Voice Memo's To Self

Doing Some Mental House Cleaning

I just sat down to transcribe the conversation I had around Easter last year with my former end-of-life counsellor and dear friend Mirella Satoor-de Rootas. We have had many conversations since then. A lot has changed since then. And that is exactly why I need to revisit. But, before I get to it, I have 32 other neglected voice memo’s to plough through. I may write rather well, however, I talk like a teenager…

ENDINGS UM UM UM 22ND APRIL 2025

Oh, this is about endings, how movie endings, story endings, memoir endings all have meaning. Then the final ending choose here ending: euthanasia and suicide. Suicide thinking about Attila’s suicide, a friend’s attempt. Ah, Angelique, killing herself. There must be more stories. I can't remember. Zsolti’s Whatsapp message at 4 in the morning: I can’t do it anymore. Please look after my mother. I threw up for hours.

Talk about that Monday. I got the phone call one friend was in hospital and she was looking for a death button. She wanted a way out. The same day another friend ends up in hospital too. In a lot of pain and worried about surgery saying he wishes he wouldn't wake up.

My suicide joke at Rachel's wedding, Rachel saying she was going to drown herself into tub when she was almost nine months pregnant. The cynicism of it.

I think it was about three weeks before Lily was born. Um Yeah, talk of death is a bit morbid. Um thought it's literally morbid. Um My memoir, if I'm going to die anyway, can we just like do it now and that changed to we all die so I don't want to rush it and that kind of became even now like I was suicidal when I arrived in Holland and then again, the terminal cancer diagnosis fuck.

LUST, LOVE & THE BODY 21ST MARCH 2025

Lust in love, finding people to play with. The elusive concept of home and in the end we're always seeking for something. What does it mean to be human? The meaning of life?

What makes us feel safe? Like we belong? How we process and deal with fear, panic, grief, and the rage we feel when people, you know, encroach on or break our boundaries.

How do you learn to trust? Trust in life, trusting yourself, your body when cancer comes knocking twice and when you put your faith in the wrong people, your expectations are maybe too high and you get disappointed and oh fuck. What is it all about?

Uh, the first book all day good day. It's too late to revisit motherhood, conversations later with Eva and Hajnal about orphanages and adoption and Alex saying, let's go get a kid. If you really want to be a mother. Not everybody who has a baby is a mother, all mothers have given birth. Um 47 now and it never happened. Um so that's motherhood thing.

The booty thing. Um I'll never have sex again, human brain mechanism of lust.

Loving the body, uh, the irony, beautiful irony in that sense, that by the time I learned to accept death in order to fully live in the time that I had left. My body starts to heal.

SILIM: REMEMBERING WHOLENESS 2ND MARCH 2025

Notes on the book SILIM the memory of wholeness or remember wholeness. um after failed Catholic upbringing. I'm not religious at all, but as my friends say Richard always happens to you. uh For example, the incident in the gypsy community when everybody started fighting and I had to sayely take two children home and I bowed in faith that we would be safe and this guy appeared in an orange t-shirt and led us around the back of the houses to safety and then he walked away. And then when I laid asked people, when they asked me, are you all right, what happened?

And I told them about the man in the orange T-shirt I had no not being a man in the orange t-shirt. Nobody saw him. So stuff like that then I'm thinking about the same principle of healthy wholeness, intact at peace, safe, complete,, uh and how I feel about that and those can be like the guiding forces or the guiding lights of living well and I think about how healing doesn't always mean curing, about life, having value regardless of its length, longevity, um about without compassion, we will never be able to find in face the complete truth about ourselves because we will always fear um judgment and rejection.

So we separate ourselves and um these ideas of coping mechanisms and avoidance strategies and um the way, for example, um in abortles, you know, the circle that Mlla drew about how we close off pieces of ourselves. If you look at the circle, the circle is still there, um it didn't disappear. However, malnourished it might be, um, you can still reconnect.

So I'm not thinking about dysfunctional in terms of um, I don't know, pathological diagnoses and the judge judgments that come with that. I'm thinking about how the whole always exists, but we just get caught up from it. And we can reconnect.

We can feel the wholeness again. It will never leave us. um yeah.

READ MY CONVERSATION WITH MIRELLA HERE

To be continued! ;-)

XXL