Three years ago, she lost her son in Field's

Her 17-year-old son actually had an earache when he woke up that Sunday morning. He was also supposed to pack his brand-new backpack for a hiking trip to Møn with his sister and mother the next day.

But he had taken an extra shift at Nordisk Film’s cinema in Field’s and insisted on going.

»They had a great camaraderie, those kids at the cinema. They weren’t very old. Most of them were 15-18,« his mother says.

So she promised to pack his backpack for him. She and her husband drove him to the station. He jumped out of the car, stuck his head through the window, and gave his stepfather knuckles before disappearing up the stairs in his yellow hoodie and bucket hat.

»Then we drove home. I started doing things in the garden. And stayed there all day.«

Or at least, until her daughter, who also worked at the cinema in Field’s, called and whispered that she could hear someone shooting in the cinema’s foyer. That’s where she had last seen her little brother.

On Sunday, July 3, 2022, around 5:30 p.m., a mentally ill young man walked into the Field’s shopping center with a rifle and killed three people. One of the victims was Esther Leuran’s 17-year-old son.

»One of my children heard their sibling being shot, and they were both there,« she writes in her book, ’Den første dag’ (The first day), which has just been published.

The grief journal is named after the document she created when she returned home early in the morning after first waiting outside Field’s for hours, then spending the night at the Psychiatric Center Amager on Digevej before someone came to tell her that her son was dead.

For a year and a half, she kept writing, in an attempt to find a footing in a completely altered world and to document and remember what happened.

‘The First Day’ is a book about an utterly unbearable personal loss and a collective trauma, where a few people paid a much, much higher price than the rest of us, who followed the images of ambulances, combat troops, and rescue personnel in Ørestad in disbelief.

And later in articles about a psychiatric system that seemingly failed a 22-year-old man who ended up as a killer.

It’s also a book about the »grieving body,« which is vast and heavy to carry around and now needs a little push into the world because it might be a way out of the loop and an escape from the damning loneliness.

Or as Esther Leuran says:

»I share it so I don’t have to bear it on my own.«

The wild child

We meet in a parking lot on the edge of a forest in North Zealand. A tall, slender figure in outdoor clothing steps out of the car. Her smile is broad and soft, her hair long and golden, almost reaching her waist.

She brings firewood in a bucket, matches, and small folding chairs. Coffee, sleeping pads, and napkins. And sleeping bags we can wrap around ourselves if it gets too cold.

We carry everything down to the lake, where she came multiple times a week with her son, who had school refusal for a couple of years. Instead, they made fires, slept in hammocks, sawed wood, searched for badgers and beetles, and named the various trees and moss species.

Her laughter flows freely as she talks about her »wild child« who climbed trees and often ended up falling into the water. Who loved climbing and dreamt of going to Japan.

»He was a nature child. A good child. Fundamentally healthy. He needed to feel his body and use it. But he didn’t care much for school. He attended school one day in eighth grade. Then he announced it wasn’t for him.«

»And there I was. Everyone in my family are teachers. But he couldn’t sit still for hours and engage in something that didn’t interest him. It had to be anchored in something practical, in the world.«

When we talk about who he was, her voice becomes light and airy.

When we speak about what happened, it shrinks, and there are long pauses between short sentences as we crunch through the forest.

When we arrive, a small group of people have lit a fire and are fishing, so we find another, smaller fire pit a little further along the lake.

She unpacks her gear and lights the fire, and we settle into the tiny folding chairs with buns and coffee.

»We’ve been here a lot,« she says.

»Several times a week. We’ve walked around the lake many, many times. To me, he’s here.«

So she is too. Often. I ask her what she does out here.

»Hang out,« she says, and laughs.

»And listen.«

Then it’s quiet again.

»It’s as if he can be all his ages here in a way that’s different from being at home in the house. Today, I have a feeling he’s not that old. Today, he might be just 11 years old.«

»It’s very strange.«

We push our children in front

One night, not long after her son’s death, Esther Leuran stood at a gas station just before midnight, where a »very young« girl had to press a button to let her in.

»I thought: Why is a child standing here alone late at night? It’s crazy.«

»We don’t pay adults enough to take those jobs. So we underpay the young ones, who put up with poor working conditions. I see it differently now. And I actually think it’s wrong,« she says.

