My father cursed our family and left us. But after his death, he followed me everywhere Yonas Hassan Al-Khamiri
My father died nine months ago, and last night he took me home in a taxi.
We knew something was wrong when my father stopped taking his insulin and started leaving his apartment at night without his shoes because there were “plant people” and the floor was made of “muddy water.” After several tests, he was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia, which causes hallucinations and rapid cognitive decline.
He moved to a nursing home in central Stockholm, and I told myself that everything would turn out well. Dad will finally get proper medication, physical therapy, new teeth, foot care, and eye treatment for his deteriorating vision. I imagined that I would come with my sons, and we would finally be able to talk about it all: why he disappeared, what we could have done differently, and why I still held out the naive hope that he would apologize.
In the first weeks at home, he would often tell the nurses the story of how he met my mother. He was a 21-year-old Tunisian store informant who used his impeccable eyesight to catch shoplifters in a mall in Lausanne, Switzerland. She was an 18-year-old Swedish student secretary who was in the country to learn French. They met in a bar. Quoted by Baudelaire. She returned to Sweden. Years of letters. Meeting in Stockholm.
After their first kiss, Dad asked Mom what her last name, Bergman, meant in Swedish.
“Mountain man,” she said. He couldn’t believe it. His family name, Khmer, also means “mountain man” – but in Arabic. Braid chains. Cue fate. braid love forever, forever-Forever ever? (Andre 3000 votes). Their names bound them together in a world that seemed to claim that their love was impossible, because they did not share class, background, religion, skin color, or mother tongue.
It was not 100% true. Khamiri does not literally mean “mountain man” in Arabic. But my father was from Jendouba, Tunisia, near the Kromiri Mountains, and Kromiri sounds like Khmer, so I guess that was true enough. My father’s most crushing loss was divorce. When my mother told him he had to leave, my father cursed me and my brothers: “Your mother will never be able to raise three boys on her own.” “You’ll end up as homeless drug addicts.”
He disappeared. I’ve spent my life trying to prove him wrong. I became a writer, my middle brother is an actor, and my youngest is a psychiatrist. None of us are homeless. But every time I go through a breakup since then, I hear my father’s voice: “I told you not to trust anyone.”
After my father moved into a nursing home, I did a fellowship in New York and moved to the United States with my family. He never forgave me for leaving Sweden. He would call me five times a day to tell me the nurses were trying to poison him. Mossad bugged his room. His plants were still full of people, and the muddy water on the ground was rising day by day. He wanted to go to Tunisia, Paris, or New York. He wanted to be anywhere but there.
“No one has come to see me for weeks,” he said, which was strange because I knew my brothers had been there the day before. “All I need is some physical presence,” he added, which seemed a bit ironic to me, given that all his now-grown children felt the same way when he disappeared.
When we hung up, my sons asked me what was wrong with my grandfather. I tried to explain. She told them: He was sick, he was old, he came from a poor background, a complicated country, he had eight siblings, and his mother could not read or write. He had worked all his life to achieve financial stability. He was convinced that money could create freedom and help him escape a painful past he never wanted to talk about. He had thousands of dreams, he sold watches, imported perfumes, drove the subway, worked as a bartender, studied languages – he always dreamed of that big break that would change everything.
“Am I getting rich?” My eldest son asked.
“It depends what you mean by rich,” I said. “He managed to save some money. But he lost a lot of people along the way.”
I hugged my sons and promised myself that I would not repeat my father’s mistakes — knowing full well that I would make mistakes of my own.
A A few months before he died, he called me to tell me he was lost in the city. It was raining, someone stole his leather jacket and he couldn’t get back to the nursing home. His voice was trembling with fear. “If you turn on the camera, I can guide you,” I said. It took a few minutes to find the button. He showed me his surroundings. I said: “But, Dad, you are sitting in your room.” “Are you sure?” He said, looking at his walls, his television, and the Tabarka Jazz Festival poster, as if this were the first time.
A few days before his death, I was in Paris reading from my last novel, Sisters. The film revolves around three brothers over 35 years old as they try to break free from a family curse. I chose a chapter about a father who forces his son to cut his hair and then helps a shop owner who is being threatened by a drunkard. The chapter ends with this line: “I enjoyed turning my father into a story; in a way, it gave me power over him. It seemed to be the only power I had.”
