Rest in peace L-G D

Ok, here goes. I don’t really know how to write this, so I’ll just have to see how it turns out as I type. I’ve been avoiding it to be honest, as the thought of writing this post has made me sad for weeks, but I feel ready now. At the end of October my beloved godfather - my third parent - died. He had been ill for a very long time, and it was expected, so it wasn’t a bolt out of the blue. I’d managed to get to the ripe old age of 47 without anyone dying on me, so when it became obvious that the most likely person to do so would be him, rather than run away from the fact, I tried to prepare myself as much as I could. I read books about what happens physically to our body as we die, how it is to work in a hospice, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on death. I trained myself for three years to understand and accept the inevitable. I think we in the West have become too good at refusing to accept death as a fact of life, and maybe even think that we’ll all cheat it somehow? David Hockney’s line “The cause of death is birth” rang true, as did the Buddhist concept of impermanence. It made the phone call I got from one of my sisters telling me that my godfather had finally died much easier. In fact, I felt very calm about it. It helped that he had a good death; he died in his sleep, with one of my sisters in the room with him. He was not in pain, and he was not on his own. It felt like a fair trade-off for the past three years, which had been incredibly tough and painful for him - and us. This wonderfully loving and eccentric man, my dad’s best friend, had no immediate family of his own, but through my dad he got one, a large Somali/Filipino mash up of a family. He lived in the apartment upstairs from us, and his door was always open, and for the 17 years I lived in Sweden it was a great comfort to know that he was always just one flight of stairs away, his casa my casa. He was the one who gave me my first camera when I was 10, which turned out to be the most wonderful gift anyone could have given me. As my friend Z wrote to me on the day he died: “ RIP dear Lasse. And thank you for introducing the camera to little Fatima. You will live on in each picture she takes.” I couldn’t agree more.

Within 48 hrs of receiving the news I flew to Stockholm, as he had stipulated that he wanted a muslim funeral (which happens within just a few days after death), a nod to my dad perhaps (or a hedging of bets, in case there’s an afterlife?), so speed was of the essence. One of my sisters, who had been his carer for the past five years, had arranged that we could see him one final time before the funeral, and it felt completely natural that we should do so. I’d never seen a dead person before, and it was truly one of the most intimate, loving experiences in my life. It felt like such an honour. We spoke to him, of him, laughed and cried. It’s an hour of my life I will never forget.

Me and Lasse in 1976. I’m sure he insisted on me wearing the top hat, as that was very much his sense of humour.

I miss you so much Lasse! Accepting death might have been easy, but grief is a different thing altogether. It was something that I couldn’t prepare myself for, but at the same time I’m relieved, as my calm reaction to it all was also slightly confusing. I know my grief is my love for him continuing on, and that is very comforting. RIP Guffar. Jag älskar dig.