy of her art would be secured.

She described them to me as friends she had known for a few months that were very interested in all of her art and anything she had been doing and that they wanted to make sure that it was displayed somewhere for all the world to see.

I asked them kindly in an email to stop doing this after I got their contact details from her, and also told them that she had already committed to donating her collections to the local county museum.

A couple of days later when I went to visit her, she told me the couple had been there again, earlier that morning, and showed me the document that they had given her to sign. They had already signed it.

When I read through it, the document was essentially granting them permissions to enter any and all facilities where she might have any possessions stored and to pick out whatever items or valuables they were interested in while leaving everything else behind.

In essence, legalized grave robbery of the dying.

I asked her closest friends about the couple and did some digging myself. From what I could see and hear this was something they had been practicing for a long time and probably still are doing today.  There were breadcrumb trails showing that they were mostly just interested in valuables that could be sold or used as decorations in their boarding house business, they were usually only reaching out to older people that were nearing the end of their journey.

I called them and told them in less uncertain terms that they were not welcome to continue their efforts, that mother was dying and not in any condition to sign any legal documents and nothing she signed at this point would be legally binding nor did we want to spend our last few days with her doing what they were proposing.

They didn't attempt to push this further before her death, but I got an email from them shortly afterwards expressing their condolences and then asking for the same thing again.

I told them again that all her collections would be going to the local county museum. Thankfully, I never heard from them again.

We drove through the tunnels connecting the two fjords and did some sight-seeing along the way, visiting the places mother and her siblings had grown up in as my grandparents had lived in the other fjord a few years while he was working there as the director of one of the first small dams that provided electricity to the local power grid.

When we finally arrived at the storage facility, the owner sounded and looked less than thrilled at our arrival. Maybe that was how he always was, but the feeling I got was that we weren't welcome.
Thankfully, in the small community of the fjords - everyone is either related or knows the person, my uncle knew him and that was enough to proceed.

When we finally arrived at the oversized storage facility she had rented, disaster struck. I didn't have the right keys with me and we couldn't open the door.

I first asked the storage facility owner if he could open it, but he refused as he said it could be illegal for him to do that even if it sounded very illogical to me. 

I then tried pleading, and finally raging, all falling on deaf ears. 

It doesn't matter if he was wrong or right or had ulterior motives, it was frustrating to not be able to complete what mother had asked for when all that was separating us from it was a fragile door with a flimsy lock.

In my rage, I was seriously considering kicking it in and just being done with it, to hell with the consequences. Thankfully, reason prevailed and I swallowed my disappointment and we left with the verbal agreement that we or someone else would return with the correct keys and that would be the end of it.

I realized my son was watching all of this take place but I can at least take comfort today in that he didn't have to witness his father going further than raising his voice in anger during this.

In retrospect, we would in any case probably not have been able to fit but a fraction of all the treasures she had accumulated in the storage room into the large van we had outside. Without access to it, there was however no way for us to realize the futility of attempting it and the bitter disappointment of failure felt heavy to me as we traveled back to the other fjord and prepared to drive back south.

When we returned back home, I found the correct keys and arranged with the museum beneficiaries to hand it over to them, as they had access to a large truck that was going north to pick up some other donated items from other benefactors.

I later heard from the museum curator that the driver had finally gotten access to it, using the correct keys, but that the sheer volume of things in there was way beyond what he could possibly fit into a single delivery truck so he had filled it up to the brim but had to leave some things behind.

She sent me pictures showing what it had contained, what struck me was that in the midst of the clutters of things were a mattress and a lamp that suggested mother had used the storage room as sleeping quarters when she had been arranging different exhibits in or around the fjords. I always wondered but never asked where she had been staying on those trips, sometimes for days or weeks. Now I know.

My uncle was thankfully able to pick up what remained and empty the storage completely of her things, the remnants being random items that either ended up on the garbage heap or were donated to the local Red Cross facilities.

I talked to the curator for a few more minutes about the journey and what their future plans for the collections would be, she was completely overwhelmed by the amount of objects they now had ownership of and was at a loss of words for what they would do with it or when they would be able to do it. A lifetimes worth of someone's memories and desires framed into collections of assorted treasures that had no monetary value but priceless to them from a sentimental perspective.

