Though Lars was Swedish, I always experienced his persona to embody the American spirit. The outgoingness, self-confidence, and competitive attitude – regardless of genre – felt somehow akin to my own approach to life. We also shared a love for cooking and would make delicious meals for our families whenever and wherever we got together.

Though Charlotte and Lars’s fiancé Åsa are childhood friends and in touch regularly, Lars and I didn’t see each other that often. Up until Elle’s graduation party early last June, we hadn’t met in a few years. Yet the two of us still maintained some kind of connection through our respective partners.

In the early days, before Elle arrived and their son Oscar was born, the four of us got together all the more often – at least 4 or 5 times a year. Either on the island of Styrsjö near Göteborg where Åsa’s mother lives, or, somewhere else in Sweden. Together with another good friend, Lars Olemyr, we had an amazing week on Ibiza. And Lars and Åsa visited us twice while we were living in Thailand, once in Karon Beach on Phuket and then again on Lamai Beach on Koh Samui. I also remember a fantastic New Year’s celebration with them at the makeshift night club at Triple Two Hotel in Bangkok.

In recent years, Lars and Åsa made several efforts to get together with us and for whatever reasons, it didn’t happen – which now makes me feel an equal measure of regret and guilt. And the worse kind of guilt is that which you can never wipe completely clean.

While the loss of Lars to Covid-19 is tragic, the abiding sorrow his teenage son Oscar will now have to carry in his heart is, well, unfathomable.

Even if the circumstances were entirely different, I can still after 42 years vividly recall when my mother died and how devastated I was. Not so much because of her death per ce, after three weeks in a coma, I was prepared by her doctor that it was only a matter of time before her lungs and heart gave up. No, it was the ensuing abysmal emptiness and emotional confusion that made it so hard to realize what had happened. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to fairly soon distance myself – at least geographically – from the trauma and drama on Croft Avenue in Los Angeles, by moving to Björcksgatan in Göteborg, Sweden where I eventually started a whole new life.

It’s been harder than I expected to process Lars’s passing. At first, I thought it was my own mortality and the lingering threat of the virus that made it so difficult to accept. But no, it’s the emotional distress that Oscar must be going through right now that I can both relate to and feel somehow. I want to hug him and tell him it will be okay. Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday. Someday.