When my little girl said ‘dead’ for the first time, on July 19 1975, she’d only been alive for two years and ten days. She knew roughly what she was talking about. It wasn’t one of those words she’d just repeat to please her verbally geared parents, like ‘cherished pledge’ and ‘utterly nutritious’. She laid still on the floor and declared: ‘Now I am dead’. Even though the seriousness of the declaration was tempered drastically by the circumstance that it was the subject herself who notified us of her premature passing, I was still a little shocked by the use of this particular word. She could have also said ‘Now i’m asleep’.
I thought about the poem by Anton van Duinkerken with the title ‘My little girl said: dead’. That starts with the following stanza:
‘The word that I find hardest to bear,
Double unwelcome from a child’s lips,
Aches my memory as an open wound rips,
Bare for the wind, naked in a gust of rain.’
To the question, where the child has learnt ‘this most bitter notion’, the poet answers that death itself has had to have taught its own name to the stammering child, for her father and her mother have always avoided ‘the dark sound’.
‘She looked at me. Her eyes grew wide
Of a shock that she read somewhere.
And I, who was silently playing with her.
Now know forever: my own child will die.’
The situation and the poem are serious enough to become subject of some deeper attention. The circumstance that the poem wasn’t written by a hen of a mother, who will take any opportunity to brag about her chick, and the fact that 1979 is the year of the child, makes it a bit less difficult for me to overcome the diffidence that the subject evokes, and to forget for a moment the toughness that our masculine culture imposes on fathers.
In the poem something remains unclear that in my daughter’s proclamation is unambiguous. Van Duinkerken doesn’t cite the words of his child, so we don’t know in which sense she used the most bitter notion. I suspect that for her, as was the case for my kids at the time, only the adjective ‘dead’ existed. ‘Death’, as a noun and as a independent operating demon, they don’t know. It remains a dark force in the background, that darkens the life of the father. Instead of ‘to die’, my kids, probably like most kids their age, have said ‘become dead’ for a long time. In as far as I can understand childlike thoughts, ‘death’ must be in the line of ‘sick’ and ‘old’. It is its superlative. Old people are already almost dead and it is a matter of fact for our kids that dad will become dead before mum, and Neeltje before Daniel. That is the simple consequence of a rule of nature that everything that has started sooner, will also end sooner.
In the poem it is Death as a Demon -with a capital- that whispers his name to the child. Therefore the reader gets the impression that the poet’s daughter used the noun. She ‘formed this word herself/ and tightened her childlike forehead’. In the face of so much seriousness the question of noun or adjective is a bit frivolous. So i’ll let it be and concentrate on the last line. My little girl declared ‘now I am dead’ and therefore was already talking about her own death the first time she used the word. Van Duinkerken makes himself into the mediator of this realisation: ‘My own child will die.’ This makes the seriousness much greater and colours it with much more melancholy. In my daughter’s case, and probably also in the case of the Asselbergs’ girl, there was hardly any seriousness involved. Concepts like beginning and end or mortality are at most an interesting background to the motionless laying still that they were practising here. I just hope that toddlers know nothing of death as a force.
Or am I mistaken in that and are we always mistaken when it concerns small children? I can hardly imagine that kids wrestle with issues like death, but on the other side: where do those dark tones come from, and why do we, well balanced adults, become so groundlessly melancholic and overflow with empathy when we see kids engaged in their serious games?I am no longer so sure that ‘becoming dead’ for them is necessarily and always something that happens to others, the ill and the old, and that ‘dead’ is no more than an adjective. Sometimes it seems as though they’ve stared the demon straight in the eyes, and as though this encounter throws a veil of melancholy over their games.
For years i’ve had the habit to write down my kids’ pronunciations when they affect me. In the last few months the word ‘dead’ is quite frequent in their conversations. Grandma has passed, a little friend of two has had an accident, a neighbour has died, two funerals of popes were televised, in short: deaths and funerals have been the order of the day. The mortality of all that lives has become thoroughly apparent. Daniel (22-12-1974) is the most radical in his conclusion. Seeing a photo of the newest pope he mumbles with something like resolute cheerfulness: ‘That is the new pope. That is pope John Paul. This pope now becomes dead: all popes become dead.’ (2-11-’78) No trace of emotion or dismay.Apparently the choice of pope to him was searching for a candidate for death. That is how the powers and the grown ups must arrange things.
The sudden death of grandma affected them more, for grandma was sweet, and then the observation alone won’t do. Still it is wondrous how quickly they get used to a definitive missing. Neeltje (9-7-1973) made a funny drawing for grandpa: ‘well gosh, I just wanted to console him’. And at the quiet graveyard the day after the funeral they are as much at home as they are in the playground. Daniel walks up to cracked old gravestones and calls: ‘Booo, is anybody there?’ and Neeltje wonders if grandma isn’t cold there in the ground. . The share of seriousness in the questions of kids is hard to judge. The protest against death is can almost not be untangled from the playful fantasies about everything that is possible and imaginable.
When little two year old Alberik died, our little girl seemed hurt in her sense of justice. She fantasised about how it would be if she had all the power, and for reasons not entirely clear she called that power ‘church’. ‘I wish I was the boss of the church. Then I would say, that nobody can be buried, but they should just be laid in a casket in someone’s home. I think it’s so sad that Alberik is buried and dead’. (27-1-’79)
She continuously toys with the thought that one of her parents will die. Sometimes that game is fairly ambiguous, especially after a day that wasn’t entirely peaceful and harmonious. ‘When mama is dead, we are allowed to stay up late, because we have suuuch sorrow’. (16-1-79) Another time she was loudly singing:
‘I have a poisoned hat,
and then I ask the thieves,
if they will wear it,
and they immediately drop dead’. (18-2-79)
Fate dictates that sick and old people die, kids want bad people to be handled in the same radical way, and that sweet people live forever. ‘You are sweet, papa, you have to stay alive’, Daniel says in a whispering tone, as though he detected suicidal thoughts in me.
The words that touched me most in this context, also by the tone which with they were spoken more tearful the less lugubrious the content became, I noted from the moth of my little daughter on March the 13th 1979. For me it is a text of some importance, and if it wasn’t so conceited and pedantic, I would dedicate six pages to it.
‘Papa, I think you are so sweet;
when you die, I want to lay with you.
I’ll certainly come to the funeral,
when they bury you, oh certainly.
But I can’t bare the thought of you dying;
it makes me want to sit down and cry.’
To be sure, just this: in three stages she distances herself from my and her own death. From fellow corpse she becomes an important visitor of my funeral and only after that she resolutely discards any thought of death. Only after the great sorrow is behind us, can we think about sitting down and crying. The tone becomes more sentimental the less near death is. On moments like that i’m not so sure how kids differ from adults.
(1979)
Cornelis Verhoeven 