2 years later, the curator sent me an email again. They were having a display at the local museum this weekend and one of the exhibits would be from a small part of my mother's collections.

Good bye mother, I hope you were able to attend this and saw the beauty of what we did to honor your memory.

The Road Trip North

"You're late, the next funeral is scheduled to start in mere moments so it would be appreciated if we can be quick about this!"

John's Funeral Arrangement Service was extremely busy, the irritation was barely masked in the funeral attendant's barbed words.  She was right, I was late. Death waits for no man, but here I was still late. Rush hour traffic is murder.

I mumbled a few meaningless words of apologies and we then finished loading the coffin into the van and departed, Mother would be fine in there and she'd now have the last road trip she always wanted. It did mean an overnight stay for her outside our house in the van as it was too late to start the journey by the time everything was ready, but since this was in late March it meant that the winter temperature would help preserve her until she got back north to her final resting place.

In the midst of all of this, our daughter had gotten acute appendicitis that required an immediate operation and was in the hospital with my wife, recovering from the surgery that thankfully went well. That meant it was just the two of us that night, me and my son.

The next morning, we headed out on the icy roads with our precious cargo for her last journey. My son, the young explorer, was coming along for the ride, as were my uncle and one of mother's dearest friends. A small convoy of honor guards in three cars for her last journey back home.

We stopped regularly along the way for some light snacks and biobreaks at the usual pit stops, the white van that was now her hearse parked innocuously outside while tourists flitted by blissfully unaware that there was a coffin inside it.

It didn't even occur to me at the time that what we were doing was all that unusual or whether it was even legally allowed to transport a body in this way. This was just what we had agreed on with her before she died and it felt natural in the moment - even if she was probably too far gone at that point to realize what kind of logistics it would involve to transport her body these 500 miles up north through snow and mountain passes at the cusp of winter.

At the last stop before reaching our destination Siglufjörður, chance or fate had arranged for us to run into Orren the farmer who she had been married to all those years ago.  He was sitting inside with a few of his fellow farmers, discussing something.

He had called her in the hospital during one of her final conscious moments a day or two before her death, to say goodbye or something similar and I ended up being the reluctant man in the middle passing along words not my own. She didn't want to talk to him directly, but told me to thank him for calling. I did.

A few days after she had passed, he called again to express his condolences and to ask when the funeral would be as he wanted to attend. I told him that that it had already taken place, which was true even if her final journey had still not been completed and her coffin was right outside our door at that point. When we talked about it she had expressed a desire for a quiet funeral and we did our best to comply, but her close friends and family could not be denied a last opportunity to say goodbye.

A bigger man than me might have talked to him directly, told him what journey we were on and allowed him to either join us or say his goodbyes to her coffin there at the final stop.

I didn't, in my eyes he was neither family nor a close friend even if they had two children together. If my brother had been there I would have deferred the decision to him and respected it, but he wasn't.

The last leg of the journey was through a treacherous mountain range that I had had frequent nightmares about as a child. It had paved roads now for the most part of it except where the whole mountainside has been slowly but surely sliding into the ocean for the last 50 years or so, a few centimeters every day. At some point, it will probably reach a critical mass and disappear into the ocean in one big mudslide, along with anyone unlucky enough to be driving over it at that point.  In the meantime, it is kept functional by bulldozers shoveling filler material on top of the cracks every few months so that cars can keep using it.

When we arrived in town, we drove through it in silence and went deep into the fjord were the new cemetery was located.

An open grave waited for us to arrive, my uncle had taken care of the arrangements. The evening was pitch black outside as it was late and it then started snowing as if on cue. Icelanders are rumored to have hundreds of different words describing different types of bad weather, and in particular snow.
The word for this would have been 'Slydda' or possibly 'Skafrenningur', both of which roughly translate to different degrees of windy, wet and cold.

Her youngest brother that lived in the next fjord was also there, waiting for us and helping with the last steps. We managed to get her coffin outside using ropes and pulleys, it was heavy and difficult to maneuver but we were eventually able to get it lowered into the grave for her final resting place and then waited in silence as it was filled up with dirt and this part of the journey ended.

She was home now, we had honored her last request.

Remembrance

Memory is a fragile thing, it both fades with time and fractures depending on the number of observers.

