We set out for a quick lunch near our hotel on the Champs-Élysées. We eat our steak frites in silence. I get the phone call as we leave the café. My eldest brother, always the messenger, conveys in an almost formal way: “Our father died at twelve thirty p.m. He has left us peacefully.”
As I walk back to our sad little group, something has changed. I feel my father so close, it is as if he is in the air particles.
“Feel, Joosje,” I say. “When you rub your thumb over your index finger, you can feel Opa, really. As if he is everywhere.” She does so and smiles. A relieved smile. Relieved for me, I think. Relieved I took it that way. She did not expect this sheer happiness on my face. Sheer happiness is what I feel. For my father, who is finally released from himself. I am almost dancing back to the hotel. My father had been dying for more than two years. He is free!
I spend most of the train ride on the phone with my youngest brother. So different from the eldest one. He is overcome by emotions. He just can’t cope. This is his first death. He cannot take himself out of it. I feel serenity and acceptance. Is that what I learned in the jungle? Or from grieving for Pasje?
While Jaime and Maxi are on their way from New York City, Joosje and I finally arrive at my parents’ house. My brothers, sister, and sister-in-law are all sitting around our table, having dinner. As we have done so many times. I embrace my mother, who has just lost a part of herself. Then I go straight into my father’s bedroom, where he has spent the past two years. The room I have left so many times thinking it was the last time I would see him and devastated I was leaving for another continent. I called him every day from New York.
He is lying on his side, facing the window. I walk around the bed to get a look at his face. A beautiful, serene face. It isn’t just his skin that looked so much younger. He has the expression of a child. I burst into tears and walk into my mother’s arms in the kitchen. “He is so beautiful, he is so beautiful,” I cry.
“Isn’t he just?” my mom whispers. She is proud, fragile, heartbroken, strong.
My heart breaks for her; she has lost more than half herself.
We eat and drink as we always do. Loud, with lots of jokes. My father is more present than ever. After a while I have to get up, to go back into his room, to see his face again. I sit on the windowsill next to him. I pick up a pile of books. On top was The Seat of the Soul, by Gary Zukav, which we had both read and reread many times.
If the perfect alignment of personality and soul have a face, it is my father’s.
Reflection: My Father’s Prophecies
My father was a one-man think tank. He practically invented “operational research” at Royal Dutch Shell. They put him in an office just to think. To calculate the probabilities of finding oil in this or that place.
In fact, probability was something he applied to just about everything. It is great to be raised by a father who calculates the chance that there will be a pervert around the corner when he sends you to a shop. Or estimates the best place to wait for you when you’re going down a French river on a raft. It leaves no room for irrational fears.
He also used probability to tackle existential questions. He believed that the chance that our world had been created by physical accident was smaller than the chance of a monkey producing Shakespeare when put in front of a computer. And although traditional physics could not explain the universe as we know it, quantum mechanics, the new physics, did leave room for the existence of God.
My father believed that God had been co-directing ever since the Big Bang. That doubts about God’s existence stemmed from the images of God that people had come up with. “As soon as you form an image of God, the whole concept becomes more improbable,” he used to say. He tried his whole life to visualize God but never succeeded. There was one thing he was convinced of, though. The chance that God did not exist was too minuscule for it to be true.
His next question was what the intentions of that God were. He felt that you could only probe those intentions by finding out how life had developed so far. My father saw the answer in a purpose for which God needs people.
So this is where he would ask the age-old question. The one Job asked in the Bible. If God is good and almighty, why does he allow there to be so much misery? The religion in which my father was brought up would say, “Only God himself knows, and we shouldn’t seek to understand it.” My father could not accept that. The only convincing answer for him was that God had not been able yet to manage all of the chaos. God is mighty, but not almighty. He is still in the process of inventing himself. He is under way, to create himself and to get somewhere. To achieve his purpose, God needs people. They must somehow grow toward an ethical and good society.
And my father thought that we were doing that. Millimeter by millimeter we are learning to control the chaos. For centuries we have been heading in the right direction. My father believed that we are on our way to a world community, all people sharing a culture and morals. The computer already connects everyone in the world. One day, the human consciousness will resemble one big mind. A coming together of the thoughts and consciences of all people, whereby we learn to go beyond our ego. The driving force of that ego will continue to exist, but it will function better socially and religiously, resulting in a better society. I share my father’s optimism.
THE BUMBLEBEE
When my father was still alive we talked about my friend who was regularly surrounded by white butterflies after her mom died. Her mom had promised she was going to send messages that way. We asked my father to do the same, but we all agreed a butterfly wasn’t appropriate for my Buddha-like father. Maybe a big fly or a bee of some sort?
Two months before he died, my father asked my mother to buy a piece of jewelry for herself. As a gift from him. My mother delegated the task to me. She wanted a brooch. I bought her two little golden bees, one covered with white diamonds, one with black onyx. Both my parents loved them.
When my father finally passed away that warm summer’s day and his body had been taken away, a bumblebee appeared in my parents’ bedroom. It stayed there all morning.
