Day after day ...
For as long as I remember, Christmas and New Year celebrations have not been the happiest or warmest moments of my year. A deep feeling of melancholia mixed with disgust takes hold of my soul during that period.
The melancholia is surely linked to my early years where, until my mid-twenties, I spent most Christmases and New Year eves alone and wistful. As for the feeling of disgust, it is triggered by the sight of so many sad people trying so helplessly to look happy. All these lonely souls, forcing few smiles, greeting people they never met before, buying stuff they can hardly afford, … just because it is that time of the year! This landscape of emotional misery always fills me with pity and pity is disgusting.
Anyhow, starting from this low esteem for that period of the year, life wanted to confirm my feelings in a way that will mark my soul forever. On the 26 of December 2002 at 8:20 in the morning, one day after Christmas, I received a phone call from my friend back in “the country”. Needless to say, at 8:20 am on a holiday, he woke me up, as he used to do on many Sunday mornings before he closed his Saturday nights and went to sleep. So, pleasantly disturbed by this call, I was ready for a long discussion on poetry, history, politics, or philosophy. The first word he uttered was my name, I felt that his voice was unusually deep, but my first thought was: “it’s normal after a long night of drinking and redefining the world”. Fairly quickly, I realized that there was an uncommon tone of seriousness in the way he said my name, so I remained silent. He carried on, and very painfully said: “I have very sad news for you, your father passed away this morning. It was quick and painless. His heart stopped suddenly.” I was stunned. I remember telling him these few words: “I need to sit down, oh no, what a fucking story!”, then I hung up having lost any awareness of time. I still don’t remember what happened during the ten minutes that followed. I lost my intelligence, my strength and any sense of reality. As soon as I emerged from my short coma, my mind transported me to the day before, the 25th of December. On that day, we called my father to wish him a happy birthday. His voice was joyful and full of energy and youth. He talked to all of us and said that he was drinking whisky to celebrate Christmas with my younger sister, that he was happy to see her and her daughters, that everything was going just great. We then finished the call with a promise to see him in the summer so he can meet my second, newly born son. Late that evening, I was sitting in the kitchen of our home in Brussels, with my other sister who just moved to France to be close to her children studying there, and we were talking about choices in life. The choice to live away from our country, the choice to live far from the ones we love, the choice of defying destiny with an illusion of immortality. At the end of that discussion, I asked her: “aren’t you afraid that someone you love, for example our father, might die suddenly, and you are not with him? Since you don’t really have to be in France, as I have to be in Belgium to make a living, why don’t you go back and be next to the ones that you love and probably are closer to the end than others”.
She replied: “He is not sick, we just talked to him and he seemed to be feeling really well, why would he die suddenly? Anyhow, I don’t like to talk about these kinds of things!”.
These were our last words before we headed to sleep around 2:30 am on the 26 of December 2002. Six hours later, I had to wake her up to tell her that what I was afraid would happen the night before just happened. I will forever regret asking my sister that stupid question the night before. As I wrote at the beginning of this paragraph, life wanted to mark my soul forever with the seal of melancholy and disgust, and it surely did. For 15 years now, every Christmas day and the morning after, I remember that ugly morning of the 26 December, 2002. It remains, until today, the worst morning I ever lived! The most unfortunate thing is that I cannot say with any level of certainty that it will remain forever the worst morning of my life … Life is a surprising bitch.
Clearly, we don’t always do the logical things. We live as if we will never die. We mistreat life until we cry for losing it. We ignore death until it stops ignoring us. We abstract death out of our lives, despite it being the only certainty we have. After all, it seems to me that the most intelligent animal is also the dumbest.
For a year, I thought about the unexpected death of my father and the “why now”, “why him”, …, and I asked myself all the questions that we ask ourselves in the aftermath of such a terrible shock. At the end of this process I reached one big conclusion: “humans are extremely foolish to live as if life or death (leath) will wait for the accomplishment of their projects. Leath has its own agenda, and it very rarely coincides with human hopes and wishes.” We naively think that the days put forward to us, belong to us. The reality is that these days naturally belong to their creator: leath. Another conclusion flowed logically from the first one: “our imperative duty is to wake up every day, try to snatch every moment away from leath, and make it our own.”
However, on specific days, few for some and few more for others, we are struck by random bad luck, and we come to realise, that, no matter how hard we try, these days will not be ours; they will belong to leath. Usually, these days are not the happiest days of our existence, they are very similar to the ones I lived between Christmas and New Year, in 2002. Typically, while living these days, we start to believe that this is the only kind of days that we will ever live again. But, in reality, this is not the case… Life has taught us three things that we ought to remember every now and then:
No matter what happens, life always prevails
Time destroys everything, the good stuff and the bad stuff
The time counter is running with or without our involvement
Since that realisation, and during the following years, I have learnt, unequivocally, that many more days than I was led to believe by my limited mind, can belong to me. With this certainty in mind, every morning since, my sole purpose is to steal the day away from leath, and make it entirely my own. Each person has a different definition of ownership, and this makes this world, the world we know. As for myself, a day that I own, is a day where, I can provide to the people I care about some of the things that make them happy, or at least contribute to their peace of mind. To make it achievable, I start with the things they need and from there I move to the things they want or desire!
Until my last morning, owning as many days as possible, in my definition of ownership, is exactly what I call success in my life. Nothing else comes close. The challenge, however, is to achieve my life’s success without hurting anyone else, outside of my circle of care. There is always a catch!!!
I sincerely hope that you are making most days entirely your own without stealing them from other people’s life, but only from your own.