A small turtle with glass chrystals. (Article 7 of the history of my epilepsy.)

To my siblings Bengt, Kerstin and Eva.

Much of my life has been hung on that nail that have been epilepsy. It has ever been present in any context. It is therefore, interesting that until I had reached the age of 40 years so had you, my brother and sisters, no idea that you had a brother who suffered from epilepsy. Our parents did not share the shame with you. At one point a few years ago I wrote a letter never sent to you. My selfish intention was primarily to provoke repressed emotions that were buried in my mind. 

It has been difficult in a natural way to communicate feelings in our family, so the feeling is now somewhat respectful initially when I write to you. Why has it become so? Maybe there are several causes, and it is not at all certain that we think any of us equally. The order in which we are born has had its importance, we are born on two different sites, Landskrona and Lund,  time itself changed the terms,  we are of the opposite sex, etc.  There are many reasons behind our various developments and inhibited relations, and then I will point out that I’m talking about the contact between you and me.  The contact and the experience you have / had with each other, I can, of course, not judge. 

Our body and facial features are so clear and similar it will never be needed to raise any doubt that we have the same parents. Any DNA testing is not needed. However, even though I feel a deep sympathy for the fact that we are siblings of the same parents, so I feel at least for my part that there is more that divides us than unites us. 

It has struck me that I never knew anything about my parents. Not that I think they had some big secrets, but for heaven’s sake they must have had dreams, goals, frustrations and experiences. I had really no idea about their personal history or their inner world. It may well have been deep frozen, but before the ice age, there must surely have been a dreamer, a rebel or a living human being. It's easy to shake off the boredom of not knowing something by saying: “Yes, I do not care, they for sure had their problems to fight with.” I think the opposite, since I have spent time all my life, to fight with myself, remembering important episodes and re-experience my own feelings. The feelings have driven me neurotically over a lifetime and never left me alone. 

"What if Dad had been able to stand up off the couch to sing a tango, asked our mom to bring in the wine, and he would certainly tell about what happened when he was young and went hunting for girls in Dalecarlia." So it was not, but the fact is that during the first few years at Alnarp when he still had not been bogged down in boredom and pain he occasionally sang and told memories in his childhoods local dialect, but those were brief glimpses. My czardas inspired thoughts are born of the fact that I play Hungarian Gipsy music in the background when I write, which in turn reminds me of that in the 40's our father always let the gypsies, who had their caravans down at The Alnarp Beach, tin worn milk cans for Alnarp. He thought they were very talented. I also believe that he secretly admired their freedom and emotional life that contrasted so strongly with his own role as the religious Mr. White who was an infallible head of a department in the conservative and rigid Alnarp environment. 

If I think that our father over the years became more inhibited and flat, which words should I use to describe our mother. She could play down her role as bordering on the nonexistent. She was certainly very aware of how stupid she often did. She probably experienced success with the method which made that she went on with it. However, I am sure that her smartness stood in inverse relationship to the stupid impression she made. If her frozen feelings had been thawed out so we had experienced a bright, talented woman. At selected times, she revealed hidden talents. I do not think it was any coincidence that bright men like Arly Henckel, Einar Svensson, Dean Torsten Berglund and Philip Sörensen, founder of Securitas, was fond of our mother. 

Being the first born in my case had major advantages and disadvantages. I got three years with our mother and father when they still should have thought they were having interesting, stimulating life ahead of them. My father was on his way up in his career and the jaws of the Alnarp hierarchy had not yet closed down around him. He sure had some happy days with the first born, and he spent time with his old classmates from Alnarp whenever an opportunity was given. With her fresh knowledge from her recent studies at the Osby folk high school and with her implausible energy I for sure received a care called satisfactory. Jokes that I received and asked loudly for breast milk until I was two years old are certainly true, a fact which, by the way gave, our mother and father a couple of years of contraception... 

The above was the positive benefits of being first born. The biggest negative factor is probably the main cause of my letter, and it has influenced much of my life and made it both painful and exciting. The Bible was our mother's drug. She relied on it. God's Word until pearly gates. Period. She never allowed herself to doubt. (Which I allow myself to believe that our father did). The first Genesis 3:16 says that: “You will give birth with pain to your children”. Our mother gave birth to me on October 9, 1940, after she had done all the pain, she was mighty. My birthday should have been the October 7.  However, during two days our mother met Biblical claim literally. At the same literal way that she did not cut off her hair during her entire 86-year life. 

