Column | Have to leave

Among all those well-known, elderly Dutch people who died in recent weeks-Frits Bolkestein, Frits Korthals Altes, Hans van den Broek, Sigrid Koetse, Ron Brandsteder-someone who did not have their fame, but was much more precious to me: André, my 83-year-old neighbor.

We had seen it coming, his body left him more and more seriously, but when his wife called me with the disaster, I was speechless for a moment. André dead? Cheerful, gentle, hospitable André? There I stood, on a Sunday morning in an already busy Kalverstraat, where I had just bought slippers for my wife in the nursing home. Banaler could not, leave that to death.

I would like to keep it a little more pleasant, but I cannot find out that André and I, and you may also, belong to a generation that starts to die with high frequency. You notice it in everything, even if you prefer to pretend that nothing special is going on. And it is actually not special either. Death, that's life.

You notice it casually in small, inconspicuous things. As a book lover, I always look in those bookcases on the street. It contains more and more books that were about thirty, forty years ago. Half oeuvres from Maarten 't Hart, Renate Dorrestein, Kees van Kooten, F. Springer, FB Hotz, Heere Heeresma.

The owners of those books are no longer there, their children have referred to the overcrowded bookcases in the parental home for a while and decided with a deep sigh: gone with it.

With that 'childish' look I sometimes try to look at my book ownership. What could be done? An impossible question, I realize a little later. Why does something have to go that you have ever been dear? Isn't it bad enough that this happens to people? By the way, who says you will never re -read it again? Then I decide that my children should sort it out if I am gone forever.

This brings me to a beautiful poem about the death with which I hopefully do not want to close it too deadly column. It's called having to go and is from the poet Han G. Hoekstra who lived from 1906 to 1988. During the occupation in the illegality for Het Parool and De Bezige Bij, he became a reporter and film and TV critic of Het Parool after the war and in 1972 the Constantijn Huygens Prize was given for his « refined modest » poetry. A few years before his death I asked him by telephone if I could interview him for Vrij Nederland. « No, » he said decisively.

The clouds we look at,

the acacias in the avenue,

They are those who are left behind

And we have to go that away.

I'll go later. All images

On my retina once came to stand

I will know how to take

In a last, cool tear.

And sea air, gently talking of people,

the skin of a child's hand,

it will live with my diaphragm for a long time

Like a precious usury plant.

Save me your black coats,

Like asters but no weepen.

There is only this to think of this

If you ever stand for my stone:

Everyone gets stuck once

In a life that yeast and smell.

Just. For no reason.

For nothing. Because it happens.

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