Sigrid Maria Jusélius was born in 1887 and died in 1898. That is nearly all the public record holds about her, which is the ordinary fate of children who die young: the buildings outlast the biography.

Her father commissioned the architect Josef Stenbäck, and between 1901 and 1903 a Gothic Revival mausoleum rose at the edge of Pori's Käppärä Cemetery, which had itself only been laid out in 1884. It is a small, steep, spired building of stone, more chapel than monument. Sigrid's sarcophagus, cut from white Italian marble to a design by the architect Jarl Eklund, lies in the basement, and it is visible from the floor above — so that anyone standing in the painted chamber is standing directly over her. The bronze door was made by the sculptor Alpo Sailo. The Sigrid Jusélius Foundation's own history of her father records that he visited his daughter's coffin every day.

For the interior Jusélius engaged Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the painter who more than any other gave Finland a national visual language. Gallen-Kallela worked on the chamber between 1901 and 1903, drawing on biblical material, on Finnish folk mythology and on plain allegory. The cycle included *Kevät* (Spring), *Syksy* (Autumn), *Talvi* (Winter), *Rakennus* (Construction), *Hävitys* (Destruction) and *Tuonelan joella* (By the River of Tuonela).

That last title carries the weight of the room. Tuonela, in the Kalevala and in older Finnish belief, is the land of the dead, reached across a dark river. A grieving father asked a painter to put the crossing on the wall above his daughter's grave, alongside the turning of the seasons and the building and unbuilding of everything. The photographs of Gallen-Kallela at work on *Spring* in 1903 show a man on scaffolding in an unfinished stone box, painting for an audience of one.

The paintings began to fail almost at once. The mausoleum was unheated and unventilated, its walls built of porous sandstone, and the Finnish climate did the rest: moisture worked through the stone and dissolved potassium nitrate in the mortar behind the plaster. Within a few years the frescoes were visibly deteriorating.

Then, in December 1931, a fire destroyed them completely. Neither of the two men most invested in them lived to see it. Jusélius had died in February 1930, at seventy-four, and had been buried in the mausoleum's side chapel, near Sigrid. Gallen-Kallela died in March 1931, of pneumonia, on his way home from a lecture in Copenhagen. The building that had been made to hold one death was, within a generation, holding the loss of the work itself.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela's sketches for the cycle had survived, and the task of repainting the chamber from them went to his son. Jorma Gallen-Kallela, born in 1898 — the year Sigrid died — was a painter in his own right who had worked alongside his father on the Kalevala frescoes in the lobby of the National Museum of Finland in 1928. He began at Pori in 1933 and was still at it in 1939.

On 1 December 1939, the second day of the Winter War, Lieutenant Jorma Gallen-Kallela was inspecting a downed Soviet aircraft with Captain Adolf Ehrnrooth when the two came under ambush. He threw himself over Ehrnrooth. The captain lived; Gallen-Kallela died of his wounds, aged forty-one. The mausoleum reopened in 1941, two years after the man who had repainted it was killed.

Jusélius had made his own arrangements long before. On 3 May 1927 he signed away his entire estate, and his reasoning is in the document itself: because his loved ones had suffered illness and premature death more often than most, the money should go to medical research. He wrote it, in effect, as a bill sent back to the diseases.

The Sigrid Jusélius Foundation was confirmed in May 1930, weeks after his death, and made its first grants in 1949. It is now the largest private funder of medical research in Finland, distributing millions of euros a year to researchers and institutes working on the illnesses that kill people. The mausoleum and the surrounding Käppärä Cemetery are listed as a cultural environment of national significance. Visitors come for the frescoes, which are extraordinary. What they are actually standing inside is one man's refusal to let his daughter's death mean nothing at all.