I wanted to write something fun and intriguing today. After all, having just started this blog, I would like to set an attractive, upbeat tone, a beguiling Mozart sonata rather than a mournful Chopin Waltz, exploring subjects that would caress and encourage my readers. But life has a way of interrupting our plans and imposing its own.
Did I say life? I meant death.
This morning we heard that Therese had died. A close relative called to let us know. The news was not unexpected. Therese had been ill for some time with an inoperable and incurable brain cancer, associated with a number of other serious ailments : it was a violent gallbladder infection that killed her. A close friend of the whole family for 20 years, since she had become the partner, latterly wife, of our lifelong friend Michel, Therese had won me over almost immediately with her attitude – a mix of optimism, rebellion and expansive kindness that hid a vulnerable core. She was 81. She was 21. Her body had altered, her mind had become wise, her heart had never aged.
Therese, Granada coast, 2011
– “I’m tired, my darling”, she told me, the last time we spoke. “I’m simply waiting to go.” Of all the people I’ve met Therese was one I’d least have imagined to be resigned, to go gently into that good night. People can surprise you at life’s edge, and she knew more about it than I did.
– “I love you, I said, I’ll miss you”. I surprised myself: these were words I’d thought but never expressed before. When she told me she was dying, they came tumbling out like a rush of emotional notes from a baby grand.
Therese had no children, but she had a piano. Had her parents been more supportive, had she believed in herself in her teens, she would have made a fine concert pianist. Until a few months before her death, she still entranced social evenings in her small flat in Geneva playing a Brahms dance, a Mozart sonata, a Fauré allegro, or a melancholy Chopin Waltz. The first time I heard her play, she had been in the next room. I didn’t know her well and thought she had put on a CD of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances for piano.
– “No, no, ma petite Sophie, that’s one of the things I do well myself. You see, I cannot cook. I’m no good at sports and really quite silly sometimes. But I can play the piano.” She had played the 1st Hungarian Dance as though she were giving a recital. I was her friend from that moment on.
What would her life have been if she’d known that when she was 20? Another Moura Lympany? A professor at the conservatory?
Instead, she became an international civil servant and worked a bureaucratic job at the WHO (World Health Organisation). She had a long-standing relationship with a man with whom she could have no children. Some years after his death, in her early 60s, she met Michel and they had been together since. Did she miss out, not having children?
– “I thought so once, but no longer. I’ve had a good life!” And so she had. She had travelled widely, she had spread love and beauty wherever she went, she had stood by her strong opinions on social justice, and she had met some of the great men and women of her age, who had honoured her.
She and I shared a love for literature, for music and for the underdog. Though she could have been my grandmother, though our belief systems were different (she was an avowed agnostic), I always felt her to be a kindred spirit, a spiritual sister.
This morning, we spoke to Michel on Skype. His normal upbeat teasing manner had given way to grieving bewilderment. He is lost without the companion of his old age. He spoke of her piano, which was behind him in the room where he sat, of the longing he had to hear her play again, of the sight and sound of her everywhere in the apartment. A silent piano is so sad. I caught her with my mind’s ear. I tried to conjure the lilting 1st Hungarian Dance, but heard only the last notes of a Chopin waltz.
Au revoir, Therese.
Therese, Alhambra, 2011
BETWEEN WORLDS 
Thanks for that lovely eloge, Sophie . Nobody would done it in better words ! Long live Therese memory in all our hearts. RIP Jean
Thanks my dear. I loved her too… I will miss her. Je pense à toi, à Michel et à toute la famille. xoxo
This is a beautiful post. Thank you for sharing what is in your heart. Yaz
thank you yazrooney, good people should be celebrated, I think 🙂
Incredible story and wonderful tribute. Your love showed through your words ~
Sophie,
This piece is very moving and its Proustian tone as light as a soufflé, so fitting for remembering a cherished friend.
Indeed the loss of a loved one is so difficult to bear—but to watch another friend try to come to terms with such a loss, an immeasurable void—as vast as the cosmos—one cannot help think that this is one of the few genuine tragedies of human existence!
As the ageing survivor, one carries the weight of the world in such memories of the beloved lost to time and space. I believe this human experience is as great as any biblical or shakespearean tragedy.
And it is this very ache which fills the human heart that compelled a poet like Wordsworth to write such moving verse.
Truly, to observe another grieve, to see them try and fill the spaces—and the slow descent of time—to continue on without the touch of that hand, carries a pathos of such magnitude. In short, it is the final frontier of human consciousness.
But what a wonderful metaphor the “Chopin waltz” is. A beautiful send off for your beloved friend.
It’s been a year since Thérèse died. Michel is trying to fill his life, visiting this friend or that, but he misses her. She was a strong presence, now a strong absence.
Thank you for your words.