Fin

Tuesday 19 June morning

Lara's calvary is finally over.

This morning was a bright and sunny one in Brussels. I welcomed it, for I would have detested driving through a down pour to a funeral; it is not only cliche, it is also depressing.

Three beautiful longstemmed roses were lying on the back seat, ready for deployment. Of course, I left much too early, showed up at the cemetary at 9:15AM, and parked leisurely. The young attendant who had done Lara's maquillage on 13 June, appeared and offered his condolances in just the right tone. He walked me over to the crematorium and a waiting room large enough for sixty people. I signed a power of attorney for the undertaker to take possession of Lara's ashes. Also I discussed what music I would like to have played. Haydn, I said, a symphony, any symphony, but very softly for I want to make a speech, too. I patiently spelled the name of the composer. First name Joseph.

Once left alone, I felt tears pressing behind my eyes, deep ones. I drew a few quick short breaths to regain my composure. I told Lara that if I lost it already in the waiting room, I would not be able to vouch for myself inside the parlor.

Close to 9:30, the attendant came up to me and said they were set to go if I was. Give me two minutes, I said flustered. Thirty seconds was actually enough. Strange: if the hour of ten o'clock has been a marker for such a ponderous moment in your life, how unsettling it is if they up the ante all of a sudden.

The parlor was ideal. The attendant quickly left me alone in a room that was designed to hold some forty people. Lara's coffin was standing at one end of it, on an elevated platform in front of two little doors. It received daylight from a window in the ceiling above it. Flowers from Helene and Jacqueline, and a red rose from Andreina were lying on top.

I lost it right then and there, while I kept telling myself I was going to do this no matter what. A big fat tear drop fell down from my cheek on the front of the coffin and ran down, off the incline of the lid.

I told Lara I was aware she was in the room with me at that very moment, probably standing off to the right of her own coffin, where the floor was less cluttered than on the left of it. I imagined her, I said, in something green, making her eyes light up in just the right shade, but lamenting the fact that I could not see her. It didn't seem fair to me somehow. Still I could see her smile like she would only smile at me, slightly demure and with true love in her face, as when saying "I could eat you up!" Despite her presence, I said, I was going to go through wih the little ceremony I had rehearsed. I added that she wanted a funeral as sober as possible, and with the cheapest coffin and a one-person attendance at her exit, I felt I had faithfully executed her wishes.

Regaining my balance, I read 1 Corinthians 13, the story about faith, hope and love. "But the greatest of these is love." The irony was rather thick that I should choose to read a passage from the New Testament to a devout atheist. As a precaution I didn't mention its source, while chuckling at the thought that I was not going to fool anybody at this point, certainly not Lara watching me do this from beyond the chasm. I took my time reading it slowly, noticing how the cadence of the text made me sound like Churchill in a radio address.

At the end of it, I placed the three red roses, one by one, on the coffin, repeating "faith, hope and love". As I was trying to disentangle the first rose from the bunch, the rose representing love drove a thorn in my left hand somewhere, and a drop of blood lodged itself onto the coffin, as I would notice later. "Nice going, van Dongen, I said, messing up her coffin as you did."

I waited out the rest of the allotted fifteen minutes, talking to Lara softly, my hand on her coffin, listening to the music from her favorite composer. Quietly the attendant came back in, as he'd said he would, and within a few moments, the two little doors behind Lara's head opened and the coffin slid up and away, stopping on the inside. I waved at her, uttering one last greeting, highly inappropriate in view of Lara's beliefs: "A dieu!"

The little doors closed on Lara. The attendant walked me back to my car. It was 9:45AM. Home was half an hour away.

As I washed my hands, I took off my wedding ring and put it in the same little jewellery box holding Lara's ring after she'd given it back to me, more than a week ago. Ironically, the same box contained the two wedding rings of my first marriage as well; they had been in there for close to twenty years. I pondered about the fact I had seen the end of two marriages at this point in my life, and repeated: "Nice going, van Dongen."

Janis Dolnick offered the following poem by Pablo Neruda, which gave me great release of sorrow:

Absence and Presence

If I should die, survive me with such sheer force

that you waken the furies of the pallid and the cold,

from south to south lift your indelible eyes,

from sun to sun dream through your singing mouth.

I don’t want your laughter or your steps to waver,

I don’t want my heritage of joy to die.

Don’t call up my person.  I am absent.

Live in my absence as if in a house.

Absence is a house so vast

that inside you will pass through the walls

and hang pictures on the air.

Absence is a house so transparent

that I, lifeless, will see you, living,

and if you suffer, my love, I will die again.