Column | Fundament – NRC

Cléo’s purple velvet Mary Janes do a flap on the floor of the Kloosterkerk in The Hague. She puts her feet down just like her father, straight and sure, and with her belly out she looks for a way through the crowd, as if she actually knows where she is going. A sea of ​​black suits, black dresses, sad faces. If I hang on to one look for too long, the great wavering within myself begins again, just as everything has been thrown out of balance for a moment, the body and mind unwilling to even think about a new balance. It is an unbearably great sadness and injustice, which only remains manageable if it is allowed in small parts.

So I just stroll behind her and see how the mourners react to her. How faces light up for a moment when they see her chubby cheeks, the long brown curls, the dark green ribbon that hangs loosely somewhere in her ponytail.

“Willeeeem!”, she now starts shouting, she is looking for her father, so she apparently had a goal after all.

She turns right, squeezes between two rows, climbs with difficulty onto a bench, puts her hands on her hips. “WILLEEMM!” People are laughing in the aisle. A family friend who appears next to us says tenderly that this one girl, among all those cousins ​​and brothers, has been given all the nice things about girls. A proud glow momentarily pushes away everything else.

I lose Cléo for a moment, but then I see her standing on her toes at the coffee table, trying to get a piece of currant road. Someone helpfully slides something towards her, she grabs it with both hands, plops down and starts eating with concentration.

I crouch down and wipe some crumbs from her tights. In the distance I see the brothers, the old father, my family, men who have sons and have been deprived of their wives too often. “They are lovely men,” someone said comfortingly to me today, I don’t even remember who, but it’s true. Dear men, dear nephews and after it a terrible year 2023 now only three women in the family.

Cléo throws her bread on the ground and takes off sprinting. She has her father in her sights. “Willem!” she shouts. She zigzags between people, suddenly attacks, I lose her for a moment, and then I see her throw herself further into her father’s arms.

And I know so well what it feels like, it rushes through me, your body close to you, your stomach and heart bursting with pleasure. The last few weeks have only been lightened by children who, no matter how much everything falls apart, need peanut butter sandwiches and to crawl into bed with you after a bad dream. We are needed, every day, we must not give up, we stroke their hair, we build their Lego castles, we go to bed early, we stand still, we dose sadness, because we want them to remain in one piece.

Cléo has torn herself away from her father’s arms and continues to wander. I follow her. And then, even though I don’t really understand any of this anymore, I understand, “I follow her.” Sometimes she is more my foundation than I am hers.

And then I just think of the titan to whom we are saying goodbye here, my sister-in-law, the same age as me, also three young children, all that work, all that love, a breathtaking example in life and death.

She teaches us so much, even now.

That’s all I have right now.

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