Wednesday, January 22

Yesterday evening I found the password for Auo’s laptop and looked through her pictures. To our surprise we discovered two videos, both of which made Naa and I laugh out loud. In one of them Auo is giving a five minute tour of her room, pointing things out and commenting on them. In the other she has set a camera up at the end of the kitchen work surface and is providing a running commentary as she makes a tuna and rice salad for herself.

Today at 14:15 we went to see her best friends in their class after school. Dan, her favourite teacher, was there along with Maria, the rector. We had found a carefully annotated list of gifts in one of Auo’s notebooks (“Olivia – lip gloss, hot chocolate and RANDOM STUFF”), and the corresponding bag of presents. We therefore gave out the presents that Auo had got for them, and talked with them about her, about the holiday and about how she died. They had spent a couple of days gathering together collections of videos and photos from their cameras and they gave us a usb stick full of those.

Now we are back home and the sky is bright blue. Irma thinks that this was one of the hardest things we have done since we got back and I agree. Sitting down with Auo’s seven closest friends brought home to me that we will never see any of them again in the same way. They will never turn up at our door again, and I will never come home from work to find Olivia and Auo frantically trying to put things back in their place again.

Later I will look at the videos we got and be really thankful that we asked for them. There are several of Auo and Silja messing around at great length in Silja’s room at home, and a couple of Auo and Olivia. I have not listened to them yet so I don’t know which language they are in, but in all of them she appears amused at the world and herself, and spontaneously her in the way I remember her.