Ingvar Carlsson has rarely shared his private life with the public, but in the new book “In the company of death” we get to know a new side of the former prime minister. In the book, he tells, among other things, about the day when, as a twelve-year-old, he found his father dead – something that has come to affect him deeply.
– I rushed home to my mother and just shouted ‘father is dead’, then everything went black, he says when he is a guest on Nyhetsmorgon.
It was in connection with the corona pandemic that Ingvar Carlsson became more aware of his own death. But after anxiously brooding that the virus threatened to take his life, he decided to do something about it.
– I started thinking about how death has affected me in the past and how I had lived with death, both the sudden and dramatic and the slower, and suddenly I got a completely different perspective, he says.
With the new approach was born the idea for the book “In the company of death”.
Found the father dead at work
The book contains Ingvar Carlsson’s personal stories about how death, on several occasions during the course of his life, affected him and how it changed life conditions completely.
One chapter is about how, at the age of twelve, he found his father dead at the coffee roaster where he worked. Ingvar Carlsson had just completed an errand when he realized that everything was not right.
– On the way back to his workplace, I felt that something was wrong because it smelled burnt, so I got worried and rushed as much as I could. But when I came back, my dad was on the floor.
It would turn out that the father suffered a heart attack, and his life could not be saved.
“Taught me to take responsibility”
Although he describes the incident as a traumatic experience, Ingvar Carlsson believes that he learned lessons from the difficult things he experienced as a child.
– I have reluctantly been forced to admit that perhaps I also learned something that I benefited from later in life when major disasters occurred, he says.
– I learned to take responsibility and that you have to move on. In that way, maybe I became a leader who was able to handle certain things in a way that I might not have been able to do without that horrible experience.
The wife suffered from Alzheimer’s
Another chapter of the book deals with the wife Ingrid, who is ill with Alzheimer’s. Although she does not remember for long, and can no longer live at home, Ingvar Carlsson feels gratitude every day.
– We can go for walks and comment on the birds and children playing in the park – these will be very important moments. We are experiencing the Swedish early summer, and it is not a bad experience.