“Het gaat zoals het gaat”

“Het gaat zoals het gaat” recurs as a compact explanation for what cannot be controlled, but the characters do not use it in quite the same way. For Peter, it moves from a family saying that supports acceptance to a realization that acceptance need not mean passivity. For Eva, it gives voice to the painful sense that effort cannot guarantee a desired outcome.

Peter’s Inheritance of the Saying

In therapy, Peter tells Hetty that he believes grief will gradually ebb and that he and Eva must find another way to be happy—or, as he revises the idea, content. He recalls that his father always said “Het gaat zoals het gaat.” Peter presents the saying as a settled view of life, and explains that therapy is not for him: he would rather continue with his life. In this moment, the expression helps him decline further therapeutic work and trust that sorrow may recede with time.

That calm formulation sits beside the grief Hetty has just described: Peter has lost a child and the hope of having another, while suppressing his sorrow because he believes Eva suffers more and has a greater right to it. He does not accept Hetty’s account that buried grief will eventually consume him. Instead, he frames the future as something to meet by finding another route to happiness. The saying therefore conveys both a genuine wish to accept what has happened and a possibility of avoiding what remains painful.

From Acceptance to a Chosen Future

After leaving therapy, Peter drives with the window open and Guns N' Roses playing. Summer, which he says he has not felt for years, suddenly seems present again; he finds himself wanting to call Steef, go to the beach, travel, cycle, eat out with Eva, find a new job, and attend a concert. The change is not simply that his grief has vanished. His world, which had seemed stalled, begins to move, and he sees a possible way for himself and Eva to climb out of their long decline.

Peter’s insight turns on the difference between having choices and keeping faith with one. He retraces the couple’s decisions to marry and try for a child, then identifies the many medical options they pursued when conception did not happen as a source of confusion and estrangement. Rather than continue to treat adoption as a lesser substitute, he imagines it as a new shared purpose: a child to whom neither of them would have a blood connection, and a different choice rather than a second-best one. The saying’s acceptance of circumstance thus gives way to active commitment. At the crossroads, Peter does not take the road home; he joins the highway and turns up the music, making his renewed resolve visible in action.

Eva’s Encounter with Chance

Eva uses the same expression from another angle. During her pregnancy, she had followed rules and preparations with intense commitment: she avoided particular foods and alcohol, took folic acid daily, and planned in detail for the baby’s arrival. Yet she cannot understand why things went wrong, especially when she compares her outcome with that of people she believes did less to protect their pregnancies. Her conclusion is that effort has no power to secure the result: some people have luck, while others have none.

For Eva, then, “Het gaat zoals het gaat” is less a path toward a new shared decision than an account of the disparity between care and outcome. The phrase links her reflection to Peter’s, but sharpens the novel’s contrast: accepting what cannot be changed may open a way forward, as it does for Peter, or register the bewilderment of discovering that conscientiousness cannot command fortune. Its recurrence holds those meanings together without resolving their tension.