Of the Dead

by Wim Lankriet (April 2026)

I didn’t know my father was in a nursing home. It had been years since we had heard from him, and I learned it from the notary, who called me regarding unpaid bills. That surprised me, considering my father had always been well-off.

“He is also struggling with serious health problems,” the notary added.

There was a long silence. I wanted to explain that my father had changed his number a few years ago without telling anyone, and that he had cut himself off from everyone, but I kept those words to myself and coldly stated that unfortunately I couldn’t help him. He coughed, let out a heavy sigh, and gave me the phone number of the nursing home. The next few weeks, I kept fearing he would call me again, but I didn’t hear from him again.

Six months later, my father had died. I hadn’t seen him again. From time to time, I had considered visiting him in the nursing home, but the drive would take over an hour, and he had advised against it himself: “Well, I don’t know if you want to see where your dad ended up. But it’s nice you called.”

A few weeks before his passing, my mother also came back into my life. She wasn’t doing well either. She spoke with a weak little voice and called herself Mummy, as usual when something was wrong, “Mummy has breast cancer.”

It had started two years earlier, and back then she had gone into remission, but now she had relapsed, and it had metastasized to her hip. My sister said on the phone, “It’s her own fault. The fact is, she should have continued chemo, but denied treatment. She thought it wouldn’t be necessary, and that she could cure it with her alternative therapies and guru-friends. You know, the usual bull…”

Together with my sister, I arranged the funeral service. We opted for a package of eight hundred euros: cremation plus a short ceremony in a service room.

The night before the funeral, my mother called me. She had written a poem about my father and wanted to read it at the ceremony, but every time she practiced, she got emotional. Might I want to do it?

“Oh, don’t you think you’d better do that yourself?” I said. “And if you get emotional, that’s okay.”

“Well, maybe you’re right.”

During the farewell ceremony, my mother was the only one reciting something. She walked towards the small podium as if she were walking barefoot over pebbles, and held her notes in front of her like a ticket she needed to present. She anxiously tapped the microphone, swallowed a few times, and started reading, with a shaking voice and her eyes focused on the floor. After just two sentences, she was already in tears. Most of the poem was unintelligible, and her sorrow was so loud that it seemed acted. My uncle watched with his arms crossed. When I looked at him, he raised an eyebrow and let out a silent sigh.

A month later, I received the bill from the funeral director, including a brochure with their services listed. A nameplate on a pillar near the scattering meadow. This was something I could do for my father. It cost two hundred euros. My mother thought it was a good idea and was willing to pay half.

“Oh, by the way,” she added, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about coming to Brussels. We could have lunch together.”

“Are you walking better again?”

“I’m doing moderately well. But last weekend I was in Lille, and in the old part of the town I had trouble with the cobblestone streets.”

“It’s the same here in Brussels, of course. Maybe we can arrange something for later this year, when you’re back to your old self again.”

She didn’t say a word. The silence lasted so long that I asked if everything was all right.

“Yes, of course. I just lost my train of thought for a minute.” She kept silent for another brief moment. “I think about dad a lot. A few months ago he said, ‘We’re going to get through this, both of us, sure thing. In fact, we should bet: Whoever beats their cancer first. Although… You’d probably win anyway.’ Such a typical thing for your father to say.”

A few weeks later, she told my sister the same story. By then, the cancer had metastasized further. She accepted the chemotherapy treatment, but complained a lot about it. Her voice became increasingly hoarse, and she seemed to be getting weaker and weaker. More and more often, I found myself thinking about her in the past tense.

Three months later, we gathered at the hospital, called in a hurry by my sister, who had heard the end was setting in.

My mother lay on her back, her face frozen in a strange grin. Her eyes wide open, showing only the whites. That ghostly, milky white stare made me so uncomfortable that I kept feeling the urge to look away from her.

My aunt stepped forward, took my mother’s hand, and whispered a few unintelligible words. My sister did the same. When it was my turn, I stopped a meter short of her bed. For a moment, I gazed at her face. Then I stood staring out the window, which grew hazy as if my gaze had misted it. I stood there for what felt like an eternity, then turned and walked away from her bed.

My uncle whispered, “It’s almost over,” and gestured to my aunt that he wanted to leave. I did the same. An hour after I got home, my sister texted me to say that my mother had passed away.

Of her savings, little was left. There wasn’t even a thousand euros on her account. I suggested to my sister that we do the same as we did for my father.

“Are you out of your mind?” she shot back at me. “This is an entirely different situation. Mum knew loads of people. Obituaries need to be sent and whatnot. It’ll be pricier. But don’t fret over it, we’ll just sell her Beetle.”

The service was held in some kind of new-age church. A colleague of my mother’s gave a long speech, about her projects, her passion and her extraordinary personality. It was like an introduction for someone who was about to appear on stage herself.

On the scattering meadow, I stood in the back row. The wind blew my mother’s ashes into the air, where they formed a cloud over the grass. Suddenly, there was a commotion up front. A rapidly swelling hum. Something hit me on the cheek. Wasps. People ran in all directions, some of them with coats or scarves over their heads. The ashes and insects swirled together in a single cloud, and the buzzing grew louder, drowning out the sound of the crowd fleeing. I covered my eyes and ears in turn, making my way to the car park, step by step, as if I was swimming through the chaos.

The speed of the crowded traffic on the highway was getting to me. I took the exit at Kruishoutem and drove through the hills. As the evening fell, I found myself south of Ronse, in an area I had never been before. The evening red painted the rolling landscape into an earth-like ochre. There was no one, except for the four cyclists that came towards me in the opposite direction. A family of four, with two children. The parents on the outside, and the kids in between them. Just like my sister and me, thirty years ago, on Texel. She was six and I was eight, our parents in their late twenties. The flickering spring sun, the sea breeze in our flowing hair, our smiling faces. As I got closer, I realized the people in front of me weren’t a family. The man was now riding a bit behind the others. He was a lot older and clearly didn’t belong to the group.

I started to feel warm. There was a deep red glow on the horizon. The earth and the dust from the fields seemed to be creeping into the car. A small bottle of water rolled back and forth under the passenger seat, the splashing noise irritating me so much that I could still hear it even after it had stopped.

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Wim Lankriet is a Belgian fiction writer living in Brussels. He studied Germanic Languages and History, but has worked mainly as a music composer/producer. Since 2022, he focuses entirely on writing fiction. His work has appeared in Zero Readers, De Optimist, Papieren Helden, Sintel, and others.

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