Marjolein Hartman (1974) wrote a book that would deserve all praise as a debut novel. It is beautifully composed. It is rich and furious in language. The main character, a mother, loses her 22-year-old son, who drowns in the sea near Scheveningen. Tightly delineated chapters, which follow the cadence of days, weeks and months, the writer alternates with letters to her seven-year-old daughter.
There are red threads that give her suffering story extra relief. Most of her friends, who were at the front of the funeral, are never heard from again. “Don’t they want to know how I’m doing? (..) Do I have to do this alone? Is that the society we live in?” Her dead son’s friends, on the other hand, take one initiative after another to surround the grieving mother with love and attention.
The book, Raw, is not a novel but a harsh reality. Hartman describes a mother’s struggle to the death in the first year after her son’s death. In the closing passage she asks herself the question: „I am a year further. What now?” Primal strength and intense love speak from her answer: “Life has played a dirty game with me. It attacked me from behind, kicked me down and kicked me. But I didn’t lose. I have not lost my son. Max is dead, but I still have a son. I am Max’s mother.”
Her book begins on May 11, 2020, the day five boys are killed surfing the sea. A meter high wall of sea foam is fatal for them. The cover states without further ado: “Max is 1 of the surfers on Scheveningen who is missing, the police came to tell us last night. And that I have no hope.”
“Max is dead, but I still have a son. I am Max’s mother
No hope. What is? Mourning, deep mourning. Six weeks after Max’s death, Hartman begins to express her despair in letters to her daughter Ivy. She is writing it for later, when her child will only be able to realize what has happened and how this will have left traces in their lives. In addition to the letters, Hartman writes other passages: as a look back at past days and weeks, as a grip on moments when she is ‘completely knocked down by grief’. It grew into a complete book, which she recently published herself.
The meaning of this book is much broader than just a personal account. She searches the internet for sources about bereavement in the event of the loss of a child. She finds what she encounters too soft. Max as a butterfly? Max as a star in the sky? “How old do you think I am?”
She finds support among groups of fellow sufferers on social media, who also share supposedly well-intentioned but otherwise painfully misplaced reactions from family and friends. “Yeah, it’s not easy for us either to see you sad all the time.”
Who wonders how to live with death? Read Marjolein Hartman – her story is raw as life and unavoidable as death.