‘Dear Maria’, Eelco Meuleman writes to his childhood sweetheart about his illness and about the past

Dear Maria,

I’ve read your letter three times now (it’s Thursday) and it still makes me laugh out loud.

What a hilarious, if at times touching account of a funeral and everything surrounding it. And those strange men in the photos all look so much like Felix, including Lodewijk. And you a little too.

Tonight (it’s Saturday night) I went out for dinner with friends, including my buddy Tjeerd, with whom I once got to know the nightlife in Amsterdam, at a nice Thai in the Staalstraat where we all have warm memories. The former owner, a tall blond man with a predilection for Thailand and, judging by his staff, attractive Thai men, has recently passed away. To corona. In Brazil! Then you know that too.

On the way home, Tjeerd and I shared our most shameful memory. It’s really awful, I’m just warning you.

In the early nineties, Tjeerd and I had once again been out until dawn under the influence of many substances, and (at least we thought at that raunchy moment) had hooked up with a nice hunk, who we alternated on the back of our bicycles ( such a tourist did not have a bicycle at the time) had ridden to his hotel, from bridge to bridge, quite a tour because he was not modest in stature. He went to collect his backpack and then go with us, or with one of us, it was still unclear at that stage, to make love, if it still existed at the time.

We were waiting in front of his hotel, looked at each other and then quickly cycled away, because we suddenly found that hunk no longer.

That is the cruelest thing you can do, we thought then and we still thought Saturday night.

Imagine: such a sweet boy comes out with his backpack full of expectation and ends up there in nothingness, the total vacuum, the clouds full of guilt still hang there.

How hard a person can be, I rediscovered then, it was another one of the ships that I think I burned far too mercilessly behind me. I cycled away, fleeing God knows what, but if you ask me now: love.

I’ve done that trick way too many times, with lots of friends. To start with the same Tjeerd, whom I dropped like a brick after a long friendship, but luckily I found it again. It happened to me with Cornald and Stephan, friends from long ago with whom I was recently able to come to terms. What cancer is not good for.

And with you of course. To be honest, I ponder when and why I let our friendship fade—but what a sin. How much more precious and enduring would our friendship have been now, and better still, how many children would we have had now if we had become a couple. I say fourteen (sorry for the inconvenience), and how warm and cozy that would have been, and complicated but worth it.

Forgive me, but when you have cancer, you seem to have a tendency to look back.

I will stop with that now: I now see you as a renewed dear friend who writes beautiful letters from which an energy that I cannot imagine bubbles up. And, in the latter, between the lines the recognizable grief over the loss of a beloved and hated father.

I hope that between all those tempting activities – your workshops, concerts and work on your book – you find the time to process that.

In the meantime, things are going well here (it is now 6 o’clock on Sunday morning), but I must immediately confess that this has only one cause, and that is called Dexamethasone. This pill, an adrenocortical hormone, helped me, albeit temporarily, to get over the exhaustion of the last few weeks.

After I had been in a coma lately (preferably sleeping, don’t feel like anything, occasionally an appointment with a friend and/or colleague against memory), I went yesterday to see my ex-lover and friend Charles in his sheltered house in Zandvoort – which is always very good for putting yourself in perspective: although he is almost completely paralyzed by the MS, we always manage to make each other laugh.

They are pleasant encounters, on average once every two weeks, which follow a fixed pattern: I bring the tastiest herring (from Stubbe’s Haring Is Een Revelation), cut it into small pieces for him on a gluten-free sandwich, he briefly prays to his god (sometimes he dozes off and I have to shake him awake), we talk a bit (thankfully he can talk again, there was a time when he could barely), and ideally he shows me another clip of the latest pop music hype – he has good taste in that area.

Sometimes he bursts into loud crying, but that doesn’t scare me anymore since he explained to me that MS also affects the brain cells that control the tear and related glands.

Then I put the flowers I brought with me in the vase, kiss him on his almost afro-hairdo (he is a black American), we wave to each other in the doorway, I shout ‘I love you, say hello to your mother!’ , he shouts back “I love you too and I will,” and I burrow into my thoughts as deep as I can outside, walking through the unsightly neighborhood where he lives, until I see the liberating train station again.

I often curse the internet, but for someone like Charles it’s a blessing. Furthermore, his world is necessarily limited to amazement or anger (depending on his mood) about a lost sock or a teapot placed in an inaccessible place. That happens when your life takes place in a few square meters.

It may sound coquettish and I don’t mean it like that at all, but when I’ve been with Charles or think about him (which is often) I too feel blessed. Yes, I have cancer but half the world has cancer and what a jerk I would be to sit in my sack and ashes about it. Look at Charles: he can hardly do anything anymore and nevertheless makes the best of it.

When I got home I was exhausted again, and I wanted to cancel the dinner date. So instead I secretly took that miracle pill. Within fifteen minutes the tiredness and gloomy thoughts were over and I was screaming hungry and very excited to cross the river.

Secretly, because my oncologist has strictly forbidden me to take those pills (of which I still have 3 left). They were meant to make the chemo bearable (you have to take four (4!) on the first day of chemo), but are otherwise bad for just about every body part that a person has.

But yes, if you have to choose between depressing apathy or the night of your life (which I had, yesterday), the choice is made fairly quickly, albeit after some hesitation.

I suspect the continued exhaustion has to do with the fact that the inflammation I was talking about has still not gone away, or returned. Fortunately, my oncologist (whom I’ve come to love, who unfortunately retires next month and, oh yes, turns out to have read my column about him and ‘recognized himself very much’) is keeping a finger on the pulse. I was back in the hospital for an examination, I will hear the results on Wednesday. Probably a new course of antibiotics.

More important is the scan I get in four weeks, of the kidney and lung where the tumors are. While I’m glad to be off chemo, it’s also pretty scary not to have treatment for months. I am often short of breath and dizzy and then think it is the cancer, but of course it could just as well be in my head.

We will see.

If everything goes well, I will come to you. I was a little shocked that you felt like a trapped animal here, but now that I’ve gotten to know you and your environment better through your letters, I understand that feeling. With me it is exactly the other way around: the more space I have, the smaller the corner I crawl into.

Even here, in this stunningly beautiful apartment, when I’m not in bed I mainly sit at my desk and only enter the sitting area when there are guests. You probably knew that, with your hypersensitive intelligence, as soon as you entered.

But I’ll come to you. To your houses and your trees and your birds and your other animals and your people. And so. I’d love to!

Don’t ask me why, but now that I’ve thought about you so much I’m going Tomorrow set up again. Not sung by Jessye Norman, who I was a fan of as a young fool, but of course by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – as you get older you come to appreciate rawness and punctuality better, but that’s the very last thing I need to tell you.

Lots of love and strength

Eelco

(Postscript: The scan showed that the tumors in my kidney and lung have shrunk slightly.)