Ever since you died, a spiteful creature has been poking its head through the membrane that separates my subconscious from my conscious mind: guilt. Mostly it comes to me in the shape of nagging questions: Did I appreciate you enough? Did I take you for granted? (yes, a little, probably, but isn’t that inevitable in any relationship, to a certain extent?) Was I not honest enough, or perhaps, too honest? Did I give you enough space to be yourself, should we have kept the dog? I dig deep to see if I can find fault within myself, some proof of my neglect in avoiding your death.

If only I’d have insisted the hospital tested you more and longer, something a tiny nudging intuition tried to tell me on what would be your final afternoon alive. I ignored it because it was 5 PM on December 30^th , and well, I guess I didn’t think it was necessary, or simply didn’t want to admit it was (how on earth could I intuit you’d die the next morning?) and sedated my gut feeling.

If only I had sent you to see the doctor sooner, if only I had watched you closer. If only we had not moved out of Amsterdam. Is there anything I could have done differently, to have made you still be alive? I know the answer. Maybe, but probably not. That sliver of a maybe is so nasty, though. Like Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven, it taunts me, alternating “nevermore” with “if only”, a maddening rhythm I manage to silence most of the time.

Every once in a while, when the questions refuse to stop and keep on pelting me like a hailstorm, that small vicious creature grows into a fetal leviathan, ripping me open, much like the parasitic creature in the movie Alien. Because it is inside of me, of course. It lives off my bewilderment at not finding you anywhere and at the same time, in every damn corner I look.

In the supermarket, a girl cries out for her father. The shout makes me cringe. My kids will not call out “Dad!” ever again, neither excitedly, nor in anger, nor in that annoyed tone typical of teenagers. Except perhaps in their dreams, or their nightmares. At times, my guilt concerns them. As if it was I who took away their father, by not taking care more, by not being more observant. As if, in some way, it is my fault they no longer have a Dad. And your family. I failed to prevent the loss of their son and brother. Your beautiful, amazing nieces; that petite Vera who’s extraordinary talent is truly emerging now. Do you know she had her first exposition? I fervidly hope you do somewhere; you’d be so proud of her. What an uncle to miss. And that closest friend, how he suffers from your absence. For them, and for the many more who love you and now have to carry on without you, I want to do penance.

But before you make the mistake of admiring this writhing of the soul, let me stop you. There is nothing noble about this guilt-searching, I’ve realized. It is just a matter of resisting the idea I had no control over what happened to you. A twisted hyperbole of my own significance and power. My grasping for guilt resembles the frantic exertion of an ant that will immediately start to fix its routine, even if the entire nest is irreparably destroyed by an animal, poison, or boiling water. As if repairing the daily chores will prevent other disasters, and salvage the way life used to be. But there is no fixing or controlling this. The realization neither I, nor anyone else, could have done a thing to prevent your demise, just might be the hardest of all notions to accept.

A children’s song springs to mind: ‘row row row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.’ This in turn leads me to something Leone once said. She was only 6 or 7 years old and looked at me with this open, pensive look. She said “I sometimes wonder if all this (she made some inclusive gesture) is not just a dream”. It was one of the many deep things she tends to say.

The metaphor of life as a ship is a useful one when we consider the issue of control or lack of it. When a storm rages at sea, a ship can’t do anything but wait for it to pass. It needs to relinquish all illusion of control, it has to, and go wherever the waves will carry it. Perhaps that’s why I like trains so much, revealing a need for control with stronger roots in me than I was aware of. A train is least likely to drift, it is the most controlled form of transportation. Its rails force it into a direction, which it will, most of the time, obediently follow. When it comes to trains, there is no swerving or meandering. The problem is, the track will end, eventually. And then what?

On a larger scale, the current situation in the world is a clear admonition to humanity as a whole, that, contrary to popular belief, we are not in control. And we know precious little. So what can you do when you have no control over a situation? Freaking out is an option. It’s not an advantageous one, however. Another choice is to, like the ship, have faith. To trust that things will turn out all right, to trust that you, we will make it, to believe things will get better. To be at peace with the notion you cannot and do not know everything.

The English poet John Keats once coined a beautiful phrase to define this skill: negative capability. In his words, it is the ability to accept “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats applied this quality to writers, but I think the world would improve greatly if everyone applies themselves to learn this skill. It is exceptional in the sense that it celebrates a passive ability the human world is ready and overripe for. Letting go, rather than a rigid holding on.

Leone’s birthday never ends. Because she was born towards the end of July, we’re usually away on a holiday. Which means her birthday needs to be celebrated at least three times: on the day itself within our little circle, and when we return from wherever we vacation: one party for friends and one family gathering. So when I was relieved the birthdays were done with, we still had two parties to go.

The series was concluded with a sleepover planned to take place during the ultimate reaches of summer, permitting an evening dip in the lake. As I was sitting in the sand, guarding the kids’ clothes and beholding their seemingly carefree joy, the water carried their clear laughter towards me. It underscored my pain. Their crystalline voices singing Moana’s song “How far I’ll go” from Disney’s Vaiana about an uncertain future made me crumble with grief, sticking needles into my crying heart as if it were a voodoo doll.

As I watched them, the velvet sunset caressed my sadness by showing me you weren’t there. So clear it was. My feet in the soft, cool sand, without you next to me to relish the abundant joy of our twelve-year old. I must now experience everything for you. 

Then, suddenly, you appeared, taking the form of a rainbow that needs no rain. It seems to be your preferred sign, a rainless rainbow. The symbol for tolerance of all genders and races, a symbol that your brave oldest daughter brandishes with conviction. This is how you materialize in my moments of greatest turmoil. And it makes sense. Because everyone knows, there is no such thing as the end of the rainbow.

Photo by Vera Silsbury, website: https://artofobservation.weebly.com/