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When I met Stieg, his mama, Vivianne, became my “substitute” mother. She was another woman of strong will. And like my grandmother, she was the one who ran her family. I really admired her. She managed a ready-to-wear store, but her ambition was to change society, and to the amazement of the local political bigwigs, she was elected to the city council on the Social Democratic ticket. “Nothing mysterious about it,” she explained with a grin. “What with all the customers traipsing through the shop, everyone in town knew who I was!” And since I’m an architect, when Vivianne joined the municipal urban planning commission, the two of us had one more thing to share.

Stieg and Vivianne were very much alike, and anything they did was done with wholehearted commitment. He was fond of her, but not in the way one loves a mother; it was more as if he felt comfortably close to her. And he treated his father and brother as if they were his foster family. After we moved to Stockholm in 1977, we didn’t often travel the six hundred or so miles to Umea. In Onnesmark, a village in my native locality of Lovanger, Stieg’s parents had a vacation home (coincidentally enough, the house had been built by my paternal great-uncle), and they loaned the place to us a few times during the summer months. In the 1980s, we also spent a few Christmases in Umea with Stieg’s parents, but most of the time we spent holidays with my family: Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer’s Day—which we Swedes celebrate lavishly, feasting on seasonal foods, putting up decorations of greenery and wildflowers, and dancing to folk music around a huge maypole. We even considered making Midsummer’s Day our national holiday!

Then Vivianne got breast cancer, and in August of 1991, on her way home after a treatment session at the hospital, she suffered an aneurysm. We immediately flew up from Stockholm to be with her. She was unconscious, but I held her hand and told her softly about Stieg, our plans, what we were working on, as if everything were fine. I felt that she could hear me. The next day, she died. She had waited for us. Just as my mother would do the following year. She too had had breast cancer, and then she was diagnosed with lung cancer, which she fought with a tenacity that astonished everyone in the clinic for palliative care where she was hospitalized. I can still see her sitting on the balcony, wrapped in a blanket, smoking and coughing. My brother and I began taking turns at her bedside, but my sister, who lived in London, was unable to join us before Christmas. So my mother hung on. At the end of December, with her three children gathered around her, she died. So our two mamas both chose the moment when they would let go.

Not Stieg. He was ambushed, taken by surprise.

AFTER WE bought our apartment on the large island of Sodermalm—a district in central Stockholm—in 1991, we celebrated all our holidays in the capital with my brother and sister. Erland, Stieg’s father, would come to the city from time to time with his new companion, Gun, and then we’d have coffee or dinner together at a cafe or restaurant, depending on our various schedules. Erland often urged Stieg to come see his brother, if only for a short while whenever we drove up to clear brush from the forest around the small cabin I shared with my siblings in Onnesmark, but there was almost no bond between the two brothers. This is why we did not attend Joakim’s wedding or any of the family birthday celebrations. Stieg would sidestep the subject with Erland by explaining that his work kept him fairly busy. Still, I do remember a few times when we were passing through Umea and had coffee with Joakim and his family just to please Erland. Joakim clearly doesn’t remember all this, as he has told the media about having quite strong ties with Stieg. In thirty years, Joakim came to our home only twice: once at the end of the 1970s, and again when Stieg died. Stieg and I always saw a lot of my brother