Lecture zero: Not a Lecture...

 At moments like this I feel and experience how dear you are to me. Almost the very next day there dropped a card on me doormat with your supportive and consoling words.

       

I'll spare you the details. It was 5 o'clock in the morning that I woke up next to her because she was suffering a heavy stroke......

    

The end of the story is that she has been able to donate her organs: two kidneys and a liver.....and has passed on life to at least three people.

      

My wife died eventually at 4:15 PM November 8 and then night after night I was writing, added new lines to a poem and exactly before the day of the cremation I knew...now I have written the final lines.

  

At the funeral I opened the ceremony with my poem (after I had been practicing tons of times to have the power to do it and I did it. Don't ask me how)

    

I only can give you the English translation....the real music is in the Dutch words...

   

it's time

   

ok it's over

time takes its toll

now nothing remains 

for me but time

I know

I have lost you

that's how time works

     

it's end of story

  

the night is my friend now

no horizon to be seen

hidden in the void

the silence of absence

the darkness the loss

of an extinguished light

       

and then that silence

    

there is nobody

to talk to

the silence is silent

in all languages

where do we get

the courage from

to go on

    

and outside

    

in the rain you don't

see my tears

that's nothing

for in sunny weather

in the rain you don't

see my tears

     

now you're so far away 

at the time

that I say this

the horizon is already lost

where is the sun

isn't that where we had

begon after all

        

How I have loved you

more than twenty years

now you choose the silence 

Soon I'm going home 

and we'll share that silence

with each other in my tears 

     

Personal detail: we met each other and married when we were 50.

          

My wife loved flowers. There always had to be flowers in the house every day of the year. She had a special florist where she spent a fortune on flowers every week.

   

On the 7th of November she was there again to buy flowers and has said to him: "Jaap, when I pass away, YOU have to take care of the flowers at my funeral". She died on November 8.

  

Her passion were Peonies and Amaryllis. It's not the season here now for Peonies, but Jaap made a flower arrangement of white peonies... which were imported from Argentina.

  

In recent months she said to me several times: I want to go first, before you go and Death has respected her wish.

    

Life goes on, so we'll have to resume our lectures... What means death to a materialist? To begin with: a time of sorrow and pain.

   

This I can tell you. She is not here or there or somewhere. She is only in my heart and memories and in those of many other people and eventually we both will have disappeared...

   

Thank you all for your attention....you are dear friends to me....