‘The party after my husband’s death was a celebration of a new future’

Zita (60): ‘A year and three months after my husband died, I gave a big goodbye party in the building where I had met him, which had since become a banquet hall. It was 2013, I looked around, saw his four grown children and looked for our son. Probably outside with his friends, I thought.

My mother and mother-in-law were talking at a table. A group of friends from Amsterdam clung together at the high standing tables that, thank God, were not skirted, we always joked about it, we thought that was the height of bad taste. The oyster king walked around in a big apron and served his oysters, someone had given them to me as a present, but I forgot who. Some casual friends came in and I introduced them to the others.

No need to talk

My brother, my sister, the whole family and all my friends were there and nobody thought it strange that more than a year after my husband’s death I wanted to dance, that I turned up the music even louder. There are people who want to mourn once for a year after the death of a loved one, there are people who want ten years to be enough. I gave the party as a closing, I didn’t want to linger in sadness. Anyone who wanted to talk had to go downstairs, I didn’t need it myself. I just asked for attention, sang Life on Mars, a song I also played at his cremation. How brave, they said, how good. And no, I didn’t feel liberated. I had been with an alcoholic man for fifteen years, a man who seemed to weigh heavily when he heard that his life would soon be over. Liberation is not the right word.

When we were 21, we had a brief relationship and when I was 35 he suddenly called me and we agreed. He was funny, wrote beautiful songs and played the piano wonderfully. That first time he didn’t say that he now had four children, that came later. And later again, we had been married for six years, all four of them came to live with us when their mother passed away in 2006. I had given much of my life to him. And now it was done, now I had to move on.

The real goodbye

After his addiction took over, I tried to break up with him several times for the benefit of all of us. Once I kicked him out of the house and he lived in an attic for a while. But what about the children? They no longer had a mother and when they moved they had to leave all their friends behind, their father was the only one they had left. So when he continued to deteriorate on his own in that attic, I took him back again.

That party after his death meant to me: I will continue. My husband had left too early, but I still had at least thirty years left and had to start over, which was difficult at my age. This party was the real goodbye. How many previous times had preceded it. In the weeks before his death, his children and I had been called up to three times. We all sat around the bed, thinking he could take his last breath at any moment, but each time he suddenly opened his eyes and everyone was startled. In the end he didn’t weigh anything anymore, I could lift him with one hand. When he was in the hospital, we laughed as a family about those bags of expensive chemo; wasted money. He was smoking in front of the entrance with his IV. The man had long since reconciled with his fate. When he got home he got a bell next to his bed that he waved weakly when he wanted something to eat. He was also careful that the steaks were cooked exactly the way he liked them.

I spoke at the party, saying how nice it was that everyone was there and that after eighteen months this was the start of a new episode in my life. Some thought it was a celebration for my 50th birthday. And that was it, the celebration of the second half. Wearing a blue-black silk jacket, I was determined to mobilize all the vitality I had left in me. Don’t look back, keep going. In all those years with my husband, I had often been alone, even when he was still healthy. He was very witty but very introverted, had all kinds of phobias, including fear of man.

No mother-mother

I was relieved, as he was, but liberation is not the right word. After a while in the hospice he preferred to go home where I changed his diaper once. I could not do it. And he didn’t allow it. So many contradictions bundled in that one exhausted body. Don’t touch me, he said as I put my hands on his shoulders. But he also had empathetic moments. When it became clear that he was not going to get better, he invited all his children and they could ask anything they wanted. Why did Mama kick you out the door, one of them asked and answered carefully. He had that side too. The side of the cheap house wine from 4:30 pm, the hidden bottles, found in the piano by the piano tuner, but also the extraordinary.

I feel guilty. Was I able to give his children enough when their mother died? I saw her one more time before she died. I had hoped she would give directions. Handles for each of the kids, but she wouldn’t talk. I’m not the mother-mother type, she said. Her children had nowhere to go, they were condemned to us, but they weren’t waiting for that lonely alcoholic father and his new wife. The celebration after his death was a celebration of a new future, but also a celebration of legitimate failure. Almost ten years later I still try to accept that not everything can be arranged and controlled, that I couldn’t save everyone.’