Shared Memories

My brother Gijs (Jon) sent this testimony to our lives. 

This makes me so sad and also so relieved for you my dear brother. I wish, with deep regret, that our brotherhood had been a brotherhood in its best sense. I longed for it, but it was not to be. We tried. You did I know, in your own way but I think it became true that since I was not who you wanted a younger brother to be, and you were not what I wanted an older brother to be, that we were both left to decide others were more important to us.

In later life, when mother died I tried a different tack. She was so worried about you and had terrible end of life nightmares of seeing you alone, adrift on an ice flow some where in the middle of an ocean and that there was nothing she could do. Just as she instructed Della (my wife) in her last hours to take care of me she beseached me to try to keep the bonds together. She knew the family she had built would tear itself to shreds after her death and it frightened her to blazes so she gave me one of those intense Clara (mother) stares deep from that old, pinched, toothless face of hers and said I had the diplomacy to try.

I kept my promise to the best of my ability and interceeded for you so many times in family rifts that sometimes blamed you for the falling apart. It was a thankless task. The effect of the camp on Hans (our much older brother), the tough place that put his kids in, the long gap in years between our two generations, the almost unforgivable lack of acknowledgement our parents had of the strife within, and the homophobia of its time reverberated like a constant pattern of crashing waves on a Scheveningen beach. We all ended up sort of lonely, hoping to find each other in the dunes with the sand constantly giving way beneath our feet.

Now here we are, you and I. I long to hold your hand. To forgive. To forget. To feel that moment where we are standing together on the stern of the Roma crossing the Indian Ocean on our way to Sydney, fascinated by the flying fish and dolphins and the white churning propeller wake. We are flying kites in the draft of the ship as it was plying its way towards an unknown destination. It’s a very sunny day. The tails on our kites are getting tangled as they veer hard left and then hard right. A string breaks. The entangled kites drag each other, fluttering into the ocean far behind us.

As to the order of things at the funeral be comforted that I will do my best to lift the veil of grief and shine a light on happier times.

Please tell Alain my deepest thoughts are with him as well.