I see you dancing, father

'There is no time. Or is there nothing but time?' Vasalis considered it in her poem 'Eb' and it is a question you will never be able to answer. Time is of course all too often very emphatic, all that waiting, all that boredom, all that looking at watches. But often when I talk to my very old mother, we have no idea what it is: 'time'. And not just because time disappears from your memory, I mean: with everything that happened in it, so that my mother no longer remembers the twenty-plus years that she taught all kinds of classes, that she marked tests and prepared lessons, talked to students, got to know a different world through the nice younger colleagues with whom she became friends, three intellectual homosexual men who brought a completely different tone and style to our home than we had known until then. A colleague like that could say to my father: 'What a nice sweater you're wearing' (he had a nice sweater too, several nice sweaters with a turtleneck, it was in the seventies) and no man in his business world had ever said that to him. How much he liked that.

Look, now I've immediately fallen backwards into the memory, in which the distance between then and now doesn't seem to matter for a moment - where is the time when you remember something? Nowhere. There is no time.

But the days that we sat around my dying father's bed, almost a week, there was nothing but time. Endless amounts of it, and yet those days also passed very quickly, with waiting, with talking and drinking tea, looking at photos, reminiscing in fragments – memories always go in fragments. 'I remember how he once' and then something comes along that he said or did and that we now find pleasant or remarkable enough to recall. Everything was both present, because he was still breathing and breathing and breathing – 'he' being his body from which the occupant seemed to have already departed well before the heart also gave up – and past, because he had become so very, very old, 95, and so much, if not everything, lies in the past.

Sometimes we also talk about the old man he was in the last years, not exactly his happiest years, certainly not the last months. I have often noticed how easily you start talking about 'the last years' or 'months' once they are behind you. Then those last years suddenly don't seem to matter anymore, they simply disappear in those three words. But they had to be lived, day after day, you have worried endlessly about them, felt depressed about the miserable life that 'we', the world, society, ourselves, myself, old people allocate, a life mainly filled with time for which there is no destination. No longer at home anywhere, nothing more to do, immense boredom.

But rather than thinking of the man who didn't understand why he wasn't allowed to drive a car anymore or why he couldn't go home, I think of before that, ' to find the unbroken man', writes the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly in his beautiful poem 'I See You Dancing, Father' about his father, whom he sees in the kitchen, whistling, 'your lips are enjoying themselves', doing a few dance steps. Mine wasn't dancing so much as he was whistling and besides, what is dancing but living? He was living. And now he's not living anymore