All the Time We Thought We Had

by Gordon Darroch

  The teacher listened attentively, without interrupting. When I had finished she picked up the phone and spoke briefly to a colleague. After putting it down she told me Euan could start after the Whitsun break in two weeks’ time.

  We lived too near the school to qualify for bus transport, so Euan would have to make the journey by bike. I nodded, thanked her and cycled home, relieved, feeling Magteld would have approved of my diplomacy. Or perhaps she would have scolded me for my brinkmanship, because there was an unresolved issue. Euan had two weeks to learn to ride a bike.

  Teaching him would be one of Stephanie’s first tasks when she started work, a week later than planned and in an entirely changed role. Her job was like negotiating a labyrinth from the centre. She had to work out how to win the boys’ trust while making them understand she was not a replacement mother. There was no training for this, and I was too steeped in grief to offer much guidance; she relied on her wits from the first day.

  ‘What are you going to do about this bike?’ my father asked when I phoned him that weekend with the news about Euan’s school.

  ‘Teach him to ride it,’ I said phlegmatically.

  It was a bluff, we both knew. I had only a blind instinct that I could make it work. Euan didn’t even have a bike. After scouting The Hague’s myriad cycle shops I spied a suitable machine outside Sanneke’s local shop, a purple and blue Cleveland with a slightly rusty lock and a chain that made a noise like tin cans trailing behind a wedding car, and bought it for the knockdown price of €50.

  The next day I took the boys out to the park for cycling practice. Euan wore a helmet, which must have drawn quietly derisive looks from the natives. (Bicycles are a symbol of unfettered personal freedom to the Dutch in the same way that semi-automatic weapons are to many Americans, and any restriction is frowned upon.) Adam followed on Euan’s old bike, with the stabilisers still on, which made progress slow and awkward. We managed two circuits of the park, as I held on to Euan and ran with him, until Adam’s yells of protest forced us to turn back.

  I feared defeat, but something must have clicked in Euan’s mind. Over the next week Stephanie took up the cudgel, guiding him up and down the pavement until, after two days, he was pedalling unassisted, whooping in delight as he went. We practised every day, in a loop around the neighbourhood, going a little further each time, and on Monday morning we covered the two and a half kilometres to school in just over ten minutes. Quite by accident, Stephanie had found the ideal ice-breaker.

  The Dutch poet Pieter Boskma, whose wife died of cancer at the age of fifty, said:

  Immediately after the death of a loved one, grief is a kind of friend: so long as the grief is there, the departed is still close by. Your grief connects you with him or her. Later on grief becomes an enemy that forms an obstacle to new happiness and a new life. Until one morning you have to say to yourself: it’s over now, it’s time to make a new start. It’s an illness that you can only cure yourself.

  I was in the second stage of this process, when the light from behind is fading but the light ahead is still indistinct and distant, and the embers of memory are growing cold. I wanted to get on with my new life but couldn’t relinquish the old one.

  In those early weeks, back in June, the land of grief seemed like a sanctuary. The World Cup had begun, and the Dutch were in party mood. Orange flags flew from poles, bunting was draped from trees, supermarket shelves were piled up with gaudy merchandise: hats, biscuit tins, scarves, promotional drinks, sunglasses, teddy bears, sweets. The carnival atmosphere erupted when the Netherlands unexpectedly trounced world champions Spain 5–1 in their opening match. The team went on to reach the semi-finals, though they never again hit the rampant form of that first game, and the vibrant mood was infectious. I watched the Dutch matches with Sanneke and Sjoerd and our children, while at home I flitted between Dutch, German, Belgian and English coverage, like a connoisseur. The BBC had the best studio, the Germans the best commentators, the Dutch the best analysts and the Belgians the best atmosphere, the presenters sitting round a table embellished with oversized glasses of wine.

  Migration kept me occupied. Magteld had died so soon after arriving that I still hadn’t opened a bank account for myself, so every time I went shopping I used her card, as if her ghost was paying for our groceries. The bank staff were prepared to stretch the rules, having seen me both with Magteld and without her. I was learning that beneath the thick crust of Dutch bureaucracy the hearts that beat are still human.

