“The darker the night, the brighter the stars.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Restless Stars, Restless Hearts
Recently, in the ordinary intimacy of a conversation with a contractor working in my home, something unexpected surfaced. Somewhere between measurements and polite small talk, we discovered a shared fault line: we had both lost our parents in our teenage years. The discovery didn’t arrive dramatically—it simply settled between us, quiet and heavy. As we spoke, it became clear that this kind of loss doesn’t diminish with time. It ripens. Age does not soften it; it teaches it new ways to echo.
That exchange carried me backward to a cold evening in the mid-1990s, aboard the Princess of Scandinavia, cutting its slow path from Newcastle to Gothenburg. My head was clouded with vodka and restless thoughts, so I climbed to the top deck to breathe. Above me, the northern sky stretched clear and uncompromising, scattered with stars that felt arranged solely for that moment. It was a private spectacle—one that could never be repeated, only remembered.
Standing there, surrounded by sea and silence, I felt an unexpected kinship with Ingmar Bergman and the way he wrote of his inner darkness in The Magic Lantern. That same sense of being trapped inside oneself pressed in on me. And, as it often does, my mind returned to my adopted father, who had left this world when I was twelve. In that vast, quiet night, grief didn’t shout; it whispered—and it whispered in verse:
Meet me amidst the ocean,
Under my Northern sky,
To the light of constellations,
As our restless stars pass by.
That moment helps explain why I hold so dearly to the Swedish idea of sambovikt—a word that gestures toward balance, toward the fragile but essential equilibrium of human connection. It also sharpens a harder truth: far too many children grow up in the long shadow of an absent parent. I carry deep empathy for that pain—for the version of it that hurts in childhood, and for the quieter, more complicated version that follows into adulthood.
What I’ve come to understand is that happiness is not a sudden arrival, nor a solitary achievement. It grows slowly from stable, long-term, trusting relationships. This matters for couples, yes—but its deepest consequences are felt by the children within those bonds. When my father closed his eyes for the last time, something vanished with him: guidance, reassurance, the ritual of bedtime stories—David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Pinocchio—tales that don’t just entertain, but quietly teach a child how to imagine a future.
Many single parents carry this burden with extraordinary strength, doing the work of two hearts with one exhausted body. Yet even in the best of circumstances, absence leaves a shape behind. Children often feel it as a low, persistent loneliness—a sense that something essential is missing, though they may not yet have words for it.
Children thrive in the warmth of praise from both parents, just as they grow through correction offered with care. When that balance is gone, what remains is often an unresolved longing—a hunger not easily named, but faithfully carried.
When I reflect on sambovikt, I’m reminded that our search for meaning is inseparable from our need for connection. It is within these foundational bonds that we hear the deepest echoes of ourselves. And it is there, too, that we come closest to understanding what it truly means to be human.
Sambovikt: The quiet balance created when two people share the weight of life with steady presence and long-term commitment, forming a stabilizing ground from which others—especially children—can safely grow.