Year of mourning: ‘I want to lie in the grave with Dad’

Image: Little Detail Photography

Tabitha (44) lives with her sons Teun (7) and Willem (3) in Haarlem. Her husband got a year ago the diagnosis: untreatable brain tumor. A month later he passed away. How are you going continue as a family after such a sudden loss? In these columns you get an insight into moments they experience. The first year without dad.

We took Teun to school and Willem and I are going swimming with a friend of his. We walk on the sidewalk and Willem plays on the edge. ‘Look after!’ I warn him, ‘there’s a car coming that you can’t see. Then you can have an accident.’ A conversation that every mother has a thousand times with her child. ‘I want to go to daddy,’ Willem says. ‘Daddy?’ “Yes, I want to lie in the grave with Daddy.” Okay, it’s just past 9:30 and I’m shaken awake again.

I understand him. When Frank had just died, I wanted to die too. Not really dead of course, I wanted to be with him and found everything so pointless. What was the point of life if Frank was gone? Willem, of course, wants to say that he misses his daddy and wants to be with him. That he wants to be protected by his father. I sigh and say that I understand him well: ‘I miss Daddy very much too.’ And then cheerfully: ‘We must now try to move on, enjoy ourselves.’ Because yes, we have that privilege. We live! As much as I would like to go back in time, we must and will continue. Frank wouldn’t have it any other way.

“What was the point of life if Frank was gone?”

But often I feel the sadness for the fact that he has already had to miss. How big his boys have become. How Teun got his A and B diploma. How Willem has grown from a cot to a large bed. How I run after the bicycle, Willem wearing a helmet and cycling separately from me. Gone… and how I can take care of him again when things threaten to go wrong. How Teun scores his first goal. Loses his first milk teeth. How well he reads to me when I put him to bed. The first sleepover. The sentences that Willem now speaks. Moments when pride and loss go hand-in-hand. How Frank would have loved to experience this and how we would have loved to have him there.

We waddle on and balance on the curb and life. We grow together in this new composition. And like any family, we also have our daily quarrels, conversations, laughter, crying and cuddle sessions. We fall and get up again. And when we fall, we want to be caught by daddy’s hands. If only we could stay with him for a while.

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