The insatiable pain of Mirjam Rotenstreich, mother of Tonio, who died in an accident in 2010

With some hesitation I move my hand to the bell of the home in Amsterdam’s Oud-Zuid of Mirjam Rotenstreich and her husband, the well-known writer AFTh. Van der Heijden. A police officer pressed the same round metal button thirteen years ago to bring the couple the news of doom.

Rotenstreich was sitting in her office at her computer at the time. Since Tonio had left home, she could work whenever she wanted, she no longer had to take into account her son, to whom much of her time and attention had gone until then.

The sound of the bell is sharp. In the silence that follows until the door swings open, I am thrown back into a past that is not mine, but still somewhat so. Because I think I know it. That comes from reading the requiem novel Tony , which his father started writing in the first nine months after the drama, after seeing the film based on the book and the play. Who hasn’t experienced something from it? ‘We’ know the facts.

Rotenstreich remained silent for a long time in all the noise surrounding her husband and his book, the film, the stage, the interviews and TV appearances. But she wrote all the while, because writing keeps her going, distracts her, gives her something to focus. Then she is in control and nothing happens to her. In 2013 she came up with Lost people. In it she describes her memories of her childhood and the Jewish family in which she grew up, scarred by the war. Her book was published three years later The stalker about grief and loss.

In the meantime she blogged. But mainly for herself, to maintain contact with the outside world, as she explains later. Tonio snuck into those blogs. She blogged about the cat photos of her son, a passionate photographer in training who had often had his Norwegian forest cats in front of the lens: When I looked at the photos, I thought ‘now I’m looking through Tonio’s eyes. I see what he saw then. I pondered the choices he made, wondering why he zoomed in on a certain detail. I couldn’t get any closer . This led to her publisher Mariska Budding from Pepperbooks asking her to turn it into a book. That was Tonio’s look (2018).

The solid wooden front door swings open. There she is finally, the mother. Tonio is the big absentee. But for him, his mother receives me. Smiling invitingly. This brings me back to the now.

I sit down in the room I’ve already read about: the library, surrounded by 13-foot walls of stacked Billy bookcases, crammed with books. “Idea from Adri (AFTh. van der Heijden) to put the cabinets on top of each other.” Her book with the telling title is on the reading table You are missing from me . This book also stems from her blogs. The short sketches are never sentimental, pathetic or too sad. However, they are seen as contemplative and analytical, strong, sometimes even cheerful. “Arjan Peters and Jeroen Vullings (well-known literary critics, ed.) encouraged me to bundle the texts. Vullings even said ‘I command you’. Then I went to my publisher, De Geus. He really wanted to.”

Thirteen long years ago, Tonio’s life ended. Since then, his mother has been subjected to ‘Sorrow, Loss and Suffering for Tonio’. Abbreviated: VGLT.

She could not put into words what she calls ‘the very bad thing, the pain that cannot be alleviated by anything and no one, but which is not getting less, but only getting worse’. “When I get up, I immediately find myself back in the stranglehold of VGLT. Being dead is one thing, staying dead is another. Adri has invented a word for this period. He calls this pantonionism (The Omnipresence of Tonio, ed.).”

She admits that she once judged harshly about writer Anna Enquist when she talked on TV in 2002 about her daughter’s accident a year earlier. “Adri and I were watching TV together. I said, ‘Is she still talking about that?’ Now I’m ashamed of that. But I can’t blame myself. I just had no idea.”

Rotenstreich is very open in her blogs. She lives with a scourge. “It just goes on and on, every day.”

‘Hi, Mirjam, how good to see you!’ says contact A.

‘What about Tonio?’ there sounds the scourge.

“Yes, that was a long time ago,” I say.

Everything reminds her of her son. There is a veil over everything. The Christmas tree sale, for example. “Tonio and I always picked out a tree together. It had to be 4 meters high, so that it almost touched the ceiling of the room.”

I realized that Tonio’s death had almost completely deprived me of the other causes that could cause a person to become emotional.

She describes how she went to an information day at a secondary school with her best friend and that friend’s daughter. But what if someone asks her: whose mother are you?

The death of a child also causes practical problems.

She says she has never been angry at the person who hit her son. “It was a young boy, just under 23, a year older than my child. He was driving too fast. But it was the dead of night, the streets were quiet. I could also have pressed the accelerator deeper then. Who not? Fortunately, he hadn’t had any alcohol, because then the situation would have been very different. Tonio was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Doesn’t change the fact that she posts:

Unfortunately, Tonio, the great absentee, has since been the subject of conversation, of mourning, of crying and sometimes I cry out. ‘You bastard! Why are you doing this to me? done!’

She recently received a postcard from Tonio’s former classmates. “The distance between Tonio and his friends is increasing. They continue. He stood still. I don’t feel much need to interact with them. I’m very happy to see that it still exists for them.”

Large parts of the time I stand with my back turned to the future. Because Tonio only lives in the past. And because he was our only child, Adri and I are no longer connected to that future in any way.

The drama did not tear the parents apart. “In the elevator of the Amsterdam Medical Center where Tonio had been taken seriously injured, we said to each other: whatever happens, we will continue. Like every couple, we have had our difficult moments. But in the year before Tonio died, I often thought: how happy I am. Actually, Tonio died at a good time. Imagine if it had happened at a difficult time in my life? Then Adri and I might not have survived as a couple.”

Sex has changed. “Such a child is created from sex. That’s crazy. How can you move forward with that?” She googled ‘no desire for sex after the death of your child’. No hits. She does come across explanations for ‘no meaning after birth’. “Oh, sex is always so overrated. You can experience intimacy with each other in different ways. Adri always says ‘relationships are not destroyed by a lack of love, but by a lack of friendship’.”

I advocate the entry on Google ‘sex after the death of your child’ with references to articles worth reading.

She considered the question of why there is no good word in Dutch for a parent of a deceased child, except for orphan mother/father and star mother/father. “These concepts have never become established. That says enough.”

She discovered that Hebrew is one of the three languages ​​that does have separate terms: eem shkoela (eem means mother, shkoelaa could be translated as mourning) and av shkul (av means father). She explains: “In Israel, all children have to join the army. Many parents have to deal with the death of children. But that cannot be the only explanation. The word also exists in ancient Biblical Hebrew.”

She doesn’t know if 2,000 years of history of persecutions (The pogroms over the centuries in European countries and the expulsion of a million Arab Jews from Islamic countries in the twentieth century) have anything to do with it. She resolves to investigate this further. She ‘chews’ on a word for her position. “Maybe VGLK is not so bad for the Dutch. I am controlled by Sadness, Missing and Suffering for my Child. It is a neutral term. That’s everything.”