Chapter 3 The Long Period I Cannot Remember
Not every important period in a life remains engraved in memory. Some events are known to us only through what others later told us. That is true of one of the first difficult chapters of my life. I was still very young when I began suffering from serious respiratory problems. My health was so fragile that I was admitted to a hospital in Leuven for lengthy treatment. According to what family members later told me, that hospitalization lasted about a year and a half. Over time, the precise dates were lost. I have no clear images of that period myself. No room. No nurse. No bed. No voice I can still remember. I was simply too young. But the absence of memories does not make that period any less real. My parents had only just been reunited with their family in Belgium. They had left their homeland to build a new life together.
And that new life had barely begun when they had to entrust their little boy to the care of a hospital. When I try to imagine today what that must have meant to them, I once again realize how much they endured in silence. My father worked deep underground. My mother tried to keep her family together in a country whose language she still barely knew. And somewhere in Leuven was their little child, far from the familiar warmth of home. I do not want to assign them feelings they never described to me themselves. But every parent knows how powerless one feels when a child is ill. You want to take away their pain. You would give anything for the certainty that they will recover. And yet sometimes there is nothing you can do but wait. Hope. And trust those who are caring for your child.
Eventually, I returned to my family. My health had improved enough for me to continue my childhood in my De Lindeman community. That is where the part of my life I can remember for myself begins. The streets. The other children. The church. The aromas from the kitchens. The miners returning home. It may seem strange that an absence of a year and a half left so few images. But a human being is not made only of what they remember. The stories others tell us about ourselves also become part of who we are. That long hospitalization belongs to my life, even if I cannot picture it before my eyes. It reminds me how fragile a beginning can be. And how much love and care are sometimes needed before a child is strong enough to begin creating memories of their own.