Five years ago I was writing at the dining table, but then on the third floor of our rental apartment in the Jordaan. I smoked, but only on the balcony. I had asked Willem to stay at home while my father received a new heart valve in a hospital in Utrecht. I remember feeling very precisely how my body braced itself while waiting. My breath high in my throat. A faint bubble of sadness manifested itself in my diaphragm. Like I already knew something I didn’t already know.
When the call came I slumped against the wall on the floor, as you do, and cried, with Willem’s slightly trembling hands folded around me. Then, leaning over the sink, I smoked a cigarette, hyperventilating.
A week followed in which I zigzagged around organizational wrangling around the funeral, the return of estranged relatives and my mother’s all-engulfing first wave of grief. I barely slept, barely ate, and with lucidity bordering on psychotic, I remembered the tiniest details. The matte gold bird brooch of the funeral director. My peeling burgundy nail polish. A snack from a porcelain teacup.
On the day of the funeral I woke up shattered. I drank five coffees, almost passed out, shivered with cold, squeezed out a valiant farewell speech like a loyal soldier, and began to mourn vaguely and long.
Now I’m sitting at a dining table in Haarlem waiting to hear that a friend’s sick father has passed away. I don’t want to smoke anymore, but waiting feels like it used to. As if a screen was erected between now and five years ago. The body keeps the score. Sadness settles in kneecaps and stomach area and begins to fester as soon as time, the color of the sky, the dead, present themselves once again. Always November, always rain.
I wiggle. I need something. I want to put the friend under a pile of duvets. I want to take his sad son to Efteling. I want to go to his house and lift it up and put it somewhere where the sun shines. If only I could get away from myself.
William comes home. I explain my vicissitudes to him, faltering, with appropriate shame, for I know, I do (big tears), that today should not be about me. He wraps his warm hands around me. Nothing is boy in him anymore.
We’re being called. I think about how the friend feels. Nerved from head to toe. At the beginning of five years of irregular grief, only to be hunted by the beast again, just when he hopes to be finished.
But the friend is especially very tired.
He is drinking a cup of tea on the sofa.
And then, very miraculously, my breath drops, I get air.
I know something I don’t know yet. But now that’s good.
A version of this article also appeared in the December 3, 2022 newspaper