As social creatures we often adjust our memories as we go through life, based on our interaction with others, which means that a memory you have may have been influenced by the memories of others or by what you were told happened rather than what you remember happening.

Different people can remember the same event differently but all of them can be correct, even if some of them contradict each other.

The reason is that memory is a reflection of how each person perceives what is happening and not a recording of it. We all experience the world differently and as such we remember differently. This is especially true for the memories of children who are still learning the difference between reality and imagination.

For every truth, there are as many versions as there are people remembering it. Sometimes the truth is simply too painful for you to bear, so you adapt it to be less traumatic. Sometimes it is so traumatic that you file it away in a dark corner of your mind where it slowly festers and grows, and then only comes back to haunt you many years later when you're either old enough to face it or it has grown so big that your mind can't contain it anymore.

A story is a memory, fictitious or real, it may or may not have happened this way. That doesn't mean it is a lie or that it is any less real of a memory. There are no false memories, only different versions.

This story is based on true events, the words have been changed to protect the guilty and heal the innocent.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

In the summer time, on one specific evening of the week, every able-bodied man and child gathered to play some type of football on a field next to the highway that had been donated by one of the farmers for that purpose. The grass on it was seemingly damaged in places beyond repair from frostbite, but the local community had come together to put up a pair of goal posts with nets for good measure.

Our glorious football pitch was essentially a muddy field with all kinds of uneven bits of grass in between the two goals, but we enthusiastically went there every week and enjoyed a brief respite from the monotony of the country life as we ran around like headless chicken, kicking and screaming as we tried to shepherd a vaguely ball-shaped leather object into the other team's net without getting kicked to pieces by them.

One evening on the summer I turned 12, there was a Track & Field trainer there that was scouting for talent to compete in the regionals. I signed up of course, not knowing what I was signing up for.

On a side note, I had attended some Christian summer camp the summer I turned 10 and had won the cross-country competition that they held there so I felt pretty confident about my general athletic capabilities and cocksure I could do anything.

My training regime for the regionals consisted mostly of running around the countryside, throwing rocks, jumping across dikes and chasing cows or sheep... which was something I did a lot of anyway so it didn't really feel all that difficult and without guidance I just assume that was what athletes did. I probably wasn't training in that sense of the word, but it felt like I now had a purpose for what I was already doing so I didn't mind.

On the day of the regionals, we drove from the farm along dusty gravel roads for about 3 hours before arriving in the county capital of Sauðárkrókur where I was dropped off at the sports stadium and told when and where I would be picked up (details which went through one ear and out the other without making a stop in between).

This was the first time I'd done anything like this by myself, to me this was completely alien territory but I did my best to figure out what to do and when. The information I had gotten sadly didn't include basic things like where any bathroom facilities were located or minor details like what to eat or drink during the day.

I ended up with having to improvise, which was something I was used to in any case. Let's just say that whoever was in charge of cleaning up afterwards probably got an unpleasant and smelly surprise when they looked behind one of the sheds that were conveniently out of sight of the track itself.

Given that I didn't have a clue what I was doing and there wasn't really a trainer that guided me in choosing a focus area - I had signed up for competing in every single event available; the long jump, high jump, 100m dash, shot-putt and 800m long distance. Decathlon wasn't a thing yet, but if it had been then I would probably have been doing that as well.

I didn't do well in the first 3 events - average at best. The shot-putt was however where I was expecting to succeed but even there the results were a disappointing 3rd place. Apparently, my muscles were less impressive in reality than they were in my imagination.

The final event I competed in was the 800m long-distance run, there were so many of us competing in it that it had to be split into 2 separate heats and the winner would be the heat with the best time across both.

The first heat completed, it was a neck-to-neck competition and two boys ended up sharing first place in it. I overheard some of the officials there worrying that they only had one gold medal to give out which was going to be problematic for a tie such as that.

It was now time for the second heat, my heat. I lined up with the rest of the boys and waited for the shot to go off. When it did I ran like I was trying to get away from a raging bull, but even that wasn't enough to get away from the rest of the heat. An 800m run consists of two 400m laps, the first lap being the warm-up and the second lap being a sprint for the ones that were still standing.

When you run, you're alone, even if you're in a group. I liked being alone, mostly because I didn't know how crowds worked and what to say, when to say it - or when to shut up.

