Friday, January 24
Home, 13:00
Everyone got up early because everyone was awake, and Naa’s school started at 8:30. We spent the morning doing nothing very much on the surface, and a lot of things underneath.
We learned that we may very well get permission to bury Auo on Monday or Tuesday, because it is now almost certain that there will be no need to perform an autopsy. The doctor Irma spoke with said that the cause of death was obvious, and confirmed that it was also very, very rare.
It has been snowing all morning, the kind of slowly falling flakes that appear in movies. I am sitting in Auo’s room at her desk looking out of the window at the house behind us; the house that is totally hidden by leaves in the summer.
Soon we will go on a short tour of undertakers and eventually decide on the third. The woman in the first one gave the impression that she wanted to take over everything and that Irma would have to fight to have any input in the process at all. The woman in the second one was like a parody of a funeral director. She was “sad” from the moment we walked in and even cocked her head to one side to show us how deeply she felt our plight. The woman in the third one dealt with us flatly, in Irma’s phrase: she asked what we wanted her to do and what we wanted to do ourselves, and then worked out the price.
So its HOK Elanto for us; although we will both feel compelled to remind each other that we would rather have nobody at all; we would rather that this whole business was unnecessary because Auo was by now almost fully recovered.
In the evening Jutta will phone and I will be happy to hear her voice. Then the parents of Auo’s friends will arrive en masse for a session whose purpose I am unclear about. They will be here about two and a half hours (although one parent will arrive an hour early leaving me feeling uncomfortably claustrophobic), and we will tell them what has happened, why it happened, how statistically unlikely it was, and how we are trying to cope. It will become clear that some of Auo’s friends are almost overwhelmed by feelings of loss and hopelessness, and that some of their parents really need this information in order to comfort them. By the end I will be very glad they came.
The day, though, will leave me profoundly tired and depressed. I will go to bed aching from head to toe with what Kari Hyyrynen has assured me is only muscular stress.