A week ago, returning from another run to the warehouse where I’ve stored most of our life, I was in the car listening to ABBA. An important soundtrack of my childhood and a recurring presence during our skiing trips, a melancholy impulse made me play the Swedish band’s music. Although you grew to like the unproblematic and sometimes-cheesy songs, you weren’t always crazy about our nth rendition of Waterloo or Voulez-vous with the cd playing in the background. Stuck behind the wheel, once in a while you suggested a change of music. Sometimes we agreed to it, but not often enough for your taste. Where I can listen to a favorite song over and over again, you disliked repetition, but the steady accompaniment of the 70’s band to our route to the French Alpes made the music acquire the happy association of those winter holidays. Now, of course, the songs have picked-up another hue: the pain of the loss of those travels.

Certain ABBA songs were more popular than others (or simply included in the Gold collection cd we always turned to) and therefore more familiar, but my Spotify account threw a lesser known (though not unknown) tune my way, called: Slipping Through my Fingers. It’s a song about a mother seeing her daughter off to school, plagued by a sadness at letting her child go, not just to school, but in a broader sense, simply because she’s growing up. Having children of my own and very sensitive to music and its lyrics, I had understood the feeling well. This, however, was the first time I heard the song since you died. It didn’t fail to touch me vehemently, but the clarity of the emotion was gone. Why was I crying? I knew it wasn’t just the letting go of our daughters anymore. Was it the recurring realization you will never see them grow up? Yes. The past year-and-a-half they have developed and changed so much, you’d hardly recognize them. Were my tears fueled by the notion I can no longer be the mother I used to be without you there to share the load, and therefore more often lose the precious time that Agnetha sings of? Absolutely. Was it because I can never again share with you this melancholy feeling of seeing our children outgrow their parents? Hell yeah. 

I have been doing alright, but the last few weeks my strength is crumbling. This might be the very first time I’m getting a taste of what depression is like. It’s not really surprising, for several stressors are uniting and serenading me their high notes. In less than a week, my kids and I will be homeless. I am cleaning out our special house, without knowing where we will go next. Our plan, to go to my former hometown, Los Angeles, has been thwarted by COVID19 – related complications. And although the prospect of moving to the US is quite daunting, it’s an exciting one as well. So what to do when the children no longer have a school to attend to in the Netherlands, but can’t go to their prospective school in Los Angeles either? Stuck in a schoolless vacuum, they see their friends picking up books and preparing for a new educational year, and look to me to find a solution. To create some security, show them what’s next. I’m failing at it and it feels like I m gambling with their future.

Relinquishing the house is fraught with emotions in too many hues. On the logistical side, it’s large and accommodates more stuff than I was aware we possessed. Intending to get rid of as much as possible, I have been going through it for months now, and the flow of paperwork, books, trinkets and clothes just doesn’t seem to end or even abate. I never realized you held onto mementoes as much as you did, until I dove into the contents of our cabinets and discovered a treasure of souvenirs from your youth and our life. When I came across a few diaries from the time you were about thirteen and freshly in high school, it was the first time I discovered you were inclined to journaling in your teen years. From a more tender age, a poetry book resurfaced. On the first pages of it you introduced yourself to the people who contributed their rhymes to your little keepsake notebook. The innocent children’s poem begins with the line “This book is mine, for as long as I’ll live”.

Since I inherited all your possessions, I guess it’s now mine, to hold onto for your children. It’s one of the most precious discoveries I made during my odyssey, but there were many more like it. Not only cabinets and closets held surprises, our computer did as well. Letters you wrote to me and I to you are the obvious instigators of emotional writhing, and yet I feel the simple notes synchronizing our daily schedules or grocery shopping are more insidious, because the agony they cause is unexpected, giving me a brief taste of how our life together used to be. One of those was particularly nasty. It was a brief email message dealing with the question whether you should get life insurance. I believe we had an argument the night before; the cynical tone was not like you, unless you were feeling hurt. You’ll never know how excruciatingly hard this joke, that was never meant to be funny in the first place, now hit me. This is the way you introduced this email: “Let’s discuss my death.”

From another angle, our moving out of Overbeek (the name of our monumental house) is also a goodbye to my family history, the main reason I wanted to live there. It wasn’t just the house I was born into, it has always been a symbol to me and my entire extended family. The families of both of my parents had lived here. At the same time. Overbeek was built in 1840 and holds the oldest elevator in the Netherlands. One of our wedding gifts was a drawing by my parents of this house, demonstrating its significance and a prophecy of what lay in our future. On our wedding-day, however, we could not possibly imagine we’d ever live there, much less, that you’d die there.

It’s a magnificent yet quirky mansion with a breathtaking woodsy garden. It’s also the place where my grandfather died suddenly and unexpectedly, his youngest son, my father, only thirteen years old. Sixty years later exactly the same happened to you, and your children. The similarities are nothing short of eerie. How well did I come to understand my grandmother’s plight.

As children, my cousin and I had made a pact to buy Overbeek back one day. We did. Now the time has come to finish this chapter of my, our, family history.