1001 Nights Cast

Dear Pap,

In all of this writing I’ve been doing, I haven’t really stopped to think about you at all. It’s impossible to talk to you now, I haven’t been able to talk to you for years.

I still remember conversations with you just before the dementia took hold, though. Just as I was getting together with Sam, it looked as if it wasn’t going to happen, and I called home one day, upset, wanting, probably to speak to mum as usual. But she can’t have been there, because I got you instead. I stood there in my new flat, bought with your money, and we talked. I cried and said that I was afraid I wouldn’t have a baby before you died. And you said that dying was a journey you had to take on your own. Then you misheard me repeatedly: I said ‘I’m afraid of losing you’, and you heard this as ‘loving you’, and then ‘leaving you’. The misunderstandings made more sense than the original declaration. Or at least they broke it down into its component parts.

My memory of when everything went pear-shaped for you though is actually bound up with Mum, buying a car, and 9/11, even though it happened after these things. Mum came to Cambridge on 12th September, and we drove all over Cambridgeshire, looking for a car. You had already, of course, been complaining about memory loss, and language loss for some considerable time—at least as far back as 1999, when we celebrated your 80th birthday in Holland—Opa Tachtig? Allemachtig!—but it was getting worse, and especially so since moving house. Mum and I cried in the car about the World Trade Centre. We went to Bury St Edmunds and went into the cathedral. A book of condolences had been set up. It was such a sad day. And yet it was all bound up with you at some level. In mid-October, you went with Mum to Majorca, and that was where it all went wrong. Suddenly you didn’t know who she was any more, and you broke out of your room at night, and attacked someone in the hotel corridor. Somehow Mum got through the holiday, she didn’t call us, not until she was back in England. She managed that whole awful trip by herself. Peter and I came to Norwich to make her go to the doctor and confront it, and that was when it was all officially diagnosed. Vascular dementia.

Mum looked after you until the Autumn of 2003, when you fell and she realized she wouldn’t be able to manage you. She had just had a stair lift installed in the house. You went to hospital, and I came up with Sasha, who was still only about five months old. We wondered whether you would come out, but you recovered slightly. But it was still too late, you had to go into a home. The moment the nurse on duty told me, I thought I had been slapped. Even though it was obvious—and what I had counselled—it was still a terrible blow.

Now it is August 2005, and you have been living in the home for nearly two years, getting gradually weaker, and losing any connection with Mum. You are an astronaut, your soul is tugging at your body. It sounds as though the connection has gone with Mum too. Now you are just fighting yourself. I wish I knew if you were terrified or not, Pap. It’s impossible to know what you are thinking or if you are thinking any more. It seems more of a battle within you as an organism.

I am waiting on the fringes, on the other side of the world. Twenty-four hours away. I don’t think I will see you alive again. I don’t know what difference that makes. It’s as though we are trying to land a plane without too many jolts. I don’t know if it will matter to you or to me not to have contact before you land.

Now I have lost you. I am only talking to the computer. I wish I had some clearer sense of you as a person, Pap. All I have are remnants, and that is what I have always had of you. I know, I am sure, that you loved me, but I am not sure whether you loved Peter. I think that you did, but you were blinded by jealousy. The way you behaved in the family was appalling. You were cruel, you withheld affection, you withheld yourself. You were aggressive, and violent. You drank. You hit us. You paid for our education, and you picked us up from school for years. You were proud of our achievements, then you played us off against one another. I think I studied languages because I wanted to be able to communicate at all costs. Would I have studied psychology if it had been available? Everything was conducted through an academic lens, I think I would have been contemptuous of it as a woolly subject. Not enough material to hang on to in it. But was I even a good linguist? I hated France, hated the French, hated the sense of powerlessness and stupidity that went with being foreign. Did I stick at it out of loyalty to you, to how hard you found it to be a Dutchman in England?

All my love

Your daughter

This letter was written in Sydney, Australia, between 10 and 11am on the morning of 3 August 2005. My father died in England, in a nursing home, at 2am on the morning of 3 August, the day before his 86th birthday. 2am in Britain is 11am in Sydney.