Rapids

Friday 18 May

My daugther came over with her husband, Kai, and our grand-daughter Yasmin (soon 5). Yasmin found the whole set-up in our livingroom just awesome: Grandma hooked up to all these tubes and getting to sleep in the living room! That called for a string of artifacts like templet-colored drawings of various animals, such as an elephant, a giraffe, a baby tiger and a rabbit, in psychedelic incarnations.

Kai helped me fix a favorite shot I took of Lara in December last, at Rob's Gourmet Market. we had justed bought two giant (and identical) X-mass baskets (we put them together ourselves); one for the hematology section and one for the ICU. As we sat down to have a nice cappuccino upstairs in the restaurant. Lara looked radiant, satisfied and Christmassy. The day before she had gotten a twenty euro haircut (the first in a year and there wasn't that much to cut yet, actually) at Jacques Dessanges, enhancing the Audry Hepburn look she had unwillingly begun to sport in the months prior. I was totally smitten again with the way she looked. I just had to take that photo.

By the end of the afternoon I had sent it around to a legion of relatives, friends and acquaintances in a format that was ready to print and frame.

Fact is that, today, she looks like a mere shadow of what the photo portrays her as. At the time, we felt - perhaps naively - that after an annus horribilis we would deservedly enter an era of relative calm; we would just go with the flow, without having to do much rowing. We didn't hear the rapids churning around the bend, until we were right in the middle of them.

Keep that photo in your mind's eye when you think back of Lara. It represents a good median image between when she was in the prime of her life and where she is right now. Apart from that: this is the way she would like people to remember her.

Right now she is developing a cough that I don't trust. It may amount to a new infection, or it may just be the vestiges of the old one she is getting rid of. I don't know. And that is the point. I am not a doctor or even a nurse with a long clinical experience (never mind formal training), so I allow my layman's judgment to inform my level of concern or anxiety in relation to any aspect of Lara's health. I connect the dots without looking at the numbers. What else can I do? In addition, even if, per chance, I would stumble on the right diagnosis, I still couldn't do anything beyond that. Which really sucks.

Time to conjure up some dinner for my sweet love, who is reclining in her bed.