What it is, why you always have all kinds of questions when someone is dead. How he thought about this or there. How his parents were like. How it is possible that he spoke his languages so well, I now wonder about my father who only had HBS-B and spoke his languages excellently. It took a while for you, if you were abroad with him, also dared to say something yourself, because he immediately heard all the mistakes. Why should you not actually make mistakes? And then I hear him say laughing again: ‘C’est Pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute’. But that was certainly not in response to this question, which I never asked.
Suddenly you have all kinds of topics to discuss, much more than when someone was alive. Your interest is tripled, it is ‘cut off’ of Vasalis that makes itself painful, all those times that you think of someone for a moment, much more often than you were aware when he was still alive. It is precisely because of that many unconscious, obvious thinking of someone you can never fully foresee what the mourning will be like. From your beloved you know that he plays a very big role in your thinking and feeling and living, but it can sometimes surprise you from a friend or a parent: so often (or little) you seem to think about him or her.
Someone changes as soon as he no longer lives into a form that carries both the former and the later appearances. You now have more memories of that form than when there was also a living person. As if the living in a certain sense keeps access to the former images closed – which is not really the case of course, in every ratio it takes the past, somehow.
The history you have together plays a role in what you feel for each other. That is the wonderful, fresh, but also undusted, of new friendships.
History is very strong with parents, of course. No, my mother no longer knows that I have been to her a few times this week, that we sat outside when she was with me – but she knows that she likes it when I visit, that we sometimes sing old German songs, that we have a certain tone – she shows. Just as my father has always been happy in recent years when I came, and now I feel strong how pleasant I thought he was delighted, and how the joy to see each other had everything to do with our history, which could no longer be distinguished, is of the feeling that you have done. As if feeling and time have become one.
That many, from which you can unfortunately only limit it to a limited extent – because it is not at all easy to remember something ‘new’, something that you have not yet felt or stripped of its sensations by repeating it often – is now a wealth, and at the same time it has become harrowing. Because all those feelings and memories now definitely belong to a time that you will no longer experience in one way or another, that part of yourself is also gone.
Even though lately it was very different from a mood that I sometimes remember, when cheerful music from the Hot Club de France sounded in the background, when my father’s voice said: “You have to do that like that.” What? No idea. He said when he lived.