I never thought of myself as being lonely as a child, even if in retrospect I most likely was. To recognize loneliness or to feel lonely you have to have known the opposite of it at some point I suppose.

Sharing was something that didn't come naturally to me and nobody taught me the importance of it so I simply didn't know what I was missing out on. 

Sharing is caring, but I didn't know how to share so I couldn't care.

As a long-distance runner however, that loneliness and my lack of recognizing it meant I was able to push myself beyond my physical limits without feeling pity or fear for myself.

As the second lap started, I lunged forward. For every step I took, I increased the distance to the rest of the group even as I felt my lungs and heart burning, screaming and begging me to stop.

I ignored their complaints and warnings, they were unimportant and I would do this even if it killed me.

I reached the goal in first place and collapsed exhausted on the ground. I was only vaguely aware of the same officials I had overheard earlier saying "We don't need to worry about splitting the medal, this heat was way faster than the other one".

I won the gold medal for the 800m sprint, but what I remember from the trip back was that when Orren the farmer that was married to my mother picked me up and I showed him my gold medal he remarked that he was surprised that I had won anything and that he hadn't been expecting it.

That felt good, that's when I realized that sharing is caring.

And that I was lonely.

Oh brothers, where art thou?

The call came in, my uncle told me my brother had passed.

I wasn't expecting it but neither was I surprised, I was just nothing. We were estranged since the death of our mother, some things broken can never be made whole again.

The circumstances of his passing were not clear, and what little detail we could get was that it had been at the farm where we grew up and that he had been found lifeless, lying face-down in the barn there.

He was living in Sweden at the time, but was back home on an extended visit, it wasn't uncommon for him to go on such visits for days and weeks on end now and then.

Sometimes these visits were just convenient excuses, he was still at war with his inner demons and many of his battles raged on without mercy for days or weeks as he tried in vain to put out the fires with more gasoline.

His father had been expecting him to take over the family estate, a farm of several hundred sheep and rolling meadows. I don't think that prospect was something he looked forward to, whether it was to disappoint his father by refusing to take over the farm or just selling it or to surrender and be shackled permanently to the place we grew up on without much in the form of nurture.

The father was an old man at this stage and in no state to care for animals or even himself as he now lived far away at a nursing home in some form of retirement.

There were rumors of starvation and neglect around the farm animals in the wake of his departure, but it was hushed up as his neighbors swept in to help feed them as close-knit communities do, likely in the expectation that it would only be a temporary measure until my brother could return to claim his inheritance and his rightful place as the head of the household.

It never came to be, his 50th birthday never was.

For the second time in only a few years, the dead were beckoning me to travel north to attend them and I could not refuse.

By accident, we were present at the hospital when my brothers body was interred. His father hadn't particularly intended us to be a part of that ceremony, my brother's daughter and niece were there however and we found out about it through them and decided to pay our final respects.

As the shroud was lifted, what struck me immediately was how his face was all swollen and blue with t tint of purple chasing the edges. I've read about it being something that can happen when a body lies face-down for extended periods of time, if the head is in a lower position than the rest of it.
Even so, not knowing what happened to him asked nagging questions even if the answers seemed obvious.

I would have liked to know more about his final hours, but his father wasn't inclined to talk about it and I wasn't inclined to ask. In any case, he was a father with a son that had just passed away, whatever questions I had as an estranged brother would be less important.

At the church, we carried the casket out of the church with his friends and my uncle, it was as heavy as a small ox. Whatever he had been doing these last five years he had been doing a lot of it.

2 months later the call came in again, again it was my uncle. This time it was my youngest brother who died from cancer with little or no warning. He had been living at a home for the severely autistic for the last 30 years, I had visited him there but only infrequently and not for some years since my mother passed.

This time I could not attend the dead, my son having just started school in the country we had just moved to. I could take comfort in that my partners attended on my behalf, while I watched over the Internet as his coffin travelled into the afterlife.

My mother, sister and youngest brother, all taken by cancer. 

My younger brother taken by the unresolved trauma of indifference and neglect, having lived most of his life with severe burn scar tissue from the terrible accident he had when we were all living together at the farm.

Indifference is violence without commitment, Neglect is indifference through alternative means.

If there's anything that I want to tell you, then it is that you matter to me and that I care. Deeply.