Yes, the friends nodded. Yes, you know. The five of them sat at the large dining table of Mug (79), each with an empty plate and a filled wine glass in front of them. Maybe they really believed those Jawels. Perhaps the word was mainly meant to reassure each other. Or itself. Whatever the case: Joanita (80) was not convinced. He certainly kept shaking her head and repeated what she had just said, now with a little more emphasis. “There were no nice men alone,” said Joanita. “Nice men always have a nice woman behind them.”
Every member of the five -member girlfriend group The Grannies of Amsterdam (Omroep Max) was a widow. That was not the umbrella theme of the online series: much more important was how they were still entrepreneurial at a respectable age – running their own market stall, saving for a trip to Venice, posing for a nude calendar – and in the meantime kept thriving in each other’s company. But they did not deny that aging also has shadow sides, or that losing your partner entails loneliness. And that it can be tough to be the man again after your seventieth. “I have experienced many funerals, LATely ”said Joanita. “And at the funeral, that man is completely pathetic, and then there are already three neighbor women …” She did what those neighbor women said to such a poor soul: “No worries, though. I go to cook for you.”
With three women at the same time, depositing a fresh widower did not sound ideal. In addition: if you had that guy on the hook, there was a considerable chance that you should take care of him. None of the Grannies was looking forward to that. “He must be a bit lively,” said Jocelyn (74), and her friends nodded. There seemed to be little room for the idea that the opposite could also happen: that they themselves would be those who had to be cared for. Some things are too frightening to take into account.
At the end of the series, those things happened anyway. First the cheerful Jocelyn died, even before she could see the nude calendar – her passion project. That left such a sad stamp on the last episode that I was initially unable to write about it. But this week a bonus episode was put online, in honor of Jocelyn. A new layer of melancholy was tapped in, because “old tiger” Joanita had also had a cerebral infarction, but nevertheless optimism slowly returned. Jocelyn was no longer there, but she had been there. And now they still had each other, and a bottle of alcohol -free gin, to toast together on their fallen girlfriend.
Magic
It can be very comforting to see how many resilience people have in them. Although I have to say that sometimes it is also comforting to think: it can always be worse. News of the day (SBS6) never disappoints in that respect. On Wednesday, for example, writer Joris van Os was a guest, a fifties who had presented herself as a young Moroccan woman to better appeal to publishers. Under his real name, he did not get his literary career off the ground. Presenter Thomas van Groningen did understand why: “If you are a white man of middle age, then you can shake it in the Netherlands, because everything and everyone will get priority over you.” The magic of News of the day Is that as a white man of middle age you can simply say in the spe while three of your four guests are white men of middle age, just like Raymond Mens who are also present in the studio via a video connection. So many disadvantaged people in one studio. Very tragic.
I will think about that if life is disappointing and I just can’t find the resilience of an Amsterdam grandmother. Then I say to myself: dude. It could have been much worse. You could also have been a middle -aged man.