In her book, she writes about how we use our children as front-line personnel in the most vulnerable places in society. In kiosks at train stations, at cash registers in shopping centers, in cinemas, ticket offices, cafes, and bars.

»We push themin front of us so they form a barrier we can hide behind in public spaces. It’s also the young people we send to war. It’s the 18-year-olds we send out. It’s wrong. It’s us who should protect our children. Not the other way around,« she writes.

Now she too has become a kind of front-line personnel. She’s the one sent out to report back from the state of being most of us fear the most.

She doesn’t mind being photographed. But she publishes the book under her grandmother’s name, Esther Leuran. That’s also the name we use in this article. It’s an attempt to protect herself and her loved ones, she says. Her children also have different names in the book. Emilie and Birk.

»I have an irrational feeling of being hunted,« she says.

»I don’t want the perpetrator to know my daughter’s name. Or my husband’s and friends’ names. I don’t want to expose them.«

You should visit Digevej

It was »completely chaotic« when Esther Leuran and her husband arrived at Field’s on Sunday evening. The entire area was filled with ambulances, police officers, rescue personnel, and military personnel. And a lot of young people who were supposed to attend the Harry Styles concert at the Royal Arena.

They waited outside for hours. And when her daughter finally emerged from the shopping center, they weren’t allowed to see her.

»I got a call from the police saying they would take her to the Psychiatric Center Amager on Digevej. And that we should drive there and be with her. We couldn’t get any information about my son.«

So Esther Leuran and her husband drove to Digevej. To the place where the perpetrator had been treated.

»It was so disconsolate,« she says.

»I can understand why that place can make someone desperate.«

Or as she writes in the book:

»Psychiatric Center Amager on Digevej. It’s the place the sickest people in our society can turn to when they feel their worst. You should visit and see it. It’s shameful. That it is the way it is.«

It’s not just that someone with sloppy handwriting has written »pussy« with pink spray paint running down the door to the reception, she writes. It’s actually worse inside.

»Worn-out furniture. Ugly colors. (...) A sort of bean bag in a neon green color. Dirty. No one wants to sit in it. (...) There are locks on the windows. (...) Has the perpetrator sat in that room? Been received there? Had a conversation with someone and then been sent home? (...) We must show care for the surroundings we use to receive a sick person in. The people who receive them must be caring,« she writes.

No one could really tell them what they were waiting for or why they ended up in psychiatry. There was also »no real understanding« that her daughter, who had been locked in a room in Field’s for three hours, needed to be outside in the parking lot more than in a building with locks on the doors and windows.

»The staff we met are trained to receive people in crisis. I don’t know what happened to them,« she says.

»But I don’t think I can point to a single moment where they did something relevant or helpful. Or just humane.«

She recognized his shoes

Not until late at night did two police officers come to tell her that her son was dead. In hours, a full workday had passed since the perpetrator walked through Field’s with his rifle.

»My son had a name tag on. So it wasn’t a questions of identifying him,« she says.

Esther Leuran was not offered to see her son while he lay on the floor in the cinema’s foyer. But her daughter was »pulled past him« by the police on her way out, she says.

»He had a plastic tablecloth over him. But she recognized his shoes, right? Her brain wouldn’t accept it. That it was him.«

Esther Leuran has not received any explanation as to why the family was sent to Digevej while others were sent to Rigshospitalet or why they weren’t informed about her son’s death earlier. Her own guess is that they tried to spare her.

»We waited too long that night. We felt like people around us were lying. That they were stalling us. Maybe they were afraid we would start yelling and screaming or have a break down. But you know, there’s nothing wrong with that.«

»There’s nothing wrong with a family breaking down in a parking lot.«

That’s something they’ve »struggled with« since, she says.

It’s also still hard to deal with the fact that »strangers handled him.« That she wasn’t allowed to be with her son. Did not see him until the next day at the Forensic Institute. Or as she writes in the book:

»I helped him into the world. I would have liked to help him out. For my own sake.«

She hopes her account in the book might start a conversation about how we handle major crises in society.

»Even though it happens rarely, it will happen again. There was just a school shooting in Sweden.«

The truth scratches the brain

The night Esther Leuran waited at the Psychiatric Center Amager on Digevej, a screen on the wall displayed news. She saw a clip of a man with tattooed arms and a rifle over his shoulder, walking back and forth in front of the red neon sign at the cinema in Field’s.

