The official story of the father’s death contradicts the physical evidence of blood

Evidence

It was only when I was back in grandma’s house, after seeing Yngve off for Stavanger, that the matter of the blood came back to me. How could it have ended like that? Grandma said she had found him dead in the chair, and on the basis of this information it would have been natural to assume his heart had given out while he was sitting there, presumably while he was sleeping. The funeral director, however, had said there was not only blood but a great deal of it. And dad’s nose had been broken. So, some form of mortal combat must have taken place? Had he got up, in pain, and fallen against the chimney breast? To the floor? But if so, why wasn’t there any blood on the wall or the floor? And how come grandma hadn’t said anything about the blood? Because something must have happened, he could not have died peacefully in his sleep, not with all that blood there. Had she washed it off and then forgotten to say? Why would she? She hadn’t washed anything else, it didn’t seem to be one of the things she did. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2435

Categorization

• QUESTION: The discrepancy between grandma’s account and the funeral director’s evidence is never resolved — a thread worth chasing in the rest of the book.
• XREF: Previews the investigative re-examination of the father’s death that structures much of the My Struggle series.