Later that week, we are dressing for the funeral. As I am putting the little bee brooches on my mother’s black suit, a giant bumblebee flies in. “Hi Pappie,” I say, “How good to see you.” The bee buzzes around us for quite a while. When it settles in the corner of the open window, I almost panic, and yell, “Please move! You’ll be crushed when the wind closes the window. Please move!” But the bumblebee stays put. I literally have to shoo him to safety.
The next day we hold the funeral service for my father. Eight-year-old Joosje reads 1 Corinthians, Chapter 13, about love. She does it beautifully. Afterward we have a celebration on a terrace outside. When my friends come over to praise her, Joosje tells them the story of the bee. And at that same moment there he is again, circling around her little blond head, a very big, very fat bumblebee!
BEYOND, OVER, AND ABOVE
One Saturday I take Maxi to his special-needs indoor soccer. Usually he goes to the Friday afternoon class, where I wait outside the glass walls with the other mothers. Sometimes I am in the mood for other special-needs moms, sometimes I am not. When I am not, I ponder how we all seem to share the same child, and I feel connected.
That Saturday it is a different ball game: There are fathers. I cannot help comparing them to the fathers of the soccer league for which my Joosje plays. My tears return.
Mikey, who is the only other autistic child in Maxi’s class, must be nine or ten years old. A bit chubby, beautiful face, and very autistic. He repeatedly “inappropriately” caresses the teachers. He takes off his shoes several times and sits—or, rather, lies down—on the floor. Maxi is, naturally, all over the place, but he complies better by comparison. With special-needs children, however, that is not so relevant. There are none of those little triumphs parents feel when their “typical” child does an activity better than the child’s peers. A special-needs child’s parent learns to get beyond, over, a
nd above comparing.
Mikey’s father seems to be reluctant to look at the soccer game. He paces up and down the hall where his younger, “typical” son is running back and forth with a little fire truck. He distractedly tells the boy to be quiet. He seems to take this son’s imaginative play and motor skills for granted: two children, two standards. A few times he has a short conversation with another man who, teary eyed, stays away altogether from the soundproof windows of his child’s classroom.
When Mikey’s father finally sits to watch the soccer game—next to me—his son kind of scores a goal. The three teachers gave him a loud high five, but his father does not respond. This seems to me to create some tension on our bench. But when the door to the room opens and our two boys come out, it is as if the hall fills with warm air. Gone is the tension. Mikey’s father closes his son in his arms with pure, unconditional love. Beyond, over, and above comparing.
STARRY NIGHT
When Maxi is six, I take him to see his favorite Van Gogh painting. He has seen it on the TV show Little Einsteins, with Beethoven’s Für Elise in the background. Another favorite. He plays the beginning of that piece on every piano he encounters.
The MoMA is as crowded as I have ever seen it. Maxi behaves surprisingly well, waiting in line after line. But when we finally enter the exhibition, he pushes his way forward, getting more than the average number of dirty looks in the process. I can barely keep up with him, but I catch up when he pauses for a second in front of a painting that is very similar. In fact I thought it is The Starry Night, though different than I remember. “No!” Maxi screams, and elbows himself to the next room. It is Starry Night Over the Rhone.
Maxi works himself to the front of the biggest crowd in the room. I run around the wall the painting is exhibited on, coming out on the right-hand side of the painting. There is Maxi, reading out loud: “Star-ry night, oil on can-vas, Eighteen eighty-two, Ly-on . . .” Then he steps back to be in front of the center of the painting and looks, his eyes wide open, silent, in complete awe. Mesmerized. So is the crowd behind him. Some by the painting, viewing it over Maxi’s shoulder, but many by Maxi, seemingly under a magic spell. What does he see? Does he see what we don’t see?
Then the spell is broken by an irritated elderly couple; I recognize the lady from earlier dirty looks. The old man tells me boldly to take my son away from there. I try, but Maxi pulls himself loose and establishes himself firmly back in the same spot. He sings Für Elise. He holds his head sideways and squints. Then he makes gestures in the air, following the curves of the painting with his finger. The man starts to shout as if Maxi is touching the painting. He isn’t, by ten inches. I quickly pull him away from the approaching guard, behind the wall of the painting, the last in the exhibition, and hold him tightly. Tears fill my eyes.
“These people have small minds, Maxi,” I say.
The man appears next to us and hears me. He tells me again it is up to me to control my son.
“He has autism,” I answer.
“So?” he asks, angrily. “What about all the other people? For you, he is the most important in the world, isn’t he? But what about all the other people?”
He has a point, but I whisper in Maxi’s ear, “And he has a small heart.” My tears come down now.
Three other people come up to me.
“My grandson is autistic, my niece, my nephew. . . . You are doing a great job.” But it does not take the edge off. Does anyone know what it takes for Maxi to even enter a museum? How many times I have waited outside with him while my friends went in with their children? How many times have Maxi and I had to walk up and down the block, often in the freezing cold, waiting for the others to come back out?
