Why I Still Believe in Magic
Natasja Van Looveren reflects on the grief of losing her mother, the memories they shared, and how those moments shaped her view of the world. Through childhood memories and moments of grief, she explores how beauty and meaning can be discovered even in life’s hardest moments.
My mother taught me how to see magic everywhere around us. As far as I can remember, she, my little sister and I were always painting colorful figures, reading stories together, singing songs we rhymed up on the spot, building treehouses with old blankets and branches we found in the forest nearby, and crafting fantastical creatures from old newspapers or used kitchen utensils or whatever we would find around the house that day. Our house was full of flower bouquets my mother made, eclectic antique furniture that she and my father collected, and lots and lots of books about art, history, cooking, crafting, and traveling.
My mother and father were both very good at drawing. During our yearly summer vacation in the Swiss Alps, the four of us would bring our sketchbooks during hikes and try to capture the mountains surrounding us. During our hikes, my mother and I told each other a story that she would write and I would draw about a little mountain who felt sad because he was so much smaller than the other mountains around him, but a little girl walking past gave him a scarf because she felt sorry for him, and the other mountains thought he looked really beautiful with the scarf, and so he no longer had to feel small and sad because now he was beautiful. It was magical because we could see the story happening in the mountains around us.
“My sister would never leave my mother’s side, even when she was doing household chores, so usually my mother would carry her around on one arm while using the other for whatever she was doing.”
When I was around four years old and my little sister around two, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. We didn’t really understand what that meant at the time, but we understood that something was wrong. My sister would never leave my mother’s side, even when she was doing household chores, so usually my mother would carry her around on one arm while using the other for whatever she was doing. But after she started getting ill, my sister became too heavy for her one arm. The moment my mother no longer carried her around the house was when we understood something must have changed.
She bought us a book about a little boy who had cancer, so she could try to explain to us what was happening. The book was full of colorful images and I remember them vividly. There were the yellow, star-shaped, angry-looking cancer cells who used their sharp spikes and little hammers to attack the little boy’s cells, who were red and round and soft. Then there were the kind blue chemo cells who tried to help the boy by attacking the cancer cells with their own little chemo hammers, but they were also a little bit dumb, so sometimes they would accidentally hit the boy’s own cells as well. This made the boy throw up and loose his hair, and so in most of the book he was wearing this funny red hat to hide his balding head.
“Some days, when she was feeling strong enough to play with us and we were playing dress-up, my sister and I were allowed to try on the wig. It made us feel very elegant, but it was also prickly and heavy on our heads and so we decided that we liked the velvet hat more.”
It was very confusing, all these fighting cells with different shapes and colors. I don’t remember how the book ended, but it did help us understand why my mother was feeling too sick to eat and why, one day when we came back home from school, she had shaved the last hairs off her head and started wearing a funny hat as well. It was a very soft, purplish brown velvet hat with a cute little bow in the front. She had a dark brown wig as well, but she would never wear it because it didn’t look nearly as beautiful as her own long brown hair had looked. Some days, when she was feeling strong enough to play with us and we were playing dress-up, my sister and I were allowed to try on the wig. It made us feel very elegant, but it was also prickly and heavy on our heads and so we decided that we liked the velvet hat more. Most days, the wig was kept hidden in a box under the bathroom sink.
For the next two years there were a lot of visits to the hospital, and often my sister and I would come along. The hospital couldn’t have been more different from the colorful world my mother and father had created for us at home. It was an old building with long, monotonous, windowless hallways with walls the color of a sick person’s skin. The toilet in my mother’s hospital room wasn’t even a toilet, but a chair with a hole in it and a bucket underneath. I still don’t know if this was normal for hospitals back then, but it was the saddest thing I had ever seen.
The only colorful thing about the hospital were the ambulances that brought my mother to the hospital a few times when she could no longer sit in my father’s car. I remember that my parents’ friends, who were at our house often during these days and tried to distract us whenever they could, made me guess which color the ambulance would be each time. Sometimes they were white and sometimes they were yellow.
Most of the time, while my father stayed in the hospital room with my mother and the doctors, me and my sister would go outside. We would climb in an old cherry tree in the garden, or try out the different candy bars from the vending machine in the waiting room, and tell my mother about all our adventures afterwards. What started out as a story about two girls climbing in a tree soon turned into fantastical tales about flying candy bars or little fairies dancing on the cherry blossoms. In the evenings, she always came back home with us.
