Saturday I was with great-uncle Karel (109 or something) to take care of a bit: vacuuming the stairs, vacuuming him, afterwards both a nice bam with peanut butter. Suddenly the doorbell rang. Karel was so shocked that he tore his sandwich in half. I quickly walked to the front door. The doorbell turned out to be with the neighbors and when I walked back into the living room, Karel was shaking in a corner.
“I’m always so upset when the doorbell rings,” he faltered.
“How so?”
“Ah, because of the old days, the Japanese, that you always had to be ready to flee. I still think when the doorbell rings that the end of time has arrived.”
I’ve had that with my cell phone for years. When the thing vibrated, the stress was already coursing through my body. Record immediately, respond immediately, because otherwise. At one point my sister spoke to me about it.
“Why do you always let everything fall out of your hands when that thing goes?” she asked.
“I don’t want to keep people waiting,” I said.
“What about the people you’re with at that moment? Or the work and the thoughts that you are involved in?”
That I wanted to protest against that said enough.
Disappointing grandchild
I chewed on her comment for a few days and realized that the rush to respond was because of our grandmother. She lived through the war and as a child I had decided to always be there for her. She only had to call and I was already on the doorstep with groceries, blood thinners or a listening ear. In return, she took her PTSD out on me and couldn’t stop telling me what a disappointing grandchild I was compared to my radiant cousins, whom she saw 2.5 times a year.
While I was thinking about all this, my phone rang. I suppressed the urge to pick up right away, because my reaction addiction came not from a desire to please people quickly, but from the habit of brushing aside for someone who had been dead for years.
Karel sighed when I told him all this.
“So you have to teach yourself not to react to the past, but to the present,” he said after thinking about it for a while.
“Exactly,” I said.
“So I have to realize that my doorbell,” he said slowly, “announces just a visitor, a package or a hopeless neighbor, instead of a life threat.”
“Precisely.”
“Who knows, who knows,” he said, starting the news. Depressing news from the Eastern Front poured into the room. Karel sniffed.
“I do have to let go. Today, the war no longer rings the bell.”
Ellen Deckwitz writes an exchange column with Marcel van Roosmalen here.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of May 3, 2022
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