»I wish I hadn’t seen it,« she writes in the book.

Since then, she has made sure not to see, hear, or read anything at all.

She hasn’t been in the cinema’s foyer where her son was found, even though she was offered to go while the shopping center was still closed in the days following the shooting. She hasn’t been to Field’s at all since.

She hasn’t followed the media coverage of the shooting. And she wasn’t present during the trials where the perpetrator was sentenced to placement at Sikringen in Slagelse both at the district court and later at the high court.

»I’m afraid of learning something I don’t want to know,« she says.

What are you protecting yourself from?

»Facts. Because my brain immediately runs there and trawls around in it. Searching for meaning. And there is no meaning. I also react physically to it when I delve into the facts. My body just says no thanks.«

She already struggles with the loop that sends her back to Field’s every day.

»I think about that encounter 50 times a day. Between my son and the perpetrator. And I have a hard time getting out of it.«

Could one imagine that there is a calm in the facts so you aren’t left to your own imaginations about that encounter?

»No.«

»I need to go somewhere else. I can’t stay there. I need to meet with my daughter or sew a pair of pants. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze says somewhere that the truth is like a grain of sand stuck in the brain, scratching.«

»My experience is that when you search for facts, the brain thinks it will stop scratching. But it just gets worse.«

It’s chilly. We stand up a bit and stretch our legs, wrap ourselves in the sleeping bags, and add more firewood before sinking back into the small folding chairs again.

Both the family’s contact person in the police and her psychologist have told her that her son likely didn’t have time to be scared.

»They said that when you get hit very violently, the body sends out so many substances that you become calm and think everything is fine. That it almost becomes a feeling of happiness.«

Sometimes it’s a comfort.

The problem is that Esther Leuran read a lot of war literature in her youth. Among them ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ about World War I by the German author Erich Maria Remarque.

»He describes how the wounded soldiers lie on the battlefield and scream for their mother. That’s part of my loop.«

And if he did that too?

»Yes. I’m afraid he felt lonely.«

It’s nonsense

Esther Leuran is no longer the person she was before. It’s also stated on the book’s flap under her photo, her birth year, and her education: »Became someone else on July 3, 2022.«

»I have gained both a sharpness that makes the world more black-and-white and a sensitivity that I don’t recognize,« she says.

Esther Leuran is an art historian and was a museum art educator before her son’s death. Since then, she hasn’t been able to work. And she can’t really stand art anymore. Especially not art that is art for art’s sake.

»I no longer think self-referential art offers anything important. I just think it’s self-absorbed,« she says.

»Before, I could be fascinated by the reference frames in pop art. Or Banksy creating a self-shredding artwork. It’s just fun and games. I thought it was great. Today I think it’s nonsense,« she says.

Art that explores what it means to exist or be in the world still makes sense to her.

»But I don’t seek it out. It’s too overwhelming. All my senses are still turned up to max. So everything is noisy.«

She also thinks it’s crazy »how much murder and death fill our cultural outputs.«

Therefore, she sticks to re-reading books, so she knows what she’s getting. And watching home renovation shows on TV. Sound off.

And she’s also started watching sports.

»I’ve never done that before. And I am teased quite a lot with it. I invite my friends for soccer nights. And they’re like: Who are you?« she says. And laughs.

Most of the time, she continues to stay in what she calls her parallel world. Hanging out alone in her garden, here in the forest, or going for walks. In the parallel world, time moves more in circles than forward, she says. And it’s also where she searches for the language to describe what she has experienced and writes it down.

»The book is an attempt to force myself out of my own small circles. And have a conversation with you, for example. It’s a gentle way to try to join the real world with the whole story,« she says.

»I hope that time helps me so that at some point I can be out among other people a bit more.«

It could have been someone else

We talk about forgiveness. Or, I ask about it.

»There’s something about him being mentally ill that acquits him,« she says.

»I also try to hold on to the fact that it was random. I know he planned to kill someone. But I also know he didn’t plan to kill my son specifically.«

We sit a bit in the sound from the fire and the birds.

»So in a way, it’s also random that he is the perpetrator,« she says.

It could have been someone else who was just feeling bad. It could also have been that someone had answered the phone when he called a crisis line before the shooting. And part of me just thinks it’s so tragic. For him too. That he has ruined his life. And has to sit in Slagelse and stare.«

There’s silence again. Birds and fire.

