“I will never meet her again, I will never smell her again, I will touch her and say I love her, all that is over.”
– There is something about the two words “never again”. It’s damn painful to think about it, even though it’s been several years since she died from me.
She died in July, when the sun is high in the sky and summer is at its very best. Now it’s soon time again, and Ole Robert Sunde is sitting at his desk at home in Bislett. Here he sits from early morning until late at night reading and writing. A green work lamp lights up patiently, several pairs of glasses are neatly sorted. Last time he counted, he had ten thousand books in here, they cover every inch from floor to ceiling.
– I force myself to go on a trip every day, otherwise I sit here and buzz for myself. Every single day.
The shirt is white and a little too big, with stains that have not been washed away. The hair is glistening at the top and far in the neck, the gray beard matches. Only the eyebrows have retained the original, dark color.
He walks out to the kitchen to fix coffee, comes back with cups and a bowl of chocolate.
Intense pain
It is six years since his wife, visual artist Marit Gulbrandsen, died after a four-year battle with cancer. He lost her he calls his light through 45 years. Now Ole Robert Sunde is up to date with the third book in what has become a mourning trilogy about the loss of his wife and the time afterwards.
– Some days are missed so intensely that it hurts physically, everywhere I see something that reminds me of her.
A pair of red shoes over the asphalt makes him think of her red shoes, and the chafing she got when they were in London. A green, fluttering scarf that has the same color as the wine bottles she lit candles on an autumn evening at the cottage. The grief has settled like a heavy blanket over his life, over the home they shared, the sofa where she lay and became sicker and sicker, in the bed that feels so big and empty without her.
– It is difficult to understand that she is gone forever, I struggle to comprehend it. I hear about people who move on, who process grief and reconcile with death, but I do not want that. My thing is to see what grief is, what it does to me. That is the landscape I explore in these books.
– Someone might say that you cultivate grief?
– Yes, my daughter says so, and maybe it’s true. I do not want to move on, I can not. I’m terrified of losing her completely, even though I know it’s impossible.
– Did you ever think that you were going to mourn your death?
– No. I have always thought that I will continue to work, but I was put very far back and feel ribbed and naked.
THE BOOK ROOM: Here, in the work room in the apartment at Bislett, surrounded by thousands of books, Ole Robert Sunde creates his own books. Photo: Annika Byrde
sea view
Pang, gone
The sun shines in through the window and hits him in the middle of the face. This is where he stood when he saw his wife’s doubles on the bench below.
– She was sitting right down there, on that bench. I knew it was not her, but she was so similar, and why was she sitting there?
Among the books on the bookshelf, he has inserted a pair of binoculars, another is on the window sill in the kitchen. He always thought that he was the one who should go out of life first.
– I took it for granted that we would grow old together, just have a good time until I died, not her. But then … Pang, then she disappeared, only 59 years old.
New women
He has tried to move on with a new girlfriend, without success.
– I have been with six women after her, and it has gone to hell every time.
– What has been most difficult?
– Everything. They do not smell like her, do not bulge like her, do not cuddle like her. No one is like her. Lying naked and close to a lady who is not her … I feel unfaithful, even though I know I can not be unfaithful to her when she is dead.
Did not talk about death
Marit and Ole Robert met in Moss. She was fifteen and a half, he nineteen. It was a youthful infatuation that never ended.
– To me she was everything. And life without her …
He stops. Looking for the words.
– I work and work and work, maybe it’s a kind of escape.
He lightly strokes the cover of the new book. The intricate pattern the wife created covers the surface, the same pattern that also adorns her tombstone. Her art is everywhere in the apartment, on the wall above the sofa, in the glass windows above the doors to the bedrooms, and in his head like eternal cracks after a long life together.
ART: Marit Gulbrandsen’s artwork has been included on the cover of Sunde’s latest novel. Photo: Annika Byrde
sea view
– She gradually disappeared before my eyes, the disease made her lose from seventy kilos to thirty-five. Everything I thought was sexy with her was gone, and I was restrained. She noticed that.
– Did you talk about death together?
– No. She did not want to talk to me about dying, she did not think I could stand it.
The museum
Everything is as it was when she lived, he has not changed anything in the apartment they bought together in 1984. First they were two, then the children came, and then they became five. Now it’s just him in the big apartment on Bislett.
– She could come back tomorrow and would recognize herself immediately. I live in a museum, a museum about her and our lives.
– Are you waiting for her?
– I know she will never come back, she is gone forever. Still, it would be only natural if she suddenly came in the door now.
Mother died of alcohol – Cruel
One of her finest dresses hangs on the wall, as does the hat she wore in the summer.
– I’ll never move from here.
– Do you feel sick all the time?
He pulls on it.
– The days go by, and I thrive well in my life. I’m fine. But there’s a big hole inside me for her, and it’s never gone. I do not want it to go away either.
– What would she have said if she had read the books?
– She did not like them at all, I do not think so. She would say that I was jealous and self-centered which overturns me in grief. But I hope she would see the books as a declaration of love as well.
Sunde fiddles with a white handkerchief, strokes it over the eyes.
– It’s not easy for me. But now I do not want to write more books about grief, I want to return to the difficult, unreadable books that do not sell shit.
STOPPED: After starting the mourning trilogy, Sunde experienced for the first time that people stopped him on the street to talk about his books. About the artist wife who is no longer. Photo: Annika Byrde
sea view
Cancer author
Long sentences, digressions and whims, paths that are trodden while he writes. He wrote a book without putting a single sentence before page 400. Narrow books that capture few, but that make the literary critics cheer and turn the dice to six. With the mourning trilogy, he has for the first time tasted being public property.
– People have stopped me on the street after these books, I have never experienced that before. I have become a cancer writer.
– What are they telling you?
– They say that the books have hit a nerve in them, even though they have never read any of the other things I have written. It’s nice, but also weird.
– Do not feel safe
Soon it will be July again, what for Sunde has become the month of death.
– Carrying her coffin out of the church and into the summer day was damn uncomfortable. I hate July, and would love to wipe away the whole month.
– How do you handle it?
– I go for walks and write and drink away from it. Death is damn serious, it’s nothing to fuck with.
He fiddles with a picture on the phone, her memorial stone fills the screen. On the tombstone are several smaller stones, he likes to lay one down when he is there.
– I have it from “Schindler’s list”, it is an old Jewish tradition to put a stone on the grave of the one you loved. It is easier than trying to talk to her, because what the hell should I say?
–
