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The Flower on His Heart
There he was. My father, sitting in the grass with his best friend.
Filmed in 1988, but today I saw it for the first time. A small girl, about two years old, was hovering nearby, shy of this man she didn’t quite know yet. My father spoke to her gently. She stayed shy. But then, suddenly, she picked a tiny flower and held it out to him.
He took it. He thanked her. And then he put it on his heart.
It moved me deeply. Especially that gesture of putting the flower on his heart; it made me tear up. Because I would do that. Exactly that. I inherited it from a man I lost when I was twenty years old, and had not seen move or speak or laugh in thirty-four years. Time folded like an accordion, and there he was. As if it was yesterday.
He was forty-eight when he died.
After my mother had left, my father became a single parent at a time when children normally stayed with their mothers. He was not a complicated man. He did not reflect deeply on his inner life or dive into his own wounds. He just…was.
But he was unconventional, genuinely and by choice.
He liked going against the grain, not to make a point, but because the norm simply never struck him as particularly convincing. By day he was a civil engineer, building dikes and dams and bridges, a man who genuinely loved boats and water and the particular problem of keeping a country from flooding. By evening he pulled on his farmer’s overalls and went outside. When I was small, we had moved to the countryside to live in an old farm with an orchard and a vegetable garden.
My father became, in his spare time, an organic farmer before organic farming was a word anyone used. When he came home to dinner, he smelled like someone who had his hands deep in the soil, then made a wood fire, and didn’t care whether it had rained or not. That smoky, earthy smell was the safest thing I knew.
What he gave me, more than anything, was freedom. Real freedom. He trusted me to make my own decisions when I was very small. I took public transport alone from the age of six. I decided when to go to bed, when and what to eat. Or not. And if I made a mistake, or suffered the consequences of my decisions, he was kind and supportive, and helped me figure out by myself how I might decide differently next time. The village we lived in was small and people occasionally side-eyed our unconventional household. When other parents suggested I was too wild, that I made up too many stories, that I was perhaps a little much, he never agreed.
My father never asked me to contain myself. He let me be me, flaws and all, promise and all.
And, especially looking back at the responsible, strong, care-taking, empathic kid that I was, I realize it was the best gift a parent can give their children: he loved me unconditionally.
The night before his operation, I visited him at the old farm where I grew up. Pancreatic cancer. He had been in the hospital a long time and had come home briefly, already weakened. I was about to leave to catch the bus, which came every two hours, and he held me and said, “You are the only reason I want to live, the only reason I am doing this operation tomorrow.”
I heard the love in it. It made me cry. He, as always, made me feel as if I was special. But I also felt pain. Something was missing. What about my sister? What about his girlfriend? What about him?
Especially that. What about him?
He died not long after. I kept myself strong in those days. I had learned early that being the strong one was how I could stay close to the people I loved, it was how I had survived. So I held myself like I always had, letting him feel it was okay to go, that I understood his time was up.
But then the undertaker’s car drove away. With his body.
I collapsed on the pebbled path next to the house. Crying, or better said: screaming. My legs gave out completely. I remember the sensation of a hole being beaten open in my belly, everything good flowing out, leaving me hollow. I thought:
I might just as well be dead. How will life ever be normal again? How will I ever laugh again? How will I ever know that I am loved?
That last thought, I didn’t have words for it then. But I understand it now.
Everything I had built, my optimism, my resilience, my ability to keep going through anything life had thrown at me, it had been built on him. On knowing he was there. On being seen by him the way only he had seen me. And it was so frightening to feel that broken, so exposed, that without thinking, I simply closed a door inside myself. I stopped crying abruptly.
Stood up.
And became the strong one again.
The one who could handle it.
The one who didn’t need too much.
It kept me safe. It always had.
For many years after, I protected an idealized version of him. The man who made the world feel safe. The man who made me feel special, and therefore capable of anything. I looked back at what he gave me, what he meant, how extraordinary he was, and how that reflected back on me.
Watching that video today, something changed. Time folded, yes, and there was love, and grief. But there was also something I hadn’t expected. I found myself thinking: I didn’t really know him. Not in the way adults can know each other. I was always a child looking up. I never knew what he struggled with, what he doubted, what he had learned to live without.
He gave me unconditional love, truly and completely. But I am not sure he ever turned that same love toward himself. Cutting through the idealized version of him, I now understand how hard life was for him. Raising kids alone. Working hard in a job he liked, but that also kept him away from us and the organic farm. He had dreamed of retiring on Terschelling, a small island in the north of the Netherlands, just sea and sky every day. The island he never reached. He was only forty-eight.
All the love he had within him, he gave to me.
I have spent much of my adult life learning to receive what he gave me. Not from him anymore, but from myself.
What I understand now, but couldn’t grasp yet when I was lying on that pebbled path, is that his love was never meant to be the foundation. It was a beginning, a demonstration of what was possible, a first glimpse of what it feels like to be fully seen.
The process has been building that same capacity inside myself. Learning the difference between being strong because I choose it, and being strong because I am afraid of what happens if I stop.
I no longer need the idealized version of him to believe in myself. I can love the real one, the man who did his best, who gave generously what he hadn’t quite found. And more and more, I am doing the same for myself.
~
author: Dr. Femke Bakker
Image: Author's Own
Editor: Molly Murphy
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