Lips thought it was a tough week. Recovering from Tom Egbers’ tears, he had to put up with Dave Roelvink as a sex education expert. And then France still had to start drying off the stomach virus (‘Nightmare by chicken curry’ headlined Of Telegraph) decimated Dutch national team.
In short, he could use some encouragement. And then there was Dirk De Wachter at the table with Sophie Hilbrand Khalid & Sophie. Lips knew the Flemish psychiatrist as the soothing grief doctor, specialist in the art of being unhappy. But now that disaster had overtaken him (The Guardian suffers from a serious form of cancer), the psychiatrist came to talk about comfort.
Hilbrand did not have to dig far to elicit the most beautiful sentences of the week from De Wachter. ‘The look and the touch of the other elevates you to a human being,’ he said of his own transformation from a sterile piece of meat on the operating table to a renewed participant in life.
And he cherished that life, perhaps more than ever. Staring death in the face, he drew “true comfort” from his wife’s embrace and the gaze on his children and grandchildren. The realization that he was part of an eternal course of things reassured him and had given him a new definition of the meaning of life: the ability to receive and pass on love.
And after that came another discovery: ‘Art may not save the world, but it can save me.’ Then he talked about enjoying the beauty of Bach and Leonard Cohen.
Lips had seen enough. He turned off the television, poured two glasses of red, kissed Mrs. Lips, and asked what song she wanted. Then they slowly stumbled across the room to Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.”
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