Keeping things in check and control…

picture taken one year ago today.

When I was fixing up here I got a lot of thoughts (doing things practically; washing the dishes, sewing, fixing up etc., and going for walks or bike tours seem to stimulate thinking!? :-))…

Of some reason I came to think about that we admire people having things in check and control!? Those who don’t, we easily look down upon?? (the contempt for weakness!?? The weak child we once was and don’t want to admit to or come in contact with!??). We can get very unsure with people talking about emotions, expressing emotions. But one can express emotions and feelings in different ways that's for sure.

I knew a man with things in check and control, in a way, and in other ways (definitely) not!! With outbreaks/outbursts of irritation and impatience, not least at his children. Reacting at all and everything, but I am not sure to what degree he acted this out outside the family?? If he only came home and poured this out at the family?

With astonishment I watched this man when he got angry at his small grand-children when they and all sat at the dinner-table. He had not patience if they "messed about"!! But should they be able to learn if they weren't allowed?

Or his outbursts when a door slammed, or if they rocked on a chair at the table.

I reacted as if I had never seen this before! hadn't I? Was this new to me?? Or had I suddenly started to this this phenomenon, since more than 10 years living at another place, for my own.

The one keeping things in check and control, doesn’t he sacrifice things, loose things? What prize does he pay? Any? In his relation to other people, and not least with his children!??? As old he was very dependent on his wife, she was the only one coming him near at all? But the start of their marriage was problematic… Noone had thought he should get married and less get six children, which he got in the end. They were expecting their first child when they married. This child was born only less than three months after the marriage, three weeks earlier than she should.

He was quite insensitive in many ways. Literally almost walking over his children, so they had to jump out of his way… An insensitivity which also resulted in that he could come home or into the house and suddenly see that he was hurt and bleeding, when he had been out working.

And with the animals this family had he wasn’t calm or steady, but waved with his arms and could get angry with them too. So the children had to protect the animals too. Horses and later other animals, and not least the dogs the family had…

This man was physically very strong. Had a very strong heart. Low blood-pressure and low pulse. But at 80 he suddenly a spring (actually around his birthday March 22) felt a knot on one cheek. He had got malign melanoma, but noone could imagine he had got that disease, because he had never been a sunbather - at all. However, he had been working out in the garden and in farm-jobs before his studies and during them and for a period when he and his family had a farm. Probably a lot in the sun, and never protected himself.

When he grew he also had to contribute to the family’s providing, with selling ice-cream to tourist on a long-bridge during the summers. Did he burn himself then? Standing there on the bridge in the sun. Later, in fact the whole life till he died, he always idealized this ice cream selling, but one of his daughters wondered how it actually was… If he didn’t feel humiliated standing there bowing for people, the tourists with money… And what about being with friends? Doing things with friend? Going bathing for instance in the big lake they lived next to in a well known village here. A village I have had mixed feelings for, but have discovered again the last couple of years.

He made this ice cream himself too. They had a stack of ice behind an outhouse under sawdust. Incredible that this happened to a person in the generation just before mine. But this man wasn’t a very young dad. Probably very tied up by his mother? A mother he never spoke badly about at all. But when she was dead he never visited her grave. I wonder if that didn’t say things…

All this beside ordinary work, writing-table-work (skrivbordsjobb as we say). Despite this work he remained strong physically till he died! Shovelled snow the last winter on a big yard, cut the grass, chopped wood in the spring…

What was that melanoma an expression of? Things he had been holding down his whole life? But now screamed out its message?

But this man denied the severity of his disease entirely I think. Reacted in other ways.

A little more than three years later he died, with a tumor in his brain that caused a bleeding.

Who was this man? Yes, he was my father.

Addition: they have found connections between depression and malign melanoma I read somewhere apropos stress-research and exhaustion...