"It's not a screen, it's a gateway to wherever your heart desires."

February 8, 2019 5:10 PM

In 1993, at the family home in Ostensjo in south-east Oslo, Robert and Trude Steen tried to deal with the news that their son, Mats, had Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He would not live what they considered a "normal life." He would die young and be taken away from them—without having set his mark on the world. They were so completely mistaken. When Mats died, they discovered that people all over Europe lit candles in his memory.

Robert delivered his funeral eulogy for Mats in late 2014, in a chapel at the Norwegian capital's Western Cemetery.

Among those who sat listening to his words - in-between relatives and a few people from the health service who knew Mats well - was a group of people the family didn't know.

Only Robert had met them. And only once, the evening before.

Mats had barely left the basement flat underneath his family's home in the last years of his life, so it was strange that people unknown to the family were present at the funeral.

Even stranger - Mats himself had also never met these people.

Before his death, these grieving visitors would not have thought of Mats as Mats - but instead as Ibelin, a nobleman by birth, a philanderer and a detective. Some of those paying their respects lived close by, but others had come from afar. They wept for their good friend.

posted by Johnny Wallflower (3 comments total)

Well now I've got tears.
posted by gryftir at 5:22 PM on February 8, 2019 [1 favorite]

I read this yesterday and it's beautiful and heartbreaking.

.
posted by Fizz at 5:53 PM on February 8, 2019

Double
posted by deadwax at 5:58 PM on February 8, 2019