I Know A Lovely Rose

Tuesday 26 June

Since a few years, I own a Bechstein. This is largely due to Lara's insistence.

We were visiting Stockholm from Vienna; I think it was in November 2008. About a year or so before that, while still Ambassador to Sweden, I had bought a restored grand piano, Bechstein too, for the residence ball room. It came from a piano store on the borough of Sodermalm, about a 15 minute walk away. This time around, since we were staying in the residence as guests, I of course tried out the piano. Vis-a-vis Lara I lamented the fact - for the so maniest time - that I had made the bargain deal on behalf of the Embassy, instead of purchasing the instrument for myself, a long held wish.

So why don't you give the store a call, Lara suggested. I doubted the chance that at that precise moment they would have a second-hand Bechstein on offer, and told her so. What were the odds? But she kept insisting. (It later turned out she'd already called the store and knew for a fact that the odds were actually looking a lot brighter than I thought.)

So finally I phoned the store. They had not one but two in their shop!

Lara and I speed-walked over there rightaway, around five o'clock, dark already since hours, trying to beat any competitor who might steal my piano before I ever got to it. I bought the larger one (a 'B' of 211 cm in length), dating from 1941, in fine shape. After refurbishing, it was home-delivered in Vienna, a few months later.

I would doubt the odds a second time.

A day or so before Lara would come home from the hospital this last time, I made arrangements for the piano to be tuned. The date was set for 7 June. At the time, I was resigned to the fact that, following all predictions, Lara would have passed away by then. After all, she was sent home on 24 April with only two or three days to live.

Suddenly the day of 7 June had arrived, and the tuner presented himself at the appointed hour. I'd forgotten all about him. Lara objected to having the piano tuned in her presence, and rightly so. So I sent the tuner away; shocked, he more than understood. I didn't dare make a new appointment until after she had actually passed away, since she had continually beaten the odds, ever since 17 April. Lara lived an amazing 57 days after having been given up by her doctors!

I played the piano for her from time to time during her final weeks at home, including some of her favorite pieces. Particularly soothing among them was a traditional Swedish hymn, which we both cherish as one of the finest melodies ever composed, imbued with sweet melancholy. Jag vet en dejlig rosa. I know a lovely rose. Listen to it using the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPnN_zDwKng

The tuner came this morning.

More Signs

Saturday 23 June morning

Yesterday afternoon I needed a dictionary from Lara's office book case. As I took it out, I noticed a motley leather binder behind it, holding a stack of white pages (at least 75) covered with machine script (manual type writer) and edited in pencil in Lara's handwriting. Upon inspection it turned out to be poetry written by Lara ten years before we first met. Lara had always been reticent to show me her own poetry - why, I do not know. It was a side of hers that during our twenty years together remained woefully underexposed, at least to me. It felt as though, now, she wanted to divulge this aspect of her being to me, without having to account for it.

Our granddaughter Yasmin (going on 5) came to the breakfast table this morning with a story to tell, a triumphant glint in her eyes. Oma Lara had paid her a visit during the night! Oma sat down on the bed, she told her parents, and her hair was long. They were speaking Dutch together. Lara had something to tell her, and I recognized her syntax in expressing them at the level of a five-year old. As it turned out, there were four messages. "I want to live." (Ik wil leven.) "I want to be with Opa." (Ik wil bij Opa zijn.) "I miss you very much." (Ik mis je erg.) And: "I will see your mam as well." (Ik zal je moeder ook zien.)

My daughter made her repeat the story two more times, and Yasmin held the line. Then asked her if she had been afraid. No, was the answer. Lot asked if it had been a dream ("images in her head"). No, Oma was there.

Still making the family rounds. Lot seems to have a visit coming.

Signs

Staunch as she was a disbeliever of God and a life hereafter, astute so she was a lawyer hedging her bets. There was enough awe in her - or should I say apprehension - of what lay beyond demise, for her to engage in speculation, keeping her options open enough to allow  the unexpected to happen. She was not afraid of death so much, knowing in her mind that 'passing on' would amount to the be all and end all. It was more the process of dying and how scary it would be. In her heart she cherished the idea of - beyond the chasm - seeing her dad again, and mine, too. She agreed to giving off a sign to us mortals who stayed behind, to tell us that she had safely arrived on yonder side. A lawyer myself, I made her promise she would not scare the wits out of me; a clap of thunder would be a tad over the top, I intimated as a point of reference. She got it.

Lara went about it in a sophisticated manner, multiple in form and diverse in location. "Doing the rounds", as my family in California phrased it. Had we expected anything less of her? Of course, to a cynic, all manifestations of the so called transcendental, would need to be submitted to Occam's razor, a law of logic which holds that the simpler explanation of any phenomenon is likely to be the true one. Being the romantic that I am - and still wildly in love with my wife, or "SWILWY" - takes me, I grant you, to the opposite end of the scale. Certainly in my present state of frayed emotions, I would be inclined to engage in connecting the dots without looking at the numbers. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as a manufactured sign from beyond the chasm, would be recorded and acknowledged as such a sign, even welcomed.

