Comfort Birds

Grieving well for the loss of a loved one does not lead to Prozac or a shrink. On the contrary, a little life skill helps, as in 'Grief is the thing with feathers' by Max Porter, Jacob Derwig and Erik Whien.

After tragedy once struck my family in the past, I consoled myself by reading aloud the picture book Frog and the Little Bird by Max Velthuijs, which is actually available at the KB all online state. Text:

"He knelt down by the bird and looked intently.
'That one's dead,' he said then.
'Dead,' said Frog, 'what is that?'
Haas pointed to the blue sky.

...

In the tree by the hill was a bird.
He sang a beautiful song - as always.
' Isn't life wonderful!" exclaimed Frog..."

Sadness and feathers

Bird is dead, but there are lots of other birds. With people who lose a loved one, you obviously can't come up with "what are you worried about, there are still eight billion people on this earth." But with me, the comfort of Max Velthuijs' animals struck a chord, perhaps something like le savoir-vivre or art of living: the ability to mould one's character with the succession of highs and lows of harsh life, while trying not to worry too much about the countless trivialities that propel it forward. (We rarely succeed in the latter, unfortunately).

After 30 years, this picture book came to my mind after seeing 'Sadness is the thing with feathers' in which a crow flies into the broken family of a father and two sons to come and comfort them, in its own very own frivolous way.

British writer Max Porter impressed Erik Whien so much with his book Grief Is The Thing With Feathers that he asked Jacob Derwig to translate and adapt the text for a play at Theater Rotterdam. Jacob did so with verve (and mentions mother-in-law Barbara van Kooten in his acceptance speech).

The compassionate

The crow in this play comes into the life of a father the two sons after the mother dies. The audience falls silent at the tragic death at the beginning, but soon enough the play becomes a tragicomedy. For instance, I had to laugh incredibly - restrained, that is - at this excerpt:

"By now, I was a connoisseur of the behaviour of compassionate mourners: as the centre of their circular orbit, you automatically get a curious anthropological eye for all those people around you: the overwhelmed, the posers, the stay-aways, the long-stayers, her new best friends, your new best friends, your new best friends. People about whom I still have no idea who they were."

No, This Grief with Feathers is anything but a forced light-hearted handling of death, as you are all too often forced down your throat these days with champagne gatherings where the deceased speaks to you on video and you are forced to celebrate life while being almost embarrassed by your grief.

Music for the soul

Rather, this piece is a succession of far-flung emotions, including the deeply raw ones. This is most powerfully expressed in the music, with the gorgeous, chilling high-pitched voice of Jesse Mensah. With Romijn Scholten he forms a perfect pair of growing teenagers who compete with their father to see who best portrays the crow's punishment.

This is poetry on stage in a form as pure as it is imaginative, which you had better start enjoying. Nice and smooth too: in an hour and a half, it made a crushing impression on me, but that's personal. Theatre Rotterdam presents a fine Grief magazine with all the information.

Your mother's song

We do have Max Porter's final text, also copied from the textbook, because of the parallel with Max Velthuijs:

"...and the ashes fly into the sky, like a cloud, with the intangibility of a cloud, physically fleeting and visually indescribable, a speckled jumble of charred birds against a grey sky, the grey sea, the white sun, and gone. And you are behind me, a flood of laughter and screams, you hug my legs, stumbling, clutching, jumping, spinning, falling, yawning and hooting and screaming

I love you I love you I love you
And your call is your mother's life and song.
Unfinished. Gorgeous. Everything."

Scholars

In a interview Erik Whien told of the joy of seeing 'Verdriet' hit the theatres. On Friday, he watched, at the back of the auditorium near the sound man, and afterwards was very pleased with how well the performance caught on with The Hague audiences. And was that diverse? Well in terms of age thanks to dozens of schoolchildren. My teenage daughter enjoyed it.

Audiences were suburban, non-disabled, above-average wealthy - also metaphorically, to be able to enjoy this - and above all very white, but the inclusion police turned a blind eye. With Jesse Mensah handing over his wonderfully performed role to Minne Koole colour is lost. Ah, in terms of dealing with mourning, the content of feather mourning is perhaps more African than Western, does that count?