  The article Magteld had cut out of the newspaper about Vlaggetjesdag was still pinned to the fridge, so two weeks after her funeral I took the boys up to Scheveningen to celebrate the start of the herring season. The crowds consumed the buns with pickled herring and onions as a band churned out soft rock at a volume that strained the speakers.

  Her plans were our guidebook that summer. In August we went camping in Zeeland, in the tent Magteld and I had tried out in her parents’ garden the previous summer, as a foretaste of all the family holidays we would enjoy in her country. Camping hadn’t held much appeal when we lived in Scotland, but I felt obliged to instil this national tradition in my half-Dutch boys: unpacking the tent, cooking tinned food on a miniature gas stove and sleeping on the ground in a tiny canvas cell, beneath a gallery of trapped insects. We managed to choose the one week in August that deviated from the gloriously warm summer, as slate-coloured clouds closed off the sky and brought in heavy showers and growling thunder, distant echoes of the storms in the Italian mountains twenty-two years earlier when Magteld and I had first met. By day the sun emerged and sponged up the puddles, and we walked down to the beach or took short outings to nearby towns such as Veere, where the Dutch and the Scots carved up the European wool trade in the pre-Renaissance era, and where the Scottish Houses museum stands as a striking anomaly, a sandstone edifice in a row of redbrick houses, all in the Dutch gabled style.

  My fortieth birthday, at the end of August, was a pebble rather than a milestone. It was the second anniversary of Magteld’s first diagnosis and the start of our year in hell. She had left detailed instructions to her family to book a day out for me and Sanneke at Zandvoort racetrack, the old Dutch Grand Prix circuit. Only now did I appreciate that her optimism and avowed intent, her ‘stronger every day’ mantra, had been partly a charade. She had lived in the penumbra of death, her mind in hell, staring at the void with that practised look of derision. She was Joan of Arc gazing at the crucifix as she burned, Anne Boleyn on the scaffold: ‘By the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it.’ And having resolved to stand firm, she donned a mask that slipped only occasionally, in the darkest hours of the night, when the silence tormented her.

  What would she think of us now, I often wondered as our lives trickled onwards. Would she be proud, or surprised, or both, that I’d started using a diary to keep track of my appointments and put up a rota in the kitchen reminding me when to pack the gym kits for school? The awkward truth was that many things had become more straightforward. There was no longer any argument about who should take the bins out or cook supper or put the boys to bed. It was my job now to be mum and dad, and I simply had to adjust my balance, like a soldier who has lost an arm, and carry on. She worried about me not coping, so I had to cope, to appease her ghost.

  The boys did not speak of their mother. It was a truth as hard as knotted rope. They didn’t have the words for it. Not so long ago I would have been told that autistic children didn’t feel loss, but this was a bogus reassurance, because I had seen Euan stand at her coffin, convulsed with grief. Adam was more phlegmatic, but if he caught me sobbing he would leave the room, unable to stand my pain. We might never sit at the kitchen table and talk freely about our memories of Magteld and the feelings that her loss aroused. I had to accept, without bitterness, that I would have to tackle my grief alone, and that frightened me, because at times it was colossal, bigger than our house, and threatened to crush us all.

  On a Thursday aft
ernoon in July, as the school holidays began, 298 people boarded a plane at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport bound for Kuala Lumpur. The summer holiday stretched ahead like a field of tulips in bloom; many of the passengers were holidaymakers who had been planning their trips for months. A phalanx of academics was flying on to an Aids conference in Australia, infused with a different sense of purpose. Others were travelling to see far-flung family members or simply going home, though around two-thirds were Dutch nationals. They would have sat in the plane imagining the days ahead: sitting on a beach watching the sun set, discussing their work with esteemed colleagues from around the world, or looking across a table thousands of miles from home and seeing a familiar face smile back.