With those caveats, what have we got? (And I am talking about a family who collectively believe that when their father died - Howard - he caused a double rainbow to appear in locations as far apart as San Francisco and Hawaii.)

As for my personal experience, I think of the teardrop that appeared in Lara's eye after she had passed. Popular belief has it that the dead don't cry. Yet she did. That one little droplet is of deep consolation to me, whatever the medical odds would be in manifesting itself. I will keep it hors de competition.

The winner sofar is an incident that is incontournable, as the French say, or something that no one could possibly ignore or deny. It concerns a 14-months old baby, my granddaughter Madelief, who in the middle of having her diaper changed, focussed on something or someone behind her mother off to her right. Asked what she was looking at, the baby said "Lara" - the first time she had ever said that word. Both the baby's father and mother got the goose pimples when they realized what had just happened; and so did I being told about it over the phone.

In second place, is Leslie's beehive. I will quote her own rendition of the event:

Some strange events occurred during Lara’s passing. We have a bee hive in our roof, and have had for around 5 years. The day Lara came home from the hospital, the hive split, and the small hive left behind appeared to fail over the next couple weeks, falling silent and declared ‘fin’ on the day before Lara passed. I climbed up on the roof to check it out (see if there was honey for me to harvest) but as a dedicated chicken, I ‘forgot’ to do it. On the day Lara passed, millions of bees emitted from the hive in the roof, MILLIONS. It was like watching that stuff come out of the Dude’s mouth in that Tom Hanks movie: The Green Mile.

In third place would be Christine's turkey. Again I will let Chris tell the story herself:

David and I have a 'game' of sorts that is like "Where's Waldo?" We came  across a peacock in the middle of no where just in the road as pleased as can be with itself. Very strange and we decided, though the showy peacock is male, that it was indeed Lara in all her finery. Charlie called 3 days ago and said that a peacock landed in the back yard of his father's, strutted around and then after a bit just took off. Knowing where they live, it would be just as unusual to see one at Ed and Connie's house. We again, said "ah, there's Lara making the family rounds", wondering where she will turn up next.

In fourth place I would put my own experience during the send-off in the crematorium, where through coincidence or otherwsie, a tear drop and a drop of blood (produced by a thorn on the rose of love) landed on Lara's coffin and rode with her into eternity. It didn't occur to me in the moment (slow as I am), but only later as I rehearsed the whole episode in my mind.

In fifth place is Leslie's story about the bird. Here's what she wrote about it:

Before Lara started the chemo, a bald-headed stellar blue jay started coming by every morning.  Bald, but otherwise large and adorned is a beautiful coat of various blue feathers.  When Lara passed it stopped coming.  I have never seen it since.

And she adds:

Then, of course, there was Lara’s voice in my ear saying “ We’ll always have Paris”...which is a really sort of a funny, amusing, expression for Americans in a certain cultural vernacular, which we share. But we actually did have Paris, and you were there too.  These things. (I remember it well, for it included a dinner at Fouquet's on the corner of Champs Elysees and Georges V.) I don't know how long deceased people stay connected, but we should be prepared to receive more signs as we go along.

Album now 117 photos

Lara's Photo Album

Over the past week, with inputs from various sides, I have put a photo album together with pictures of or about Lara. It is disseminated over the Internet. You can open the album to look at only if I invite you to do so by email. I have sent out a fair amount of such invites already. In fact, if you haven't received one when you read this posting, you may have to ask for one by sending me an email.

The album now has 117 photos.

For easy viewing use the slide show. It will take you under 10 minutes.

For language switch click on little Dutch flag at the top (red white bleu) and then click on any language you prefer.

I invite everybody to look through the picture files in their computers and send me appropriate photos for inclusion, by email.

Die Cancer Die

Wednesday 20 June

A collection and a delivery.

At around 9:00AM a courier came to collect Lara's oxygen machine, which had lived in our house since 11 June 2011, the time she returned from Saint Luc on home-leave after her second chemotherapy. It literally kept her alive at times, especially when her lungs were still in bad shape. The suit-case shaped machine had been mostly on standby since late summer last year as Lara's capacity to breathe indpendently improved. It did travel with us to Honfleur, though, in September. And even since 24 April last, when Lara came home from Saint Luc once again, she used to rely on it when watching movies together on TV or even when sitting outside on the veranda on a sunny afternoon with her friend Liliana. We uncoupled her from the larger machine in the living room, made her walk to the back of the house with her Baxter, and hooked her up to the smaller machine.

The contraption was the single largest piece of medical equipment that had remained in the house since Lara left. Seeing it go felt like yet another step in her deconstruction.

Apart from the collection, this morning's delivery was much more anticipated.

