A deeper reason, perhaps, for the procrastination – the reason why I have written nothing on this blog for over 18 months – is that I like to keep my inner life private and it would have been impossible to give an honest account of this recent period without revealing something , perhaps too much, about my personal life. I had intended to tell you about my trip to Egypt in April last year, but every attempt to write about it became stilted and mechanical, a mere day-by-day account of events without warmth or emotion. The same problem has dogged me ever since and I realise that I need to lay a ghost to rest if I am ever to write creatively again.
I mentioned Tineke in my blog entries for August 2010. At that time, though still legally married, we had been separated for nearly two years. Tineke and I first met at a party in a villa outside Florence in October 1978. She was then a student teacher and had arrived from the Netherlands to visit her brother, with whom I shared a house (along with four others) as a post-graduate student at the European University Institute. Within days, we fell in love, and not many months later we were sharing a room in Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands. Tineke graduated as a teacher in June 1979 and in the same month my post-graduate grant ran out (I never did finish the PhD thesis). Money was no problem, as we both had a strong work ethic and casual jobs were plentiful in those days. By December, Tineke had a full-time teaching post at a school for the blind in Grave and I got a full-time job as a logistics administrator the following month.
For four years, we lived fairly happily in the Netherlands and gradually increased our prosperity. All the small milestones I well remember: our first TV set (black-and white); our first car, a Citroen 2CV, and the move from the student house to our own, rented, two-bedroom apartment. We saved but still had the money for trips abroad to Brittany, Denmark and Tunisia, plus annual visits to my family in England.
By the end of 1983, we were both becoming rather bored with our respective jobs and decided to move to England. Before the definitive move, we were formally married in July 1984 at a well-attended ceremony at the Udenhout Registry Office, followed by an even better attended reception.
I will not bore you with all the details of our lives over the following 25 years of marriage. This is not about me, in any case; it is about Tineke. Always hard-working, studious and intelligent, she was absolutely devoted to her calling as a teacher of students with multiple disabilities. I deliberately choose the word ‘calling’ because she was not at all career-minded and had no ambitious drive to work her way up any ladders. The fact that she ended up ‘managing the teachers who teach the teachers’ was purely a matter of seniority and experience. There was nobody else to fill the position and she often said she would rather have been back teaching directly to the deaf-blind students.
She was also a good mother and – most of the time – displayed far more patience with them than I was able to muster. We had our differences about when to be strict and when to be easy-going, but on the whole I think we made a good team when it came to raising our kids.
I already mentioned that we shared a strong work ethic. Sometimes, I have to say, Tineke could take it to extremes. There was a period when, through force of circumstances, I was working away in Nottingham through the week and she was working full-time and then collecting the kids from nursery school at 5 o’ clock each evening. At this time, she decided that she decided she still did not have quite enough on her plate, so enrolled for a degree in Psychology with the Open University. She graduated in 1998 and was disappointed that she ‘only’ got a 2.2!
Unfortunately, our personal relationship was always a turbulent one and there came a point when I could not see any more mileage in it. After 24 years of marriage, all the little things that had been trifling irritations at the start finally stacked up and toppled over. We did not stop loving each other; we just could not carry on living together. At first, I shared an apartment with a good friend, only 200 metres from the family home, in the hope that I could still spend a lot of time with my children. While I was living there, Tineke developed breast cancer. She was operated on and appeared to have made a good recovery and returned to work. The children, in their teenage years, were more preoccupied with seeing their peers than their parents, so I decided to take full advantage of my professional mobility and see the world, keeping a watching brief on the situation back home. The first stop was Iceland and I fell in love with the country, spending 8 months there.
Then came the hammer-blow. The cancer had not been checked; it had spread and was now incurable. I remember the day well, although I cannot remember the exact date; I think it was the last day of February 2011. I had spent a wonderful day outdoors, walking along the coast and revelling in intermittent snow storms until I stood on the road outside my accommodation and, throwing my head back and spreading my arms, shouted “Thank you, Gods, isn’t this just bloody wonderful?!” And then, in the evening, I got the bad news. No need to rush back immediately. Plain statement of fact. My duty lay before me: I would have to go back to England to give what help I could. But I raged. Oh how I raged! Damn you, gods! Damn you, Norns!, Damn you, Wyrd! I swept everything from my altar with a blow of my forearm and left the images lying on the floor. Later, calmer but still seething, I challenged the Gods to give me an answer as to how this made any sense. Why not me? I have smoked, drunk and generally abused my body throughout my life. Tineke never smoked, drank hardly at all, and ate and exercised healthily. And everything was coming together for me, with the prospect of a house in Iceland where I could study magic and learn the Icelandic language… it made no sense at all.
And unlike those of the desert religions, who say one must have faith in some divine plan and not question the will of the one god, I DO question. The only answer I am likely to get is “Shit happens. Happens to people all the time. What makes you or yours so important?”
So I returned, out of love and duty. Tineke and I never lived together again as man and wife, but I was able to be close and offer help, when necessary, through the last 2 years of her life. She worked heroically until January this year but then took a turn for the worse and was in hospital for long periods. On 8 May, she was taken to Saint Michael’s Hospice. When I arrived there the same evening, the doctor told me “We’re looking at an end-of-life situation”. I said “You mean she is dying?”, wondering why they have to use such mealy-mouthed expressions for the obvious. While Tineke was still lucid, we discussed the fact that she was dying and she was resigned and content with the fact. I have never known anyone so brave. Gradually, as her physical body began to shut down, she became a bit confused, saying things like “Remember to wash the bushes across the road”, but she had the best of care from the wonderful staff at the hospice, giving her all the sedatives and morphine that could be responsibly given, short of euthanasia. I had a desire to be with her at the final parting, but as the days passed I realised that such things do not run to a timetable and the effort to stay by the bedside can be distressing as well as exhausting. On a Tuesday evening, although I was desperate to complete a translation job, something prodded me: forget all that – get the kids, visit her one last time. We went there around 10 o’ clock at night and I asked the kids to tell her about their day and tell her they love her; it didn’t matter whether she responded or not, she might hear. And so the three of us made our final farewells. At 3.30 in the morning, 15 May, as I was saying my bed-time prayers, I got the ‘phone call.
I loved you, Tineke, and always admired you. Perhaps we were not really cut out for each other in the end, but we stuck together with grit. I will always miss you, for the length of this life, but I expect we will meet again in the next. Just be my pesky little brother next time, eh? Or a big sister... that would work too.