Dimitri Verhulst - The Latecomer

‘He’d only just turned seventy-four. The birthday decorations were still taped to the ceiling, in a manner of speaking.’

‘Seventy-four? The poor guy, that’s way too young to go, it really is.’

And everyone agreed. Seventy-four really was much too young to die. Nowadays, at least. With all the medical care available and the pills and the blah-blahblah. And their backs started to ache from spending all that time bent over a difficult constellation of boules.

‘From what I’ve heard he didn’t choose the easiest way to end it all either. He fell out of a window.’

‘Really?’

‘He’d stopped eating a few days beforehand. He used to save up his sandwiches to feed the birds in the nursing-home garden. But when walking that far got too much for him, he started throwing the crumbs out of the window instead. And apparently that’s how …’

‘That’s terrible. And fell straight to his death? I hope it was fast at least.’

‘And what makes it even more tragic: a few hours before he crossed the Styx with his box of bread crumbs, he wrote a few words on his bathroom mirror with toothpaste. The completely random words tree, carrot and lamp . Try to make something of that if you can. As if he was starting school all over again, the poor guy, and proudly practising the new letters he’d just learnt.’

‘A God-awful disease, dementia …’

Everybody agreed, dementia was a God-awful disease. And then enough was enough and it was high time to get back to life. The discussion of millimetres resumed. Somebody would win the game of pétanque. Somebody would be determined to get revenge. Night would fall and they would say goodbye to each other, but not for long, because soon they would meet again, on the day of the black raincoats, to sit down together on their usual cold pew in church. And when they’re standing together in consecrated silence at the cemetery, they can remark that it was a close thing, any closer and my body — an insignificant footnote — would have been lowered down next to Rosa Rozendaal’s in what they unthinkingly call ‘the merciful earth’.