Kerstmis

Kerstmis is a recurring calendar point in which family life, depression, and suicidal intention meet. For Emma, the holiday first arrives through Karel’s warm description of his household’s traditions, briefly offering a picture of ordinary belonging when her own sadness feels overwhelming. For Linda and Beatrice, by contrast, it becomes a deadline for ending their lives. Emma’s later effort to remind Beatrice of her promise to wait makes the same date a reason to defer action, while their final exchange leaves the outcome unresolved and hope deliberately small.

Family Ritual and a Moment of Relief

During a walk, Karel asks Emma what she will do for Sinterklaas and Kerstmis. His questions about whether she will celebrate at home with friends or relatives bring her to tears. She describes a family gathering at home that combines the two holidays: surprises, a tree, poems, and relatives together. The mention of family overwhelms her. Even so, she tries to hold on to Karel’s words as he talks about his own celebrations.

Karel explains that his family now celebrates Kerstmis rather than both holidays. With children and their partners difficult to gather twice in a crowded month, they begin preparing early: the tree goes up at the start of December, and his wife decorates the house with wreaths and branches. They still pursue presents and poems. His daughter once wrote a ten-page poem for her brother, after which the family set a two-page maximum. The domestic details give the holiday a texture of affectionate routine, shaped by practical limits as well as playfulness.

As Emma listens, she can almost imagine Karel’s world as clear and ordinary, a world she feels he deserves. For a moment, the image is absorbing enough that she forgets her own. This is not a cure or a change in her circumstances; it is a brief interruption in the pressure of her sadness. Later, she recalls the walk to Gwen, who recognizes that Karel was trying to distract her and explains why his account of family may have mattered beyond the festive details.

Karel’s Account and the Meaning of Presence

Gwen describes Karel as a long-serving colleague who works at the PAAZ and carries substantial responsibilities at home. He has worked there for fifteen years and, despite the strain of the ward’s merger and move, is not someone she has heard complain. His son had an accident, and Karel and his wife now care for him full-time. Gwen connects this quiet, sustained care with Karel taking time to walk with Emma, even amid the disruption on the locked ward.

In Gwen’s reading, Karel’s holiday story suggests that family and true friends do not measure someone’s place by whether that person is ill, needs support, or provides it. What matters is that the person is there. She relates this to Emma and Sergei, whom she sees together at the PAAZ. The point answers Emma’s depressed conviction that she is a burden not by denying her suffering, but by setting it beside the effort other people choose to make for her. Gwen develops the contrast through a chessboard: Emma feels trapped on the black squares, yet the surrounding squares are white. Kerstmis thus carries an account of connection that Emma can hear, even if she cannot simply believe it.

A Holiday Turned into a Deadline

For Linda, Kerstmis has a far more dangerous meaning. She tells Emma that she has informed her family she will end her life if she is still depressed by the holiday. After a previous three-month depression that she had hoped never to experience again, she has now been depressed for another three months and no longer believes things will improve. She says her family has until 24 December; after that, she intends to resolve the matter herself. The date turns a seasonal gathering into a fixed limit on how long she will wait.

The deadline also makes the holiday a point of pressure for Beatrice. When Beatrice is overwhelmed by emptiness and says she cannot bear it anymore, Emma recalls that Beatrice told the group she would end her life if she was not better by Kerstmis. Emma stresses that the date is still more than a month away and that the agreement was to wait for her family, even though waiting would be hard. She reminds Beatrice that she had previously faced the same intention and, instead of acting, allowed herself to be admitted. Emma asks her to hand over her pills to the nursing staff, or to Emma herself. Beatrice clutches the bag protectively; a pill bottle rattles inside. The exchange ends not with the danger erased but with Beatrice agreeing that they will do it together.

Statistics, Solidarity, and Unfinished Hope

Later, Beatrice recalls hearing staff discuss suicide and annual totals while she was on the locked ward. She is unsettled by the gap between the person she thought she was and the person now waiting for Kerstmis to end her life. Emma responds that the people counted are not merely numbers but names. Beatrice mentions the figure of five a day, keeping the abstract scale of suicide present even as Emma insists on the individual lives behind it.

At the end of their conversation, Emma says she hopes Beatrice will not go through with it at Kerstmis. Beatrice answers that she hopes so too. Their exchange does not establish what Beatrice will ultimately do; it records a shared wish, expressed without certainty. The holiday’s meaning remains divided: it can gather a family around food, decorations, and poems, but it can also concentrate despair into a date. Between those meanings lies the fragile interval Emma tries to defend—not a promise that everything will be well, but more time, company, and the possibility that the future may still change.