The headline reads “A last fika at grandmas”. It’s strange for me to write and then read it. On our visit to Sweden, my mom and aunt had decided we should have one last dinner all together in grandmas house the night before the funeral and right after the funeral we all went to the house to have a fika together. The dinner felt strange, in fact it was so strange that we ended up laughing a lot and told weird stories all night. Some of the strangeness was also that we had one family member who doesn’t speak Swedish and everybody was trying to figure out how to include him, haha. But we had a great time, even if we were missing one important person.
The fika was hard for me though. The funeral was incredibly beautiful and the priest did a very good job. From the stories my mom and aunt had told him, he had captured all the right things about grandma and the way he spoke about her was very nice. I didn’t cry much at the funeral, cause it really felt like a closure and also like a “I’ll see you again some time”. In the middle of it, it felt like she left the church and it got brighter in there. What was left was just my feelings of her being gone and the memories I have of her, but she was no longer present. I’m sure that I was the only one who felt it this way. Anyway… We went to grandmas house and when the others prepared stuff in the kitchen, it hit me. This would most likely be my very last time I visit this house. I walked into the outdoor storage and the smell in there took me back to my childhood when I ran in and out of there for different reasons. I started crying. When I walked back into the house and was gonna sit down for rhubarb pie, I tried my best to keep it together. Not because I didn’t want them to see me cry, I mean, we all just came from a funeral, but I saw that my two younger cousins, who took the funeral very hard, was actually laughing at that moment. I kept my tears away til I came back to New York.
Next time I go to Sweden, I probably can’t visit the house, and there will be no more fikas with grandma. This is a thought that keeps coming back. I will miss her house. And I miss my grandma ♥