Column | Does she call 911? No, this woman is calling the neighbors

Margaretha Schenkeveld (93), my old professor of Dutch literature, says that she fell, late Sunday afternoon. “I closed the cabinet doors,” she says, “and on the second I heard a click. And then I lost my balance.” She sits on the chair by her desk and points to the front room. The cupboard, antique, oak veneer, the wide drawers full of photo books, still belonged to her parents.

“That click,” I say. “Did you hear it in your head or did it come out the door?”

“Luckily out of the door,” she says. “And luckily I didn’t break anything.”

But she was on the floor and she couldn’t get up. It got darker and darker in the room. “It took me half an hour to crawl to the phone,” she says. “I could just reach the button for the light and then…”

Then she called 911? Well no. This woman has lived through the war. She knows what hardships are. Hunger, cold, fear of soldiers entering your house at night to take your father. Her father, a Reformed lawyer, was in the resistance.

She certainly didn’t consider herself an emergency. She had called the neighbors. The Iranian neighbor on the other side of the portal. The Dutch neighbor from above. She is in her eighties and asks every day if she still needs groceries. Since she no longer comes out, he also takes the newspaper from the bus every day for her. “They helped me up,” she says. “But you understand that I have now ordered such an alarm button.”

She’s a widow. She has no children. Plenty of cousins ​​to care about her, but she doesn’t want to call on them when it’s not really necessary. She also does not want home care, at the expense of the community. She pays for the maid and the woman who washes her hair once a week. And yes, she asks me if I want to take a look in her wardrobe while I’m there. What needs to go to the dry cleaners? Do her winter clothes still fit? She’s lost so much weight lately.

This is what the government wants, I think as I cycle to Modehuis Blok on Gelderlandplein to buy new winter skirts, warm winter skirts. My old professor only turns on the stove when it’s below 18 degrees inside. The government wants her to stay in her own house and get help from neighbours, family, acquaintances, friends. How long will this go well? The apartment building in which she lives, in Amsterdam Buitenveldert, is a mess, the lead pipes are being replaced. Her kitchen, her living room, her bedroom, her bed, everything is covered in dust. But what does she say when you ask if she wouldn’t rather go to a nursing home? Temporary? Until at least this misery is over? Then she says, “No.”