  None of them would have thought for a minute that Malaysia Airlines Flight mh17 would be snatched out of the sky a few hours into the flight, snapping their futures shut faster than they could comprehend. They would have lost consciousness within seconds of the missile striking: heard a violent noise, gone to take a breath, felt their heads swim and the air turn cold, and then nothing. They dodged the consuming dread that nearly everyone else knows in their last moments; they still had hopes and expectations even as the rocket flew through the air towards the cockpit.

  But my second thought was that this was the worst way to die, because it deprived their families and friends of the chance to say goodbye properly. Magteld taught me the importance of that.

  During the school holidays Luc and Diny took the boys to Sleen for a few days, leaving me alone in the house for the first time. The children were looked after, the night was quiet and placid, and as I drifted off to sleep the thought rose unbidden in my mind: ‘Would it be so bad if I didn’t wake up in the morning?’ It won’t hurt, I had told Magteld a few months earlier, and I believed it. But I had also seen the tremendous effort she had made, in her final days, to organise Euan and Adam’s new lives. She left detailed instructions to both our families about what support we would need, right down to preparing her parents for the day when I introduced them to my next partner. She would have consigned me to the flames if I let all that unravel now.

  Flight mh17 was shot down over Ukraine on a Thursday afternoon. By evening grief had cast its pall with the suddenness of a power cut. Streets which a month ago had been thick with orange banners and jubilation were now adorned with drooping tricolour flags. Dutch newspapers, usually reticent in reporting personal details, published special supplements focusing on those who had gone and those they left behind. In a country of seventeen million people, almost everyone knew somebody at second or third remove who had stepped onto the doomed plane and whose remains were now lying scattered across fields in a disputed land. A stray rocket had made 298 people victims of a dirty parochial squabble.

  Television pictures showed how the fields were guarded by men with guns slung over their shoulders. Negotiations to recover the bodies were chaotic; the political map of the region was changing daily as Ukrainian and separatist armies swapped scraps of territory. Rescue workers gathered up the remains, bundled them on a train and transported them on military planes to Eindhoven.

  The country declared its first national day of mourning. Millions played their part by hanging out the national flag or observing a minute’s silence. Some kind of ceremony was called for, yet there was no precedent for such a mass calamity. And the bodies needed to be transported several hundred kilometres to Hilversum to be formally identified. The solution was simple, pragmatic and quietly impressive. The plane was met by a small delegation including the king, queen and government ministers. As a bugler sounded the last post, the forty coffins were loaded one by one into black limousines. The stately cavalcade set off up the motorway to Hilversum in single file, occupying the middle lane, passing under bridges lined by silent crowds. A few people cast down flowers, their white and yellow petals contrasting brightly with the black roofs. The rest of the world looked on admiringly at the hastily arranged, precise ritual. The procession was repeated every time for several weeks, identical in every detail.

  In the grip of national mourning, the Dutch drew strength from their sense of order and the straight line. The next day’s front pages showed the chain of cars, evenly spaced, stretched out down the middle of a flat, straight carriageway. Flags lined the streets; every house seemed to have the same standard-issue white flagpole topped with an orange bauble. I had first seen them on King’s Day in April and wondered where the pristine tricolours all came from. Noticing my flag socket was the only empty one in the street, I decided I should find out. I found a small ironmongery store where every inch of wall space was bristling with handsaws and screws and nails and brushes. When I told the owner what I was looking for he vanished into a back room and emerged, a few minutes later, holding an orange-tipped pole and a neatly folded flag. I handed over fifteen euros, cycled home, the long pole balanced awkwardly across the frame of the bike, and added my red, white and blue stripes to the tableau.

  My personal grief was disconnected from the national sense of mourning. These people had their loved ones torn from them by a violent haemorrhage of fate as they were preparing for their holidays. Magteld, on the other hand, had known for weeks that her life was ending. I recognised the pain the victims’ families described in those newspaper interviews. But I also knew that each of them had their own private grief to deal with, distinct from the collective mood. Grief is an innately solitary thing: it touches everyone differently. Even in the shared context of a plane crash the experience of losing a child is vastly different from losing a parent, a partner or a pet.

