I’d like to wish my dear old mum, born Neeltje Verburg, a very happy 98th birthday today. I’d like to, but unfortunately she’s dead and has been since 1999, and as it is extremely unlikely she survived her own death and cremation by ascending to Paradise, there’s very little point. Still, there are memories, aren’t there?
Coincidentally, it would have been my stepfather George’s birthday today, too. I reckon he’d be around 106 had he not been struck down with Parkinson’s and finally dementia which rather took away all he lived for. By the time he died – and I was with him when he drew his final breath – life, but not as we know it, was all he had left. His death was strangely powerful because it was the first time I’d actually seen someone die in my company, but it was not in a spiritual way. It was certainly a blessing given how much he suffered.
Neeltje, or Elly as she was known, suffered from self-inflicted illnesses. She grew up during a time when everyone smoked and died during a time when medical science had long concluded that smoking was A Bad Thing.
The most remarkable fact is that somehow she survived until the age of 75, although the last 15 were effectively ruined by heart and circulation problems caused directly by smoking. The pain she was in was unbearable for her and not much better for George or me. That she ignored medical advice didn’t make things any better. On 28th October 1999, when my partner, my children and I were away on holiday she suddenly dropped dead in her care home. This too, I have to admit, was a blessing. I cried once and that, I know, was for myself. No more pain.
A blessing? Really? She was my mother. How can I say that? Well, because the pain she was going through was more powerful than the love I felt for her. I didn’t want her to die – who wants a parent to die? – but why would you want someone to suffer for as long as she had?
The main reason I don’t believe in the ‘after life’ is because, as I said before, I do not believe you survive your own death. It may be comforting to imagine she was now in the arms of God, along with the countless billions who died before her, but I find it hard to seek comfort from something I cannot believe to be true. And in any event, why would I want this elderly woman, in terrible pain, to go through the same thing in Heaven, along with her Parkinson’s wrecked husband, in the same place as a God who allowed it all to happen in the first place?
I still have my memories and old photos but I also have countless questions, many of which never occurred to me while she was alive and they all revolve around my fucked up life. Why did I perform so badly at school? Why was my professional life such a relative failure? And why, as I stagger and limp into old age, am I still weighed down by mental illness – more than half a century of it – and undiagnosed conditions? Of course, I blame myself for most of my many failings but would things have been different and maybe better if I had not been a grisly example of autodidactism?
The good my mum gave me outweighs the bad stuff that came along because it came through the love and care a mother gives her son. And it wasn’t her fault that she was a simple Dutch woman who came to live in a country that wasn’t hers, even though she embraced her new land in the best way she could.
I feel sad for her, too, because much of her life was bringing me up alone in near poverty, with no support and very little by way of a friendship group. Perhaps, as a teenager in Nazi occupied Rotterdam, watching Jews being taken away to transit camp at Westerbork before their final journey to Auschwitz-Birkenhau and Sobibor she counted her blessings and regarded any form of life as better than no life at all. Maybe, then, she was happier and more fulfilled than I imagined?
Either way, it would have been Neeltje’s birthday today. Despite everything, I’m glad I lived at all. The odds against me living at all, like the odds against everyone else living at all, were huge. Until we meet again? No, that’s not going to happen but if works for other people, who am I to knock it? Happy birthday, mum.
