My aunt's birthday

Last Sunday I went to my aunt’s 80th birthday. She is a sister of my mother and I very much appreciate my contacts with her because she reminds me of my mother, and is also a very good woman. She is one of those people who seem to bother only about other people and never about herself. In her life she was en is a member of voluntary organizations such as the National Rural Women Organisation (originally an associations of farmer’s wives but nowadays a far wider organization of women caring about spiritual and general education and charity), the church board, helping individuals who need it, and always with a big smile and a joke. She followed a regular, recognized course in her forties just to better be able to help people in social need. Her husband died many years ago after a long lasting, incurable illness during which she intensively took care of him. She never criticizes people but always stresses their good characteristics. If I had to be a woman, then please let me be somebody like she is. And now she has become 80 years of age with a fine dinner for which I also had been invited, from 1.00 – 6.00 PM. Between the courses (which were very modest so we didn’t feel over-eaten) a powerpoint-presentation was shown and one of the family-members had been busy for many hours to amateur together a professional-looking film documentary about her life. During dinner everybody was talking, chatting and discussing so it was very vivid. My other aunt was sitting next to me (she is aged 82) and noticed with black humor that this kind of events enhanced the contacts so that we wouldn’t see each other only at funerals. You have to know, she had one sister and two brothers older than she is, and one sister younger than she is: her younger sister was celebrating her birthday that day, and her older brothers and sister passed away exactly according the sequence in their age rank order. If this would be the rule, then she would be the next one, which she reminded and she invited us for her funeral. One of the other guests answered that this wasn’t something to be discussed right now, let’s not think about it now, she said. But I find (I didn’t tell for I didn’t want to spoil the joy) that people approaching the end of their lives are free to utter anything about death, and teaches us that this time will come for us as well if we are not suddenly raped away from here by an accident or worse.
As a gift for her birthday my aunt asked to give something in a collection box for children in need. But I couldn’t help to give her something personal. One of my hobbies I used to practice (nowadays I’m too busy with photomania) is calligraphy and I had calligraphed a poem about what “time” means for an older growing human. They know that time proceeds, the see backwards a vast area of experiences and episodes, and in the future they also see something but also know it’s a fraction of what lies behind them. I found this Dutch poem (which I translated as well I could) expressing this feeling very well:
Also the photograph of seedfull dandelions is symbolic of aging: the hair color, the seed of many given examples and wisdom, the strong flower during youth, etc., and last but not least the late-afternoon sunlight scattered through their “heads” making them appear as little lamps.
A rich and satisfying experience indeed.

The poem is by the Dutch poet Rutger Kopland, I translated it as follows:

Time

Time – it is strange, strangely beautiful, too
Never to know what it is
And yet, how much of what lives within us is older
Than we are, how much will survive us

Like a newborn child looks as if he were looking
At something in himself, sees something there
Which he’s got with him

Like Rembrandt looks in his last portraits
Of himself as if he were watching where he goes
A far-away beyond our eyes

It is strange, but strange too, to realise
That one day nobody will know anymore
That we have lived

To realise how we now live, how here
But also how nothing our life would be without
The echoes of the unknown depths in our heads

It’s not time that passes, but you, and I
Outside our thoughts no time exists

This summer we were standing on the edge of a valley
Around us only the wind

Rutger Kopland
Translation: Erik Tjallinks