#68: September is A Dead Month

Love brought me to Brussels, but death kept me here

I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe Brussels Notes newsletter. This week, we’re talking secret graveyards and the morose thoughts they prompt in people prone to melancholy (and welcome to all my new subscribers!)

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The old Ganshoren municipal cemetery is a quiet place. I used to visit during the pandemic when it was on my lockdown walking route. It was a pleasant green refuge in a grey and hard part of the city and was, somewhat sacrilegiously I suppose, a great place to sit down on a bench and have a beer undisturbed. Certainly not by mourners, because the cemetery is decommissioned and last of the 10,000 bodies interred in its two hectares went into the ground almost 50 years ago. 

Those final marble headstones from the 1970s are probably the cemetery’s best-preserved. Aside from a well-tended military memorial fanning out underneath a tall, mossy cubist obelisk in a corner of the graveyard, there is no indication of loved ones undertaking any graveside upkeep. Most plots have instead been reclaimed by creeping undergrowth and are overrun with grass and ivy tendrils, with broken pieces of stone crosses scattered on the ground and large cracks in the granite tomb-slabs.

The whole site feels forgotten, hidden down a short cobbled street and sandwiched between a municipal dump and a depot for street cleaners. While it is no longer a working graveyard, its rusted green gates remain open to the curious and the melancholy. I first discovered it because it is across the road from the In Den Hemel (“In Heaven”) café, and having been a bit of a graveyard botherer in my youth I was curious. I have not visited much since my early pandemic walks. But there are times in the year when I am melancholy too, and I find myself drawn to that old village of the dead.

Alicia Kennedy, in a recent newsletter, wrote about how July is a difficult month for her following the death of her brother, and how it is only getting harder the further she moves from him. For me that month is September. It used to be a month of birthdays. My grandfather Dick was born in September and almost shared his birthday with my younger brother. One of my parents was born right at the beginning of October, which is basically the same month, and my two Belgian brothers-in-law - both called Jonas - share a September birthday. But Dick died of a heart attack on September 8, 2007, at home in the living room of his house in Santry. He was 87, or 88, I can never remember which. I do remember getting the call from my mother with the news, sitting on my bed in Limerick getting ready for my last year at university. By the following September 5, a month shy of her 48th birthday, she was dead too, diagnosed in the week’s after Dick’s funeral with a cervical tumour that would resist nine months of chemotherapy, surgery, and radiotherapy before overwhelming her in the summer of 2008. I was in the same bed when I got a call that June, just after my 22nd birthday. This time it was my father telling me her cancer had returned, again. I had just finished the last of my final exams, and by the time of my graduation ceremony she had already submitted herself to hospice care and was too ill to travel. The first week of that September we sat in the halls of the hospice above Cork city and waited for her to die. On the Friday it happened there was no call, just a text from my uncle while I was in the cinema on a break from our vigil, telling me to get back as soon as I could. Which was, it turned out, not soon enough.

The graveyard where we buried her, on a windy hill outside the small Cork town where she raised us, has none of the broken down picturesque calm of Ganshoren’s cemetery. Until I visited in February this year, I was not sure if I had ever seen the gravestone we had picked out for her nor could I remember what we had had inscribed on it. But then I have lost a grip on most of the memories of that time, and many of the ones before that are increasingly foggy too. I struggle to remember her voice - I used to be able to call her phone and get her voicemail for a time, but her number was cut off years ago. Several years back I deleted the Hotmail email account I used when she was still alive, so I have no written communication between the two of us. I do have photos of her in an album my sister made, and I look in it periodically to at least refresh my internal image of her. There have been years when I have even forgotten about September 5 and only recalled its importance later in the month. The further I move on from that September in 2008, the more she is becoming an abstraction to me, and I am not sure how that makes me feel. 

