This is a special edit, for a special day of remembrance for me.
To remember someone who is half of me, and that I lost exactly today at this time of the night, nine years ago. To remember someone who taught me to try new food, always and at all costs.
Even, and perhaps especially, when it looks, smells and tastes weird.
Animula vagula blandula / Hospes comesque corporis / Quae nunc abibis in loca? / Pallidula rigida nudula / Nec ut soles dabis iocos
We have the same nose, my dad and I.
The same attachment to our mountains paired with a suffocating need to escape, the need to stay along the sea. The same need for discovering. The same centrality of food and gastronomy and herbs and health and traditions and visions in our lives.
The same overly developed sense of smell. And such a small nose!
He taught me to protect my own personal freedom, independence, and self-sustainment at all costs. Be free, spread your wings, and never forget what my dreams are.
I owe him half of what I am.
The other half, of course, is my mum’s. To whom I dedicate this article.
A woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And on that day her whole life.
But nine years ago, on 24 September 2014, my father died.
We were in ‘s Gravenhage, The Hague, The Netherlands - where I was living and where he decided to come visit for his last family travel.
We were in a small, cosy room of a local quiet hospice, where he met death after we shared a last supper of Dutch herring on bread buns with raw, chopped onions, and a mustard soup. I remember buying the soup at the bio grocer round the corner from my flat and never being able to buy it again, in the years that followed.
I regret now not having bought it again: when eventually I moved from The Netherlands I forgot to do so, whilst I was packing a lifetime to move south. I will need to go back to The Hague and find back that mustard soup, to get back that warm, cosy and homely feeling I had back then.
When I warmed the soup, its aroma filled the room and finally transformed that rather empty hospice apartment from a last stop, into a last home.
I had biked to the fishmonger after work, hurrying before it closed, and passed by the French baker on the Frederik Hendrikslaan where I lived to get fresh bread.
I was on a mission.
Stopped briefly to feed and cuddle the cats, and then biked to the hospice building.
He left us a few hours later, as I had gone home again to tend to the two baby cats and they woke me up at around three fifteen in the morning, shortly before my mum rang me to tell me dad had passed.
He had insisted that I go home to the cats, ensuring that my mum would stay with him for company. She had stayed with him, and at that time of the night, still awake, she went for a cigarette on the balcony.
He chose that exact moment to leave us.
Silently, like on tiptoes, he left the room, I know, without looking back.
He was on a mission too.
He was the most courageous person I have ever met, and I know that he did everything in his power not to ever let go of the most important thing in his life: freedom.
To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it. To love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.
His cremation happened in the beautiful town of Delft, on a chilly, sunny morning.
We did not go to the morgue, he would not have wanted.
This journey he was busy with, it was his, and his alone.
Instead, with my mum, we climbed the tall church bell and observed from there, the fumes slowly spiralling upwards towards the sky, in the distance. It looked like a Vermeer painting, and that simple beauty soothed our hearts.
We thought about what would he have wanted us to do, and we chose to hit the fish market and have a plate of his favourite fish: mackerel.
We stood at a table among fishermen and passers-by, we ate our mackerel with mayonnaise. We bought fried cod, and we dipped its juicy bits into ravigottesaus. We got patat oorolog and, if I recall well, a glass of chilled white wine.
As we secured the glass in our hands, I remember the cold air on my face, the humidity of the water canal, and the emptiness of the city on a chilly day.
We bought tulips, and we returned to The Hague, where we would have had to wait some days in order for all the procedures to be solved and our urn could travel with us back home.
We both had some bread and croissants at Michel, the local French bakery.
Perhaps even pain au chocolate. We stocked up, and by the time we got home, my colleagues had left on my doorstep a beautiful, white, enormous bunch of flowers.
We waited patiently for the bureaucracy to resolve its course, spending time in silence and reading, and sometimes going for walks on the North Sea shore.
He wanted to rest among our Dolomites, which is why we headed south.
He longed for our mountains, our two and three-thousands to climb. The same paths I too, now climb. Up there where only birds and souls fly.
We had to bring him back from his travel, eventually. But he made sure to stay a bit more in South Holland.
And so did I too.
At least, until I found a reason for whom to move away, I stayed in the apartment, in the city that last saw us together. He would have wanted me to move on with my life, and move, always move.
So I did.
Someone has to die in order for the rest of us should value life more.
It's contrast.
When he left us, there was a lot of emptiness, silence, and a sense of being lost and having lost all maps and reference points. I spent my life since, going out and courageously drawing my own maps, with my own orientation points.
Since then, every time I try a new plate, visit a new place, or discover a new dish or ingredient I think about what he would have done with it.
Losing my North Star made me feel like a pirate, sailing the seven seas under the guidance of the newly discovered Southern Cross.
I write this today, nine years after, as both of my cats, now grown-ups and all fluffy, ooze near me.
The cats he helped me bring home from Groningen, a couple of days before his condition worsened. He chose them with me. Boaz, and Jachin, are named after the two majestic pillars situated in front of Solomon’s Temple.
For them to be my pillars -the pillars on which I could rest my universe when I was tired. He played with them and cuddled them till the very end, and there is a bit of this shared love among us.
I used to listen to this song quite a lot, and its text was really on point in 2014 for me. I was soothed frequently in listening to it, and tonight I had the chance to listen to it again, so many years after, and yet so few.
Lyrics:
My life without you isn't that different
I do everything a little slower and I have time for myself
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
His life without you I see him often
I don't really understand how he'll do it but he'll survive
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
There's a time for everything go straight ahead you know
You have to hurt yourself a little and you'll understand later
it's a moment then it passes I swear it will pass
You can call her if you want freedom
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
There's a time for everything to go as it goes
Some things turn off, others you turn on again
You respond to pain with the smile you have
Girls never cry
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
My life without you isn't that different
I sing it so as not to cry and I won't cry
My word, this has everything ... sadness, poignancy, the treasures of remembrance, beautiful storytelling, life lived, shared moments, connecting points ... most of all it has love. Powerful writing. Thank you
This was touching. Thanks for sharing such an important and painful moment of your life. ❤️