Fortunately, my friend, with whom we came to the exhibition, finds us. She tells me all the lovely comments she has overheard about Maxi in the back of the crowd. Then she muses, “Isn’t it ironic? Isn’t this just the type of man who would have been the first to harshly judge Van Gogh in his times? Dismiss both him and his work as crazy? Have him locked him up without a paintbrush? Who do you think connects to the artist here?”
Reflection: Maxi’s World
Maxi does not talk. He does not like to talk. Yet our silent communication seems much greater and more essential. We feel the language rather than speak it. From soul to soul? Maxi confirms my suspicion about words—the limitation of words to communicate what is invisible.
Whoever is with Maxi syncs with him. Jaime, on the way to the park, or bathing and feeding him. Me, falling asleep next to him, or ice-skating with him. Nana, our nanny, moving in unison with him on their way to his therapies. His “shadows,” the special caretakers, walking hand in hand with him at school. When I ice-skate with Maxi, it is like the sum of all romantic love. As portrayed in a movie, on a cloud. Everything else is a blur and unimportant. There is just Maxi, his smile, the music, and my heart bursting. Time stands still.
With the men I’ve loved, I always ended up thinking about something else: the next thing to do or to buy. I definitely saw the moment as an obstacle to the future. When in sync with Maxi, I have no desire for anything other than being with him and savoring his smile. It must be the definition of Zen. Moreover, with Maxi I can act as crazy as I want, as much as I want. He will not define me, let alone judge me. He will just grab my face and pull it toward his. Give me a quick kiss. A pure, matter-of-fact kiss, without conditions.
Reflection: Flip Sides
There is a flip side to any situation. When you look back on unfortunate things that have happened, you can always find something good in the misfortune.
For me, everything got much easier when I started to see the advantage of disadvantage, and vice versa. To own my luck, both good and bad.
Now I can’t help noticing how the more fortunate take ownership of their blessings.
“Everyone makes his own bed, so they should lie in it,” they say, taking credit for their soft sheets and good health, their happy marriages or successful children. When they define, discuss, and judge the less fortunate, they seem to find a reason to hold them responsible for their fate.
This blame must surely be rooted in fear: “If it’s not his or her own fault, it could happen to me.” Finding fault gives the illusion of control. “If the mother of that drug addict is to blame, it won’t happen to my son.” Or “He got cancer out of stress, a bad diet, a karmic debt.”
But pain gives depth, and even dysfunction brings its own brand of love, with an intensity that functional families can’t always understand. That is the flip side to good fortune: you can miss out on the possible benefit of experiencing hardship. But by achieving compassion, the fortunate don’t have to experience misfortune to acquire depth; they import it for free, without the misery. And the less fortunate don’t get an extra kick in the gut by being blamed, frowned at, looked down upon, and excluded.
If the fortunate would see the limitations of their luck, perhaps they would not judge or pity. They would be less fearful and thus more open and more compassionate. True compassion strips away superior-inferior feelings. You see through the other person’s eyes without thinking of yourself as being on a different level. All you have to do is focus on the other person, put yourself in his or her shoes and forget about yourself for a few minutes. Completely. Don’t think. Compassion comes from the heart.
Just flip sides, and everyone is up.
HURDLES AND PERCEPTION
“Joosje, move away from that picture. A little bit farther. Otherwise you won’t be able to see what it’s about. You will only see the details but not the whole painting.”
We are at a museum. “That’s how Papa sees the world,” I mumble, thinking that she can’t hear me. When I see she has, I quickly add, “Of course, I would stand too far away and not see any details.”
Now I have her thinking. With a wrinkle in her brow, she repeats, “So Papa stands too close and only sees the details. You stand too far and only see the picture. So where should I stand to make sur
e I am in the right place?” The wrinkle deepens. Then her little face relaxes, and she says, “You see? There is none. That’s why you and Papa need each other!”
• • •
Jaime and I both like beating the odds. In business and in life. Again and again. But the odds always win in the end—or what appears to be the end. We had too many factors against us. We should have known. Different cultures, different religions, different personalities—all those hurdles that parents warn their children will matter over time when the romance wears off. That is why all Romeos die. Love is not enough.Could it have been any more romantic? How Jaime came looking for me, brought me back to life, to give life? Hadn’t we deserved to live happily ever after? Together?
But life kept on happening.
In the end, marriage is a marriage of egos. And culture, religion, and personality matter. For egos.
What’s love got to do with it? Nothing. And everything. For Jaime, Maxi’s love became all-encompassing and sufficient. He does not need more. As it turns out, Jaime prefers Holland to Italy.
COUNTING
Every year, on the 14th of November, I commemorate.
First, Pasje, of course. “Today he would have been thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty-two, fifty.” And so on.
Then for the next eight days, I also count. How much I eat and drink. From seven a.m. on the first day, the second, the third, to five p.m. on the eighth day, when I was rescued. It is a lot. Two slices of brown bread with cheese and tea with milk every morning. Coffee with milk and another slice at eleven a.m. Lunch. Tea with cookies, a drink with salami and olives, dinner with wine, tea with chocolate. And water. Many glasses of water.
No hang-ups. Just counting.
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