Reading Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter over the summer, I found myself nodding along with this paragraph: “When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past…The person holding the other half is gone.” He was writing about divorce, but it crystallised for me how I felt about my mother’s death, and what it took from me. I had lost my past. I put some of this down to our being, at the time of her death, if not estranged then at least at our greatest emotional distance from one another. We had not had a falling out, or at least not a serious one; we were just not as close as we had been during my childhood. 

After what I would characterise as an insular childhood, where friendships and self-confidence were hard to come by, I had finally grown out from underneath her. I was an adult, living away from home, independent more or less (aside from periodic bail-outs), with a solid circle of friends around me and even a girlfriend. I was, in short, shedding my “mummy’s boy” identity. This was, I still think, all she ever really wanted of me, though it meant that the space she took up in my life was diminished. In the ordinary run of things we probably would have grown closer again through my 20s and into my 30s, but her cancer put paid to that. What I am left with is a half-formed image of my mother, as someone who dominated my childhood but who I never got to know in any meaningful way as an adult in her own right. Maybe I am being too hard on myself. In his “Letter to My Mother” which I read earlier this month (I told you September was melancholy), Georges Simenon writes of how watching his his own mother waste away slowly in a hospital bed made him realise she was still a stranger to him, despite living into her 80s and he in his 60s when she died. 

She visited Brussels only once, in July 2007. I was living with L in her mother’s house in Leuven and working the reception at the city’s Irish college that summer. Our day trip to Brussels was her first time in the city and only my second. I did not know the city well, and we would not move to our first studio apartment in Schaarbeek for another two years. I think how different her next visit to the city would have been had she ever made one, and then I think what it might be like to have her in my life, if she had survived the cancer. I find this hard to imagine, not because it is too painful, but because I have spun out a narrative about the life I have built here in Brussels that is predicated on her being dead, on what her death meant to me at the time, and what it made possible for me in the years after. 

I used to say when people asked me why I came to Brussels that it was for love. But that is only partly true. It was love that brought me here, but it was because of death - her death - that I was able to stay. When I landed in Brussels in July 2009 I was able to spend the first six months not working but studying French and getting my bearings, thanks to the small stipend that was released monthly from the trust she had left behind for me and my siblings. I don’t know if I would have benefitted from such a no-strings-attached munificence were she still living; she was not a very indulgent woman. But there was something else too. When the lid went down on her coffin on the Saturday of her removal, and they wheeled her away, it was as if - like Gospodinov wrote - that my whole past went with her. I was one person when she was rolled into the crematorium furnace, one with all the baggage of a tumultuous childhood and difficult adolescence. And I was another one afterwards, freed from my backstory and its poisoned totems. To invite in the notion that she would have a place in the life I built after this is to undermine the foundations of the Chinese wall I have built between this life and the earlier one.

I tell myself that this is why I cannot fathom a reality in which she is alive and I live in Brussels. It is why, when I think about it, I think how it would be awkward and strange and how so out of practice I am at saying the word “mum” that it tastes strange in my mouth. I do of course sometimes wonder what she might make of the children, and it does hurt that she is not there to experience their growing up. But there is no keening over her absence. I think actually it is only since the children have come along that I have properly interrogated these feelings, and I do not think that - like Kennedy - my Septembers are getting any harder the further removed I am from her. But I do think about it more than I used to, usually around the first Friday of September and in places like Ganshoren’s abandoned graveyard. The firewall is still standing, but it is perhaps not quite as impenetrable as I first imagined. 

I think also about that trip we took to Brussels in the summer of 2007. We had a good day playing at being tourists, taking the metro out to the Atomium where we rode up the long escalators to look out from the observation deck in one of the spheres. We only went, I think, because she could afford the tickets and we were broke students, and in the 15 years since I have only been back once. That day trip was one of the few excursions from Leuven we made during her visit. She was, I remember her saying, feeling run down, a little off-colour, and so we kept the days short and the programme light. I did not mind, figuring there was no particular haste to see as much of Leuven and Brussels as possible. There were, I thought, going to be many more visits.

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