  The dignity of the ritual at the airport lay, many said, in the fact that there was no hierarchy among the dead; in public, all were commemorated in the same way. But in the private sphere that grief inhabits, the impact of each of their deaths could not be reduced to a fragment of a larger tragedy. It was a complete pain in itself. My newly adopted homeland was a country in mourning, but it was not the land of grief. They were two different places that I happened to inhabit simultaneously.

  * The songs played at Magteld’s funeral: ‘Tender’ – Blur, ‘Yes I Am’ – Melissa Etheridge, ‘Calm After The Storm’ – Common Linnets, ‘I’m All You Need’ – The Divine Comedy.

  14

  As the months went by, I wore my grief more loosely. In the beginning the twenty-sixth day of each month was a point when the pain and emptiness closed in and enveloped the day like a dense mist. It was a matter of surviving: of clinging on by the fingertips against the gravity of the abyss. As summer ground on, everyone drifted back towards their routines. The disrupted rhythms of work, social life, family outings, sports and hobbies reasserted themselves by a gradual, almost indistinct process.

  None of these comforts could temper the sting of loneliness. Cancer had scorched the landscape. My old life had been discarded on the other side of the North Sea. I sat on the kitchen floor and raged in silence at absent ghosts. Magteld’s constant presence was not wholly benign; she was a mixture of guardian and ghoul. Sometimes her voice echoed so forcefully in my mind I had to resist the impulse to turn round and check she wasn’t standing there. When I went out to buy clothes for the children I could hear her sharp interjection: Don’t buy those, they’ll look awful. In fairness, it probably helped me choose better.

  Everyone in the family had the same sensation of scraping by, of surviving, of living with the dimmers down. What distinguishes the land of grief from the world of the living is the retreat of joy. You go to work, you go to the shops, you read the newspaper, you cook supper, in a series of mechanical processes. I spent the summer working through Magteld’s plans partly because I lacked the energy to contrive new ones. I didn’t read a book for months, and when I tried my eyes washed over the words without absorbing the meaning. I was incapable of following the thread of a narrative or retaining anything for longer than a week. I felt dislocated in time. The past was a museum, preserved in glass cabinets, while a curtain had fallen over the future.

  My doct
or arranged for me to see a grief counsellor, who asked if I was coping. ‘I think so,’ I replied, but in truth I had no idea. Nothing seemed arduous or overwhelming. I was living in snippets. I got up in the morning and rode the conveyor belt to bedtime. I was careful to keep running, drink in moderation and change the bedsheets regularly. My energy was focused on the needs, hopes and discoveries of the boys. I lived vicariously, sweeping the chaos and horror of my arrested life into the corners.

  I missed her, I came to understand, because I needed her. When she became seriously ill I realised how deeply enmeshed our lives were. Once when we were talking about the business of looking after her and the children, she retorted in a flash, ‘You don’t look after me, I can look after myself.’ This was, as I recall, shortly after her mastectomy and in the build-up to her radiotherapy treatment, when she needed daily naps to recover from the surgery. We had nurtured the conceit of modern marriage that we were both free to walk away at any time, without pain or recrimination. We should have deduced, from the fact we had stayed together despite all the countervailing forces, that the truth was more sophisticated. Our lives were symbiotic: interdependent rather than independent. It was a choice, but also a strategic necessity. I needed her poise in dealing with officials, her persistence in scything through the sprawling paperwork, her strength and tenderness.

  Above all I missed the intimacy. Not just the physical kind, though it would be disingenuous to deny that. In the last months Magteld’s rapid disintegration consumed too much of her energy, but even when she became too fragile, we shared intimate moments that transcended mere sex. A warm and gently breathing presence in the darkness, or a soothing face in the dawn light. Waking at three in the morning and feeling an empty space where your beloved is meant to be is the worst deprivation.