‘Well, Mr. Vroom, you’re in good hands, aren’t you?’ As an 18-year-old snot from Enschede, I went with this question to interview the terminally ill actor Siem Vroom. I thought the expression meant you were going crescendo.
I am certainly not the only cheerful cancer patient. The lady who waited with me in a room told me within a few seconds that she had to undergo a few more chemo’s before her bladder would be removed, ‘but you can live well with a stoma’.
This was her second chemo, and the first hadn’t been easy for her. Especially that rock taste in your mouth, is that just as bad the second time around? No ma’am, you get used to it, I said truthfully. And it gets better. Yes, she laughed, I thought so.
We came to lie opposite each other and this purebred Amsterdam girl, a super friendly lady of 78 years, talked cheerfully and endlessly. She lived in the Vinkenstraat in Amsterdam, which reminded me of the most painful moment of my then still young journalistic career.
In 1979 the actor Siem Vroom lived in Die Vinkenstraat, and I went as an 18-year-old snot from Enschede with the only other gay editor of Daily newspaper Tubantia interview. Vroom was a valued actor of small roles (a lot of TV) and now had the glorious lead in The othersa play about AIDS – the disease from which Vroom himself would die not much later.
He deservedly received great reviews, his career was on the rise when he knew he was dying (we knew that too), he was a very nice and gentle man and I wanted to let him know that in the form of a empathetic question too.
I started that question with an expression that I’d always understood to mean you’re going crescendo, but which means just the opposite: ‘Well, Mr. Vroom, you’re in good shape now, aren’t you?’ I saw Vroom go pale, felt a stabbing poke from my colleague in my side, and I have completely forgotten the rest.
Madame had not known Siem Vroom. In the meantime her husband had come and sat down next to her bed, a good guy with a red nose whom I thought I heard twice say the word ‘gin factory’. At the same time, the lady diagonally across from me was allowed to go home again. That’s quite a journey, she said. First with the ambulance, and then waiting for the fire brigade to lift her up. “But hey, I don’t have much else to do anyway.”
There was a lot of laughter in this room, also by the woman next to me who I couldn’t understand because she didn’t have her teeth in it.
The jenever factory turned out to have blown in from the former Yugoslavia forty years ago. They had been happy just as long. “I’m the only one who understands him, but I’m used to that.”
And it was also nice to live in the Vinkenstraat.
Volkskrant journalist Eelco Meuleman (60), who has been diagnosed with terminal kidney cancer, writes weekly about his life.