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After a five-minute train ride out of the city, we’re met with a harsh chill as we step out onto the platform and into the quiet district of Enskededalen. Surrounded by concrete and greenery, it’s a stark contrast to the city of Stockholm that watches from a distance. It’s 6pm. A grey sky hangs over our heads, spitting raindrops down on us at random. During the Stockholm summer, the sun doesn’t set till near midnight, and even then the sky doesn’t turn black like it does at home – just a dark greyish-blue light washing over silhouettes, like the sun never really sleeps. It’s hiding just below the hills, pretending. Jetlagged from a twenty-hour flight, our group of university students follows the tour guide, an enthusiastic middle-aged woman named Helena, along a road to a cemetery called Skogskyrkogården – literally, ‘forest cemetery’, or the Woodland Cemetery. From a lookout, you can see the open green paddock, a couple of cream-coloured buildings and a tall granite cross standing at the other side, breaking up the almost-bare picture of nature. Look further beyond, and you see the woods, a forest of brown and green drawing a line where the living collides with death. The graves are lined up in rows, concrete soldiers hiding among the trees. The word ‘Fred’ is inscribed on some of the graves. Swedish for ‘Peace’. I shut my eyes and listen to the nothingness. It’s hard to imagine a more peaceful resting place. *** Helena tells us that mourners are not allowed to decorate the graves here. No buried person should be favoured over another. ‘But sometimes they allow the graves to be decorated for a short period of time,’ she says, gesturing to a grave decorated with balloons, flowers, and teddy bears. ‘That was a particularly recent and tragic case. She was very young.’ On one of the balloons, a child had written a message in Swedish: ‘Happy ninth birthday Therese’. Look up. The roof of leaves is dizzying. The tops of the trees stretch towards the clouds, away from the dead. *** We come to Seven Springs Way, a gravel path nearly a kilometre long lined by trees and leading to the Chapel of Resurrection. The path is like a hallway, the woods like walls on each side. The chapel stands tall at the end, as foreboding as it is inevitable. Our destination. Helena points at the trees. We’re walking past the birches. Further up the corridor would be the pines, and then as we reach the end we would walk past the spruces. The colours of the different types of trees mean that the path will grow darker as we go along, and mourners will feel a sharper melancholy as the light changes, as if in anticipation of the path’s end at the Chapel of Resurrection. Inside the chapel, the room is lit by ceiling-mounted lights, but the coffin is also bathed in the natural light that streams in through the room’s single window, as if heaven itself were shining down upon the deceased. For all its serenity, there is also an unevenness about the room, as the single window on one side seems to throw off the symmetry. The chapel is like another world: you step into the unfamiliar, a skewed reflection of reality in which the passing of life is elevated out of the shadows and explicitly acknowledged. When we leave the Chapel of Resurrection, we exit through a different door from the one through which we came in. As I walk back with the group, hood on my head, my face buried into the collar of my jacket to shield it from the cold, I feel I’ve come face to face with death and the afterlife. A cemetery bathed in seemingly endless light. A silent world of its own, separated from the outside. It’s 10pm. A grey sky looks down on the Woodland Cemetery. We spot a deer in between the trees, eating the grass. It looks up and sees us. It seems at home in nature, gravestones and all.