4 ideas
In summer 1948, fifteen-year-old Trond's friend Jon goes out with him 'stealing horses' at dawn, riding a neighbour's horses without permission. Jon then leaves home, and fifty years later the widowed Trond discovers that his only neighbour at his remote cabin is the grown-up Lars.
Trond's father spends the summer felling timber with his son and floating the logs down the river to be sold in Sweden, and the family understands the money to be meant for them. The father never comes home.
Trond's father teaches him that 'we decide for ourselves when it will hurt'. The idea is that pain can be postponed and mastered by an act of will instead of simply being endured. Trond adopts it as a way to survive, but it turns into a habit of deferring grief and withdrawing from people, so that the pain is kept waiting rather than dissolved.
The boy sees only fragments at the time, such as overheard remarks, a look between adults and his father's night errands. Read this way, a formative event is really two events: what was experienced without understanding, and the understanding that arrives decades later, when nothing can be done about it.