Sweet Child O’ Mine

Sweet Child O’ Mine is bound in Peter’s memory to Lieve, the daughter he and Eva lost, and becomes a musical passage from the possibility of a new family back to the child they mourn. As Peter turns up the music after deciding that he and Eva should pursue adoption, Slash’s guitar solo brings him to Lieve’s song and, in turn, to her grave.

The Song and Its Association

Peter hears the guitar solo by Slash as sharp and almost painfully plaintive. He recognizes Sweet Child O’ Mine as the song of his and Eva’s daughter: a piece that once carried promises, now inseparable from Lieve and from the future they did not get to share with her. Its meaning is intimate rather than general; Peter hears his child in the song’s sound and title.

The sequence begins after Peter has concluded that infertility treatment and uncertainty have led him and Eva away from themselves. He settles on adoption as a shared purpose, a different choice rather than a second-best substitute. At a junction he chooses not to drive home, takes the motorway, and turns the music up. The song accompanies that turn, though Peter does not explain why he chooses to visit the grave.

From Forward Motion to the Grave

The repeated question in the song, where to go next, sits beside Peter’s newly chosen route toward adoption. The contrast is not a simple rejection of that decision: the future remains a possibility, but the music reopens the past that the decision cannot erase. The guitar solo makes the turn in his attention audible, carrying him from a proposed shared goal to the particular child whose absence shaped their lives.

At the cemetery, Lieve lies in the children’s section beneath a white fieldstone inscribed with a message of enduring love, among forget-me-nots. Peter notices how the graveyard’s attempts at cheerfulness—garden ornaments, stuffed toys, and bright flowerbeds—cannot dispel its sorrow. The nearby sports fields make the contrast sharper: children’s exuberant voices carry across a place marked by loss.

Peter kneels and leaves a white rose against the stone. Eva has kept the grave tended, but he has not visited since the funeral; he had avoided it as a monument to his failure. Touching the cold stone, he wants to feel love for a child he never got to know, but finds guilt instead. The song’s former promises thus meet the material fact of the grave, without resolving the difference between longing for Lieve and knowing her.

Grief, Memory, and the Song’s Return

Peter has told Hetty that grief no longer occupies him and Eva day and night: they have new friends, he listens to music again, and he rides his motorcycle. He describes their lives as having found a new balance, even as therapy brings the suffering behind them back into view. Sweet Child O’ Mine gives that tension a concrete form: music belongs to his renewed life, yet this song also returns him to the loss that balance does not remove.

The song’s association with Lieve is not a cure or a completed act of mourning. Peter’s visit ends with him still unable to make his feelings match the love he believes he ought to feel. Its significance lies in holding the two movements together: he has chosen a possible future with Eva, but the song makes the lost child present again, and the grave gives that return a place.