Farewell on the first anniversary of Lieve's death

The farewell on the first anniversary of Lieve’s death brings Eva and Peter together at their daughter’s grave, where a private ritual of remembrance becomes a difficult promise to continue living. Eva says she will no longer come every day, but insists that Lieve remains her daughter and that she remains her mother. Peter accompanies her, carrying his own guilt and jealousy alongside a grief he has struggled to meet. Their departure from the cemetery, hand in hand, leads not to certainty or cure but to a brief, physical experience of release by the sea.

Background: Two Unequal Griefs

Peter and Eva reach the anniversary from different positions. Peter has not visited Lieve’s grave since the funeral. He had avoided it as a monument to his failure, and his reluctance had angered Eva. He has begun to feel that grief is less constant: he and Eva have new friends, he listens to music and rides his motorcycle, and he thinks they have found a new equilibrium. Yet being in therapy brings the suffering behind them back into view. His sense of improvement and his discomfort at the grave coexist; neither cancels the other.

Eva’s mourning has remained closely tied to the grave. For a year she has visited every day, sometimes twice in one day. Her grief has been so visible that a woman once contacted Peter after finding Eva lying on the grave and crying, her fists pressed against her stomach. At the anniversary visit, Eva again finds it hard to speak. She keeps her jaw clenched and avoids Peter’s eyes, afraid that opening her mouth will release a scream. Her silence is not an absence of feeling but an effort to hold it in.

The grave itself makes private sorrow part of a landscape that cannot be controlled. Lieve is buried in the children’s section beneath a white fieldstone marked with a message of lasting love and surrounded by forget-me-nots. Plastic ornaments and bright flowers try to make the corner cheerful, while nearby children’s voices carry across from the sports fields. The contrast between the memorial and the sounds of living children sharpens the pain of the place. Earlier, Peter had knelt there with a white rose, wanting to feel love for a child he had never known alive and finding guilt instead. At the anniversary, that unresolved feeling accompanies him as he stands beside Eva.

At the Grave: A Promise, Not Forgetting

On Bevrijdingsdag, Eva chooses the grave as the place to mark the year. She clears withered flowers from the bed while Peter fills a watering can and pours water over the forget-me-nots. He strokes her back and holds her hand, but the scene exposes his unease: he feels most inadequate beside the remains of Eva’s greatest love, jealous of a dead baby and of the sincerity of her grief. His touch offers companionship, but it does not mean that he feels what she feels.

Eva kneels and rests her hand on the stone. She addresses Lieve as their little girl and tells her that both parents are there. Peter clears his throat and offers a greeting of his own, but experiences his words as something said for form’s sake. Eva then explains that she has come to say she will let Lieve go. She describes the death as Lieve’s choice to become an angel, expressing a belief that gives spiritual meaning to the loss without changing the fact of her death.

Her farewell carefully distinguishes letting go from abandonment. Eva tells Lieve that her parents must go on, but that she will not be left behind: she will remain in their hearts, Eva will think of her continually even if she stops visiting every day, and she will always be her mother. The promise does not ask Eva to stop remembering or loving her child. Instead, it gives her a way to imagine a change in their daily practice while preserving the bond she fears losing.

Eva bends to kiss the stone and takes a small stone angel from her bag. She places it among the forget-me-nots as a guardian for the times she is not there. The couple look at the figure and the flowers above the small plot in which their shared dream is buried. Peter admires Eva’s ability to believe that Lieve has become an angel who hovers around them, while acknowledging that he cannot believe it himself. The ritual allows them to stand together without requiring identical convictions.

Leaving the Cemetery

Eva whispers that she is letting Lieve go. Peter strokes her curls, presses his face to her neck, and kisses her earlobe. They say goodbye without crying, then walk away holding hands. Peter feels lighter, and the change is registered through ordinary perception: he hears birds and gulls and notices sunlight shining between the trees. The relief is real but bounded. Nothing about the farewell reverses the loss; the scene marks a moment in which leaving the grave becomes possible.

Eva suggests going to the beach. They walk for what feels to Peter like miles along the waterline and through the shallow tidal pool, with their clothes gathered up and their shoes in their hands. At the quieter nudist beach, Eva proposes lying in the sand. Peter is uncomfortable among the naked bathers, but chooses not to complain. Eva takes off her clothes and settles into the warm sand with her arms spread, describing the feeling as freedom. The movement from the grave to the beach gives the day a striking change of setting and bodily register: after tending a stone and speaking of the dead, the couple walk together beside water and enter a space Eva experiences as free.

Grief Beyond the Anniversary

The farewell does not make mourning linear. Elsewhere, Eva is frightened when she realizes that several hours have passed without her thinking of Lieve. She recalls the baby’s small body, closed fists, and fine hair, and fears that forgetting even briefly might mean letting her daughter go. She lights a candle beside Lieve’s photograph and holds on to the identity of a mother whose child died before she could truly know her. The anniversary promise therefore sits beside, rather than resolves, her resistance to forgetting.

Later, Eva’s uncertainty about a possible pregnancy brings another kind of hope and fear into her daily life. She notices tense breasts and nausea at the smell of coffee, avoids running, cycling, and bumpy roads, and reminds herself that pregnancy would be unlikely even as she imagines it as a second chance. On mornings when anxiety leaves her unable to rise, she turns to Lieve’s photograph for comfort before getting ready for work with young children. These later moments complicate the meaning of the anniversary: Eva can promise to stop visiting the grave every day and still carry Lieve into her thoughts, her sense of motherhood, and her hopes for the future.