Clad in cut-aways, the parlor attendant presented himself at our apartment at 9:45AM, having announced himself by phone, a half hour before. In his hands was a cylinder-shaped metal cannister measuring 22.5 centimeters in height and 15 in diameter (8.8" and 5.9" respectively). It doesn't really look like an urn to me, which I always associate with a ceramic vase. Appropriately, it is spray-painted ash-color. On the lid of it is a little white sticker with the words 'GABRIEL Lara' and a registration number.

This was she allright. I took the cannister from his hands and he gave me also an official document, i.e. "Permis de transport du corps et des cendres". I would later post the document next to our front door to reassure unsuspecting visitors: Lara's presence in the house was legal.

After the man left, I carried Lara's ashes into the living room, where I had prepared the (non-working) fireplace with a tile (for more stability) and a modest candle arrangement. Standing in front of the fireplace and raising the cannister up high, I caught my own image in the mirror hanging over it, and the floodgates opened once again. Through my tears I placed the ashes on the tile and stepped back and saluted her. Welcome home again, Pluisje, it's been too long.

The scene brought back memories of Sri Lanka. Lara and I had stood twice at the grave of my name-sake, my father's older brother. He died of 'typhoid fever' in Colombo, on the trip home from the East-Indies, in 1939. The two of us had located uncle Toine's grave at Colombo's General Cemetary, in 1991, I being the first family member to have reclaimed it. We came back to it a year later to inspect a small stone I had ordered for it. We stood in front of it then, too, and observed a few moments of silent musing. (See "Tombs" and "Toine" in the previous blog)

It occurred to me how little is left of despouilles once they have been incinerated. In Lara's case, two kilos and 800 grams, a little over six pounds - and that includes the incinerated coffin, lining, shroud, clothes and shoes. You lose, of course, the happy parts of the frame Lara once inhabited. But she'd abandoned it already when she died. Just a body is all that's left. What you burn also, though, is all the unhappy parts of her body, notably the cancer cells, her devastated lungs, her unusable stomach. Igor will never come to visit again. I felt full of revenge and rage all of a sudden towards those parts of Lara which had made her life uncomfortable, miserable, and ultimately unsustainable.

Die cancer die!

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.

Grammar

Monday 18 June later

My son, Bouke, wisely remarked the other day that he had known Lara longer than he had not known her in his lifetime. Now aged 33, and a father himself, Bouke must have been 14 when Lara came onto the scene. When we got married, he was 16. Lot was 20. They both were severely conflicted - not surprising when the nuclear family falls apart. For the longest time, relations stayed constricted, with Lara and also with me. They couldn't forget their father had walked away from a marriage; they saw Lara as the marriage breaker (which she was not, by the way); and they were staunchly loyal and protective vis-a-vis their mom (as I would expect them to be).

It took long years of perseverance and patience from the two of us to clear up the air. We were cold-shouldered many times. Lara never claimed (or aspired) to take the place of their mother or to play the role of a surrogate mom. She was 'Lara' to the children. Nor did she ever give cause for the kids to think she was keeping their father away from them. On the contrary: Lara was coaxing me in their direction as a matter of course. "Call your kids!"

As they grew into adults, however, my children began to realize that Lara was actually making their father a happier man, and a more balanced person. They began to understand that she therefore couldn't be all bad, despite the unsettling start of our marriage. Also, both of my children chose partners who themselves happened to come from broken up families, changing their perspectives of separation. I believe these two considerations together made room for acceptance (one step up from condoning), growing with time and leading to appreciation, and ultimately affection. On the rebound, Lara began to speak of 'our children' instead of  'Toine's children' or simply 'the children'. And certainly she called herself 'oma' (for grandmother) to 'our' two granddaughters, Yasmin and Madelief.

What clinched the paradigm shift was that Lara went through hell over the past year and a half, coupled with the prospect that their father some day might find himself left behind. It brought home to them that health is precious and that fortune is fickle. I couldn't have wished for warmer and more supportive kids. Nor could Lara have. 

I guess that losing a spouse of long standing (twenty years as a couple, 17 years of wedded life) comes with a range of paradigms that shift. One of them is grammar. It occurred to me over the weekend that I still tend to speak of Lara in the present tense. Clearly, when you talk about her mortal remains, that is a plausible thing to do. She still exists as such. But when you speak of her as about a living person, then that would be less plausible as from last Wednesday. I have decided to apply the past tense to Lara as from tomorrow Tuesday, the moment of her cremation.

Similarly, what do you do with possessive nouns? Does 'our car' suddenly become 'my car'? And 'our apartment' 'my apartment'? What about the 'bedroom', or more to the point: 'the bed'? In other words, does your grammar stay inclusive, without moving from the plural to the singular? Or does it become exclusive, where even the children and grandchildren become 'mine' again instead of 'ours'? This is not purely a grammatical matter, of course,  where only rational answers fit; it is also a matter of syntax and context. The choice of terms is intertwined with loyalty, respect and love for a dead spouse. And perhaps with insecurity over where all this has left you.