Little did I know - much less appreciated - how difficult it is for sixty-plus people to fall in love...again! Until a woman friend I met on the net brought out what I could not comprehend in the beginning. Re-starting life is harder for many middle-aged people because many are saddled with painful experiences caused by losses that wounded their souls.I recently became a member of a society of sixty-plus people who are looking for friends and love. A majority of the members are women, which proves that they are the surviving parties most affected by losses as a result of death of a life partner or one's own child, divorce that came too late in life, and other heart-shattering experiences that left deep wounds in the soul. The "society" offers a forum of exchange between members that keep the flow of communication on different topics lively, thus breaking social isolation among those that have already been deleted from the system after retirement.
I found myself writing a Swedish blog in the form of a diary. In the beginning I felt hopelessly lost in the nuances of the Swedish language. I was searching for a style I am used to in English, meanings I could hide between the lines but which do not escape the detection of the native speakers. But I was already there, and hell! I was going to write in Swedish. I wanted a unique style, something all my own and not one subject to comparison. Hence, I decided that all my narrations would start with an exotic recipe, and then proceed with a philosophy. I would find a philosophy for my day's encounters from the "sublime to the ridiculous".
I started this new project first with a diary entry about "Hot meatballs for a Sunday family dinner", and continued with a serious topic on how to break social isolation without being lost in cyberspace. The response was awesome. I had orders for several kilos of hot meatballs by a reader ready to offer cash on immediate delivery. Then, I followed it with "Sushi and Tempura, after getting lost on the way to the city". Then came "Peking duck and the English taxi-driver " - (the English driver who offered me a place in his bed when I could not remember the address of the place I was going to one late night in London.).
Then came " From Sjögräs" to "Cibo" - which was about a booking in Söder's Sjögräs restaurant that was unfortunately not booked at all, and that we were forced to find another restaurant and ended up in "Cibo", an Italian restaurant in Åsogatan that was much better than Sjögräs. And after the dinner, we went on a car drive around Stockholm's harbour, looked at the majestic white ships quietly moored side by side on a still night when Stockholm city slept. And inside the car, Tom Jones sang "Touch Me..and I will be a fool again."
My latest diary entry was about "Hot lamb curry and the poetry of life". I gave the recipe of an authentic indian lamb curry and proceeded to describe a day in my work in a nursing home; how my heart broke when one of my patients died especially after the relatives arrived and started to cry. I went to a dark room and cried my heart out, not because a very sick patient died but at the images of deaths happening in war torn areas; of children lying dead in the street; of mothers clinging to the lifeless bodies of their children and all the mothers and wives losing their sons and husbands to senseless killings in the Middle East. I cried over the lifeless body of my husband on a hospital bed, and over many other deaths all over the world, unmourned and uncelebrated. I wanted to call someone and say:" Help me!"
There is indeed poetry in life and in death, in the beautiful as well as in the ugly, in the solitude the heart suffers from as well as in the glimpses of hope that, what has been shattered may find a new hope, only if the heart can forgive and forget that hurts from the past.#