The next day, my brother texted: “Dad has stopped eating and drinking. Doctors are considering palliative care.” I stood there, narrowing my eyes at the screen, trying to comprehend how helpless my stories were in the face of death.
I flew to Stockholm and spent three days and nights with my brothers at his bedside. He was breathing but couldn’t speak. He was looking at us but didn’t recognize us. It looked like a small bird, with thin wings for its arms and empty holes where white teeth had once been.
The nurses said, “He can still hear you,” so we believed them.
We did not leave his side. We played sati frequently. We told stories. Do you remember that time when he held two rabbits in his hand, killed mosquitoes lurking on the ceiling with towels, pretended to eat a wasp, danced like James Brown, defended us against racist skinheads, quoted Disney movies, forgot our girlfriends’ names, warned us never to get involved in politics, and told us we were crazy for trusting the banking system. Sure, death seemed to be the winner, but our stories put up a good fight. Dementia had turned his mind into a desert, but I imagined our stories planting seeds that might awaken him. And soon final clarity will begin. Soon he will speak. We kept hoping for a logical ending.
One afternoon, we filled the hospital room with people: my mother, my brothers’ girlfriends, their children, older children keeping their distance from his stiff body, younger children fearlessly climbing into bed. For a moment I saw a smile appear on his lips. But there are no words yet.
My middle brother was the last person to hear him speak. The day before I arrived, my father looked up and said: “Tell Per Olof I still love his daughter.” My Swedish grandfather, Per Olof Bergman, died in 1993. My parents divorced in 1995. My father died in 2025.
I We’ve spent 22 years writing about families, perhaps as a rebellion against death. Every time I get a call telling me someone has died, my mind whispers: “You can write about this.” This happened when my first girlfriend committed suicide. When a childhood friend died in a car accident. When my grandfather, grandmother, cousin and uncle died.
For years, I felt guilty about this reflex. Now I see it as a defense mechanism – an illusion of control: “Don’t worry. You’re not powerless. You can come up with an evocative first sentence and a poignant ending. You can put your loss into words and replace everyone who dies with sentences.”
And on some level, we all do this: we lose and we tell stories. We tell stories and then we die. The best case scenario is that time is killing us. No wonder we search frantically for control, for narrative structure, for a happy ending.
But as I sat next to my dying father, I didn’t think about writing. Maybe because I had already mourned him. He once told me: “Everything you have, you got from me. You wouldn’t be a writer without me.” I think he was right, but I think his absence affected me more than his presence.
His breaths became shallow. We said goodbye, we forgave him, we cried. We waited. We waited some more. We said goodbye at least eight times.
At 2:30 a.m., on the third night, his breathing slowed. I woke up my brothers. We sat next to him. His forehead was cold. Long silence. Then another breath. silence. He breathes. silence. He breathes. Then silence. A brief moment of pain. gargle. silence.
He didn’t wake up to say he loved us. He did not explain why things turned out the way they did. Breathe, breathe, then stop.
After his death, I flew to Tunisia to collect letters and photos and meet my cousins and aunts. Even though he was gone, I saw him everywhere. He drove every car, parked behind every bar. The security guard who told me that the mosque in Tunisia would be closed had his eyes closed. The bald man who tried to lure me into an alley in the market had homemade tattoos on his hands. My aunt had the smell of it; My uncle made him laugh. I would never have visited Tunisia without him – and my mind would not allow him to die.
When he returned to New York, he appeared less often. In April, a young version of him sold halal food on 47th Street. In June, a middle-aged version of the referee refereed my son’s soccer game in New Jersey. “Didn’t the referee look like your grandfather?” I asked on our way home. My son had headphones on and was unresponsive.
My father died eight months ago, and last night he took me home in a taxi. I leaned forward to see if it was really him. Same neck, same hair, same shoulders. But when we hit a pothole on Flatbush Avenue, he turned to me and said, “Sorry.”
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Jonas Hassan Al-Khamiri is a Swedish novelist and playwright. His most recent novel, SistersIt is his first book in English