My chest grows warm at the memory, and yet there’s a sharp pinch between my ribs. That’s how it’s been ever since I got the phone call that my father had died. Every moment I feel like I’m torn between two worlds: the world where my father is still alive and my life can carry on as usual, and the world where my father is dead and my life has changed irrevocably, never to be the same.
It was my father’s colleague, Noora, who had made the call a week ago. She told me that my father had gone for a walk in the woods and somehow became disoriented. A search party found him the next day, coated in ice and snow. Dead.
The news didn’t seem real at the time. To be honest, it still doesn’t. It feels like those two worlds are still intermingling with each other, and I keep being bounced around and I never know where I’ll land. Sometimes I just wish that the grief would set like cement, because the moments where the reality crashes upon me can be too difficult to bear. I’d rather be stuck in the thick of it, all the time, as real and raw as possible, as if I could get the pain over with.
People assumed that because I rarely saw or spoke to my father that we didn’t have a close relationship, but the strange thing is that, despite the distance, I felt closer to him than my mother. It’s like we had our own silent language, or some kind of magnetic tie between us that kept us connected throughout my life. I always felt him with me, felt his love, even when we were technically estranged.
That’s the part that hurts the most, though. After high school, when my mother moved to Seattle with her now-husband George, and I was still in LA, I thought about going to Finland. I thought about asking if my father would come to LA. I thought these things, but along with the thoughts of I should stop eating so many donuts and I don’t need to watch Howl’s Moving Castle again, and I certainly don’t need another succulent for the patio, they never came to fruition. I just thought them and moved on, making the mistake of thinking there was plenty of time. I decided that a year from now, when I turned twenty-five, that’s when I’d finally take a vacation from work and go and see my father. I thought that’s when I’d start making him—my family—a priority.
I never thought he’d die. Not now, frankly not ever. He didn’t seem the type, and if you’d met him you’d know. My father was like an unstoppable force. He was the life of the party, popular to the bone, full of life and zest. People loved him and he loved people. My father had this way of making you believe in magic, in that anything in the world was possible, and that you could be anything you wanted to be.
And now he’s…gone.
There has to be a mistake, I think to myself as the plane slams down onto the runway. I grip the armrests tighter, warily glancing out the window at the snow that’s blowing across the slice of bare pavement on the runway.
We bump along for a while and finally come to a stop.
I let out the breath I was holding as the flight attendant starts speaking in Finnish, so fast that I can’t understand a word of it. I have a very rudimentary grasp of the language from what my father taught me as a child, and I’ll admit it was only because Finnish inspired Tolkien’s Elvish language that made me stay interested in it.
It doesn’t take long for me to exit the plane, considering how small it is and it was only half-full to begin with, February being Lapland’s off-season. I still have to wait for my carry-on bag though, since they made me check it because of the diminutive overhead bins, and it’s while I’m waiting at baggage claim in what must be the world’s tiniest airport that I feel a burst of cold at my back.
For a moment I’m disoriented, dizzy, and the skin on my scalp prickles.
I turn around to see a middle-aged woman staring at me, short, with a graying blonde bob and round, weathered cheeks that shine like apples. She’s smiling, though her dark eyes aren’t.
“Welcome to Sampi,” the woman says to me in a thick accent, and though I’ve never met her before, I immediately know it’s Noora. In fact, I can hear her name being sung in my head, as if from a robin on a branch, and I have to blink a few times to right myself. Jet lag is no joke.
“Sampi?” I repeat. Dear god, don’t tell me I got on the wrong flight.
“It’s what we Sami people call Lapland,” she says. Then she extends her hand, like an afterthought. “I’m Noora. But you already knew that. I’m sorry we couldn’t have met under better circumstances. You meant the world to your father. There wasn’t a day where he didn’t talk about his dear Hanna.”