This, however, is a typical sight in Swedish cemeteries
So a couple of days ago I took my cross country skis and went just down the street to this giant field that leads to a giant park with paths through the forest and beautiful views of the Baltic Sea. (Why yes, I am bragging just a little bit. When you only get 7 hours of sunlight a day, you gotta take what you can get.) I'm very new at this, but fortunately, it's not that complicated, and since many, many Swedes had been there before me, there were nice trails already cut through the snow. So I followed them.
This is the same place where, in other seasons, I go running, and yet it looks so different under a foot of snow--etherial, otherworldly, gorgeous, you name it. And yet, after about forty minutes, I found myself in a place I'd never seen before.
It appeared gradually, as I climbed up a hill with my skis pointed to the side, leaning on my poles so that I didn't slip backwards. There, in the middle of the forest, were these small lanterns, and as I got closer, I could see snow-covered headstones. It was a cemetery, and I held my breath just a bit as I awkwardly approached, feeling as though I were walking into a poem. Probably one by Robert Frost.
When I got close enough to brush the snow from the headstones and take a closer look, however, things began to seem a bit...off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I found one that said (loosely translated), "To Penny. She gave me the best years of her life."
Penny, by the dates I saw, was only 16 when she died.
Granted, a 16-year-old could quite possibly have best years, but I'd never actually heard someone use quite those words to describe them. And then there was the question of just who had put the stone up in the first place. Parents? That was odd. A boyfriend? Even odder, given that that would mean the parents hadn't been involved.
While I was trying to figure this out, I looked over at another, enormous, stone, several yards away:
Now here's the thing. I don't have a hard time believing that a Chinese person would have been in Stockholm in the 1940's, nor that that person could have died at 14. But what I don't believe is that said person wouldn't have a family name. It just wouldn't happen!
And that's when I took a closer look at yet another grave:
"Beloved CANDY"
Yes, I had wandered into a very elaborate, very picturesque, very well-maintained pet cemetery. And with some very famous residents, too! There is even a horse from The Seventh Seal. His name was Don Juan.
And then, of course, it all made perfect sense, the tone of the headstones and the age of the deceased, the first-name-only basis, all of it. But I was fooled for so long because it was so well-looked-after, complete with recently-lit grave lanterns and candles despite the recent snowstorm and temperature dip. Swedish cemeteries have fascinated me since we moved here, as they would any Californian, I think, given how detached we are from graveyards in our everyday life. Here, they sell grave candles in the grocery store that, despite my first assumption, are not called that due to a linguistic holdover from years past but because they are ACTUALLY USED ON GRAVES.
I've also been fantasy dog shopping lately, mostly because I like dogs, but also because this is such a good city in which to have one (see: giant field and forest just down the street), and so many people do. They go everywhere, and they get there on the subways and busses. And as this cemetery shows, having a dog is not just a 12-15 year responsibility here, oh no. You have to keep that lantern lit.
The Swedish word for "cemetery" is "churchyard," so what you are seeing on the out-of-focus sign above is a smashed-together word meaning "animal cemetery."
I still feel like I wandered into a Robert Frost poem. His poems are never what they initially appear to be. (And on that note, the next person to say to me that "good fences make good neighbors" without an appreciation of the tonality of that line is getting an impromptu poetry lecture.)