I opened Puk Qvortrup’s memoir, Into a Star, on the first full day of my recent reading holiday. I had settled in a comfy chair on the patio of where we were staying, sea views and the sun on my face. Moments later, I was up and heading back inside to fetch a box of tissues. And over the next two hours, I tore through the book and the box of tissues.
The book begins –
Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I’m alive.
When Puk was 26-years-old, and pregnant with her second child, her husband, Lasse, collapses in the middle of a half-marathon. Puk, at home preparing for their young son, Elmer’s, birthday party, receives a phone call from the hospital to tell her that Lasse is in a coma. He dies hours later.
In the hour after his death, Puk is assisted at the hospital by a grief counsellor. He speaks to her matter-of-factly about what has happened and Puk observes that ‘…never before had forever felt like such a physical sensation. It crushed me. Lasse was gone forever…’. She soon realises that she has to tell Elmer that his dad had died.
I didn’t know how to talk to a two-year-old about death. We only had fifteen minutes left of the appointment. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to stay here. I couldn’t remember the name of the man sitting opposite me, but he was the person who was to help me come up with the most important story of my life. A story I’d have to tell my own child.
Into a Star tells of the year following Lasse’s death, how Puk and Elmer navigated their loss, and how they eventually welcomed baby Kaj into the world. The most striking aspect of this book was how Puk put words to her visceral experience of grief.
I hadn’t needed my mum like this since I was a child. I waited for her to comfort me or tell me to pull myself together, tell me that my children might be my responsibility but I was hers, and she wasn’t about to let the world end on her watch.
This is beautifully (but crushingly) observed when Elmer doesn’t grieve the way in which Puk anticipated. There are times when Elmer doesn’t want to be reminded of his father, and other times, when it is least manageable by Puk, Elmer evokes a memory of Lasse. It is a clear reminder of how grieving is not linear, but rather an unpredictable thing done on its own timetable.
The worst part about the first Christmas as a widow wasn’t that Lasse wasn’t there. It was writing the tags for the presents. Two sad little poems.
To Elmer from Mum.
To Kaj from Mum.
As I have mentioned before, I look for something new each time I pick a grief memoir. In this book, Puk makes an observation that is so succinct and so deeply meaningful, that I lingered over it for some time – of Lasse’s mother, Helle, she says –
We’d lost the same person, but we hadn’t suffered the same loss.
I know that readers will either want to read grief memoirs or they’ll give them a wide berth – it’s not really a genre to dabble in BUT if you were to dabble, Into a Star is magnificent.
4.5/5
One afternoon I’d arranged for Esben, Hans and Helle to pick Elmer up from nursery. They returned to the apartment armed with shopping bags from the market. I gave them a despairing look, but they promised to clean up after themselves. Elmer’s face lit up as they spread the kitchen worktop with apples, oranges, beetroots, carrots and pineapples. Juicing was one of Lasse’s things. He’d loved making juice with Elmer.