That two days trapped in the uterus and / or trapped in the birth canal of a physically strong woman, who gave her word to the Lord to cause pain, is leaving its mark that cannot even neurologists and gynecologists deny. It is not surprising that this two-day tortures led to epilepsy. The abnormal fetal birth prevented the natural instinct to get out head first, which normally is how a number of life's processes are being launched. Instead, I had to be turned around and pulled out by the tail, strangled by the umbilical cord around my neck, a painful process that had gone over the line for the healthy. 

From the terror-filled birth process until you found out that it had led to epilepsy more than 40 years had to pass. Forty years but that you knew what I suffered, what I took medicine to control, what had created a constant anxiety to keep the "social balance" and not to be revealed to be a carrier of a shameful disease. One side of my difficult birth and the imprints that I got meant that I developed a will and energy able to tire out more than you and our parents. If someone tried to stop me, I always found another way. Epilepsy may have disincentives, but the forces behind the seizures possess an energy which more than made up for me. However, it has been at the cost of having had to live with strong medications for many years, and they have put a lid on my emotions. I could describe the picture like that to sit locked up in my own inner prison. Being able to see, hear, speak, think and act but never really at 100% feel connected or attached. 

There is, of course, a risk that my letter may be interpreted as complaints of a wasted life. However, despite the negative aspects I have mentioned my life has, on the contrary, in many respects been a fascinating and exciting journey from both internal and external point of view. As my experiences with different therapies and treatments have begun to break up the neuroses which hampered my feelings and made it possible to use both brain hemispheres, I subsequently realized that the world around me has been given a distorted picture of me. 

Since I was between 3-8 years older than you and kept away from home as much as I could we never tore at each other as children, even if I subsequently realized that I as the big brother for sure was unbearably dominant. We never went to the same school (as I had time to begin in Lund before the primary school reform came), and we had playmates from different families and environments. 

Our father certainly did little to distinguish between us, in each case so that it was evident. He was by nature just and fair but lacked the ability to communicate and explain life's mysteries. A serious incident occurred when I was nine years when our father beat me hard, which ruined the relationship between him and me forever. He suffered probably as much as I and not until 1979 two months before he died when I was home two weeks from the U.S., so he ventured to take up what he did with me when I was a little boy and asked for forgiveness. It took a number of years for me to get over it. Father supported me in my teens, however, practically and helped me out of economical situations that I screwed up. 

With our mother, it was different. We got a special relationship early and took advantage of each other. We were both from a social point of view class climbers, and mother was my timid mentor, and we entertained each other's needs to think ourselves into a “different world.” Your comments about that: “mother always put away the finest pieces of food to Jan” is certainly true, and she was impressed by my natural talent for mobility between the upper bourgeois homes at Alnarp, Lund, or wherever it was. This kind of experiences and adventures we shared over the phone far into the 90s. 

The fact that I did not take our mother's religiosity too seriously did not care mother, but it did, on the other hand, not mean, that I not felt bolstered by her constant "I pray for you, Jan" each time I talked about my problems of one sort or another, which not rarely meant a problem of the marital kind. Mother never doubted her religiosity, but I have a feeling that it was of practical nature. When I divorced myself from Gunilla, so she whined and felt that I was terrible. When I pointed out that Dir. Sörensen, who our mother helped with cooking on festive occasions at his manor Blommeröd, when he divorced himself, then she did not call him terrible! "No, Jan, but there's a difference! He can afford it!" 

Mother had from my birth, a deep-rooted feeling that she had caused something that was not as good as she expected. She kept during 40 years this felling / fact to herself until we spoke in January 1980 when I got home from Primal Therapy in Los Angeles. Suddenly, she began to cry and told me about why the birth took place in the manner I mentioned earlier. This for sure was the reason that she after the birth protected and compensated me in many small everyday situations. Mother's stunted creatures, it took much finesse and tricks to access, and I could write a book about how I gradually learned to play on her frozen feelings. There is a good example from the spring of 1948. The two lowest grades in the Öresund’s school, led by Karin Bergstedt went by bus to Malmö and we visited including the EPA department store. Mother had given me one dollar. For that, I bought a brooch to her for 50 cents. It was a small turtle with glass crystals. When our mother got the brooch plus the 50 cents left over so I had unwittingly made it my life's investment. Mother's tears were genuine and she never forgot it. 

The purpose of this letter is to show what on the surface has been one life, has  underneath been another. It would be interesting to hear your experiences of the conditions and circumstances that we shared over 10-20 years. 

There is no truth, there are only opinions. Hjalmar Söderberg