One day, my mother could no longer sleep in the big bed upstairs, and so my father and my parents’ friends installed a hospital bed in the living room downstairs. From that moment, my mother spent most of the time in the bed — though most of the time not alone. My sister and I soon discovered that the bed was taller than a normal one, so we continued building our colorful blanket tents, this time not in the garden but underneath the bed. Our collection of stuffed animals was moved downstairs as well so they could join us in the tent, or we put them next to my mother on top of the bed, so she could read them bedtime stories like she did with us.
“I only realize now how exhausting it must have been for her, to be surrounded by us laughing and playing all the time while she needed to rest, but she never showed it and she never asked us to leave.”
The bed was only just wide enough to fit the three of us, but at that time, it was our entire world. And, in a way, hers too. I only realize now how exhausting it must have been for her, to be surrounded by us laughing and playing all the time while she needed to rest, but she never showed it and she never asked us to leave. Maybe for her too, the magical worlds we were playing in, worlds that she once taught us to create and believe in, were a better alternative than the real world at that time.
My father and my parents’ friends were also a part of the magic. They made impossible things possible. That summer, they wanted to go on a holiday together with their family and ours, and so they brought us all: my father, my parents’ two friends with their little son, my sister and I, my mother, and a small truck with her wheelchair and hospital bed. We stayed in a little cabin in the woods. My mother’s bed was put next to the big fireplace in the living room, the head of a majestic deer hanging above her head to keep her company. I remember when we went hiking, which my mother couldn’t, the three of them brought her along with us in the wheelchair, and whenever the path was too rocky for the wheels, my father would simply carry her. She was so small and so thin. There’s a photograph of him carrying my mother, in her wheelchair, wearing her velvet hat, over a river that we passed on the way during one of these hikes. In that moment, they looked like a prince and a princess to me and I will never forget that image.
The last ambulance was yellow. I don’t remember much from what happened after that, except the color of the ambulance and how I hated that yellow color and how I had always liked the white ones more, and that my sister and I realized that this time at the hospital somehow felt different, and how my mother and father didn’t come home to sleep with us like they used to, and the moment when my father asked my mother to smile at me and my sister one more time and she did, and how the next day their friends and our grandparents and neighbors all came to our house and they had something very difficult to tell us.
At the end of summer, two days before the start of the new school year, the funeral took place. Her mourning card had a soft yellow drawing of sunflowers on it. Sunflowers had been my mother’s favorite flowers, but as a child I thought every mourning card was supposed to have sunflowers on it, so a few years later, when my best friend and I found a dead bird while we were playing in her grandmother’s garden, we buried it and held a little funeral and drew a mourning card with a bird flying cheerfully between bright yellow sunflowers.
I don’t remember much from that day, except that my father bought new clothes for me and my sister and that we felt beautiful and we were sure my mother would have thought so too, and that he wanted to have a specific song play during the ceremony but that the priest was opposed to playing non-religious songs in a church but it was so important to my father that in the end the song was played anyway and it was beautiful, and that I never saw my father cry before or after that day and it was so heartbreaking to see it and I didn’t know what to do, and that I never saw my grandparents or any adult cry before or after that day, either, and that all the children from my class were there too and we all got a white balloon and their balloons could fly so that when they let them go it looked as if all these white balloons went up to heaven, where my mother was going to be, but the balloons my sister and I had couldn’t fly like the other ones, so we just had to hold them even though we also wanted to make them fly with my mother, to accompany her on her way up.
I don’t know if I ever really believed that magic was real, even as a child. Not in the classic meaning of powerful spells and happy endings, anyway. It didn’t save my mother’s life, and she must have had so much pain in those last months. How could there be any magic in that? But seeing beauty in the small things, giving meaning to what happens around us — that’s magical too. I still try to look at the world in that way. I still try to understand some of the most incomprehensible things in life, like death and grief and passion and love, by imagining them as a book full of colorful characters. And even if I no longer see dancing fairies or talking mountains, my mother is still here with me whenever I observe all the wonderful things life has to offer. If magic can’t change the world, it can at least make it a little more beautiful.
Natasja Van Looveren is a writer and photographer from Antwerp with a passion for art and traveling, currently living in Shanghai. She writes about life, living abroad, and anything that inspires her.