It’s amazing how grief works. You would think that the sadness and loss after the death of a loved one would decrease the longer it took to say goodbye. But it usually doesn’t go that linear. My mother found the second year after losing her husband more difficult than the first, and now that she is in the third year she misses him perhaps more than ever. Being together for almost sixty years and then being alone, how do you actually do that?
For most of her 82 years of life, my mother was half of Riet and Jack. Now there is only Reed. An extremely brave and full of life woman, that’s for sure. She has a social life that fits four times mine. She carts across the country in her car to visit family and friends. Several times a week she gets on her bike by herself and cycles the same laps that she cycled hundreds of times with my father. She joined various clubs. Regularly invites people over for dinner and then does her utmost to put something festive on the table. No, I think she’s a hero. But occasionally a lonely hero.
I myself miss my father no less than when he had just died, and that loss surfaces, just like in the beginning, at the most unexpected moments. About six months after we buried him, I entered a supermarket in Khao Lak, Thailand, and walked out with tears in my eyes. “What’s wrong?” my friend asked worriedly. “They were running Close to you”, I sniffled. Whereupon he looked at me with raised eyebrows. I had never told him how my father and I used to sing along endlessly to The Carpenters in our orange Peugeot.
Although I no longer wear his sweaters as often as during that first winter and, to my regret, I no longer encounter him as regularly in my dreams – he was almost always around the age I am now, at least long before his ghost began to fade away and it became increasingly emptier and quieter in his sweet head – the triggers are far from extinguished. Recently I was writing while Radio Swiss Classic was on in the background – a nice station, I think, especially because the conversation is limited and only in very civilized Swiss German. No sooner had the first notes of Pachelbel’s Canon in D major sounded than I was sitting at my desk sobbing loudly. My father’s Sunday afternoon record.
Music does things like that to us, that’s known, and the same goes for tastes and smells. Last fall, on the second anniversary of my father’s death, we gathered, my brother, my sister, my mother, and I, just as we had on the first anniversary of his death. We visited his grave, swept away some autumn leaves, picked up a few chestnuts and reminisced. Then we drove to the parents’ house for lunch. “I have a surprise for coffee,” my mother announced. And then, as if time had stood still for forty years, a box of After Eight arrived on the table. It is still exactly the same box. Dark green, with an image of an elegantly curled gold clock that shows five past eight.
Oh, how my father liked that. And us no less, by the way. I closed my eyes and put a chocolate in my mouth. I thought it was very sweet. But that wasn’t the point right now.