My mother, Paula van Roosmalen-Breekelmans (91), passed away. Surrounded by pictures of parents, children and grandchildren, she finally fell asleep. She spoke her last words a few weeks ago between two spoons of porridge. “It is no longer necessary.”
Death had become a friend to her who announced his visit at every turn, but something always intervened. I wished her death, I think I was relieved when I heard the news. But face to face with reality, with the memorial table with the plastic flower in the nursing home, the mess, photos and notes in her room that I had to clear out with my brother and sister, how she lay laid out in the funeral home, her mouth subtly fixed , the box with tissues next to it, I was still missing it.
I have written in this newspaper about her last years, first about the initial happy confusion and its repetitions, then about the upheaval and finally about the disillusionment, and finally nothing at all. But Paula van Roosmalen-Breekelmans was more than her end.
She was the second youngest daughter in the large family of a Brabant smallholder farmer, born in the farm on the Koestraat in Oirschot. That farm was set on fire at the end of the war, only a statue of Mary came out of the fire unscathed. It was not a miracle recognized by the church, but of course one that she preferred to keep to herself. “Otherwise you will lose your image.”
When she was fourteen, her mother became terminally ill, her father put her in the nunnery across the street. From her cell she could see the rebuilt house, but she was not allowed to go to her mother, a grief she carried with her for a lifetime. The nuns of Nazareth taught her to cook and clean, and with result: until she could no longer, she made stews. After her mother’s death, she moved in with her oldest sister. She obtained her teaching certificate and traveled with friends to Rome, Spain and France, which was considered an idiotic undertaking in Brabant at the time.
She met my father on the bus from Oirschot to Middelbeers. They started a new life in Arnhem, where they ended up in a flat in the Presikhaaf district. Later they moved to a terraced house in Velp, where she consistently missed Oirschot and Brabant for fifty years. She was proud to be a working mother, she was also a woman who, with a cigarette in her hand, could deny that she smoked. Always Stuyvesant red, until her first heart surgery twenty years ago a pack a day, then never again.
Her torment was called Alzheimer’s. It’s over now, there’s suddenly room to remember who she was. Her Maria statue is now on our fireplace. It looks very ordinary, very different from before. The magic was not in the stone, but in Paula van Roosmalen-Breekelmans.
You always see it too late.
Marcel van Roosmalen writes an exchange column with Ellen Deckwitz here.