Hetty Vos

Hetty Vos is a psychotherapist and lived-experience expert whom Peter and Eva turn to after the death of their daughter, Lieve. Her work becomes a point of division between them: Eva relies on the sessions to speak about her grief, while Peter experiences them as an unwelcome return to pain he would rather leave behind.

Identity and Introduction

Eva has arranged the appointment without consulting Peter and presents it as an alternative to separation. Peter enters the therapy already hostile to the setting and to Hetty herself, whom he sees through a contemptuous, disparaging lens. His account describes her gray, greasy hair and a dim room scented with incense; that description establishes his resistance more than it offers a neutral portrait of Hetty.

Hetty has been recommended to Eva by other people who have experienced loss. She is there to help the couple process what happened and find a place for it in their relationship. Her authority rests not only on professional practice but, as Peter understands it, on her own experience. From the outset she asks for cooperation and trust rather than treating attendance alone as a sign that Peter is ready to participate.

Work with Peter and Eva

Hetty attempts to make the sessions physically and emotionally participatory. She asks Peter to put his feet on the floor and suggests he remove his shoes; he refuses, interpreting the request as a kind of capitulation. She tells him she is not his enemy and says that he seems like an angry child sent by his mother. Peter admits that the comparison may fit. He believes their misfortune is something they must eventually move beyond, and doubts that a stranger can help them do so.

When Peter says that he has resumed listening to music and riding his motorcycle, and that he and Eva seem to have found a new balance, he also explains why therapy remains difficult for him: each appointment brings the suffering back into view. Hetty responds by naming two losses, not one. Peter has lost Lieve, she says, and also the hope of having another child. She believes he is suppressing his grief because he thinks Eva suffers more and has a greater claim to it. Her image of an ignored wound that may grow more painful makes explicit her concern that apparent forward motion is not the same as mourning being resolved.

Peter does not accept this interpretation. He expects grief to recede with time and thinks the couple should seek another way to be content. He has tried therapy, but concludes that it is not for him. Hetty’s account of his grief may identify something he has difficulty acknowledging, yet the sessions also intensify his sense that he is being pulled back into the past. Her help therefore meets a real limit: Peter is unwilling to trust the process she offers.

Relationship with Eva

Eva’s experience of Hetty differs sharply from Peter’s. Even after he withdraws from therapy, Eva continues to attend because Hetty is the one person with whom she can spend an hour speaking openly about her sorrow. Eva recognizes that the conversations are paid professional care, but that does not make the chance to speak less important. Hetty also gives Eva a spiritual interpretation of Lieve’s death: she describes the child as a star child whose soul had a purpose beyond this world. Eva holds on to this account as a way of imagining that Lieve’s short life had meaning and that the child remains close to her.

In a later session, Hetty is pleased to see the couple doing better and takes their renewed vitality as evidence that talking can help people through a difficult period of farewell and grief. Peter resents what he sees as her self-congratulation, but Eva responds differently. She has begun to speak of having made a place for Lieve’s death and accepted the end of the possibility of a child biologically shared by the couple. She is now open to other paths, including adoption. Eva also acknowledges that her desire for a baby had narrowed her perspective, and recognizes how difficult it was for Peter to know he was not Lieve’s biological father and to stop fertility treatment.

Role and Limits

Hetty’s influence is not presented as a simple cure. Peter sees therapy as an intrusion into a fragile new equilibrium; Eva finds it a continuing place for grief that others have stopped listening to. The contrast shows that the couple do not mourn in step, and that advice to move forward can mean something different to each of them. Hetty’s work helps Eva articulate both her continuing bond with Lieve and her openness to a future beyond the child she lost, while Peter’s refusal leaves his own grief largely unspoken. Her role in the story is consequently both supportive and contested: she offers a language and space for mourning, but cannot make either spouse accept them.