»In any case, it matters that he is young. Otherwise, I think I would have had a different anger. I don’t really have any anger.«

Do you think about his mother?

»Yes. We’re in the same situation, aren’t we?«

»She has also lost her son.«

The midnight blue room

Esther Leuran has two bodies now. About half a year after the tragedy, the outer one slowly begins to do what it used to. It shops. Meets people. Asks them how they are.

»When it hears an old Contours track it hasn’t heard in years, the shoulders go up and down. It dances a little, closes its eyes, its feet step across the floor and get a splinter, like before,« she writes.

The other body is inside, as you find out in the book.

»It walks, struggling and dragging its breath, dragging clumsy, shapeless feet. It comes from below and behind, I think it lives in the midnight blue room.«

The midnight blue room is different from the parallel world. It’s behind her and endless. It’s the place of death. But it’s also alluring.

»It’s not a place I really want to be. It’s filled with anxiety. But there’s also a beauty about it. And a hope of finding him,« she says.

Some days she feels she can almost reach out after her son. That he is right there, on the other side.

»I can’t choose whether I enter the midnight blue room. But it’s a choice to fight my way out of it again. And I keep fighting to come to terms with that room so I can go out to my daughter.«

Do you feel you’re betraying him by going out to your daughter?

»No. The feeling of betrayal is tied to not being there when he died.«

A kind of passage

For a long time, his room just stood there. Esther Leuran vacuumed it. Tidied up and sorted through his things. Gave away the pants he couldn’t fit and gathered the T-shirts he never wore.

»I’m afraid of losing him even more if I pack his room away,« she writes at the beginning of the book.

»His things give me access to him. His sweater smells like him, it’s a kind of passage. If I sit with it for a moment, I can almost convince myself that it’s all a misunderstanding.«

After almost a year, her husband thought the room had stood there, emanating sorrow and emptiness, long enough.

»He says I might be keeping myself in the grief. That I can’t sit there at the end of the stairs outside of time,« she writes.

Their grief is the same, she tells me by the fire in the forest. But they deal with it differently.

Now the room is emptied. Not as quickly as her husband wanted. And not as slowly as she needed.

They are also gradually starting to refurbish it.

»And it’s incredibly difficult. But the grief must be able to move. And there are places where I’m stuck. That’s how I feel about that room. I think I can find him there. But I can’t.«

She still has his shoes. They are a concrete sign that he has been here. That there are traces of him.

Where do you find him now?

»Here,« she says, looking around.

For now, I wave

We pack up the sleeping bags, folding chairs, and coffee cups, extinguish the fire, and walk back along the lake.

On the way, we look into the fishermen’s bucket. They’ve caught a large pike.

We talk about how things have changed since Esther Leuran wrote her book a year and a half ago.

For example, the feeling that everything was so »insanely brutal« has eased a bit. But it can still be triggered by »a siren or a birthday card,« she tells me on the way back to the parking lot.

Or like the other day, when she looked at the list of favorites on her phone.

»It lists my son, my daughter, my husband, and my mother. My mother also recently passed away. So now half of them are gone, right?«

It’s the people who are still around her that get her up in the morning. Her daughter. Her husband. Her friends. And the pasta family.

The pasta family is a group of people who moved from Copenhagen to the north many years ago. And whose children have grown up together. They are the ones who have carried the family through the past three years.

»From the beginning, they made food and organized things. And tasks were distributed to keep us going. I feel great love for them and gratitude for them being here.«

It might mostly be their children who bring light with them when they burst into the house and need help with math and history assignments in the study group she has created.

The pasta children open the fridge and ask for ketchup. They cook and lie down in her bed and take a nap. And ask for help when they need to move. And the best part is, they forget to be considerate.

»It’s so wonderful. They go in and out of it. They are very special, fantastic children who have a lot of love. And it’s healing. We have really received a lot from them. They have surrounded my daughter with care. And they can bear to be in our house. Which has sometimes been a very heavy place.«

I ask her if she also finds hope there. With the children.

»I can certainly feel the vitality. And that the world goes on.«

Many people tell her it will get better. That life goes on. And that it will quietly push her and take her along. She isn’t so sure.

»But maybe they’re right. Grief changes all the time.«

»For now, I wave. From my parallel world.«

»But that’s okay too.«