The art of visiting (or, dropping in on mourning and memories)

Preamble: This is not a post on mourning and memories in a broad sense. Rather, it’s just one of several reflections I’ve had in the past year as I go through the long period of mourning that comes with the loss of a loved one, when we come and go with our grief, and — in this instance — not so much a sorrowful grief, but rather a remembrance where I feel the loss, but it is accompanied with nostalgia and the memories being such a long distance is the past that it feels more like a warm memory, though one that could only emerge as such comfort after death has rendered that memory (or memories) to something more poignant and meaningful. Is it because now it falls just to me to carry the memory/story? There’s something solemn in that thought of not having the other person of the tale to be here to tell it from their perspective. I’m the only keeper of it now. And putting it in this post fixes it from one instance and one view only. Mine. Anyway, on to the post itself…

A maybe three-year-old me stares down the photographer (unknown) as I dig into what appears to be a meal of soup and buns (lunch?) at one of the many family visits I made to relatives in The Netherlands over my lifetime. My mother is behind me wearing the cool tinted glasses.

THE POST ITSELF: As is a norm for many who experience the death of a beloved family member, photo albums are poured over in the days leading up to (if lucky) and immediately after death. That was certainly the case with the death of my mother in August 2023. This now common practice likely emerged quite organically as cameras became ubiquitous accessories and albums became more prevalent in family life in the twentieth century. The act of looking is accompanied by or sparks the recalling of details, stories, milestones, feelings associated with that someone who is no longer returning home. As it goes, these albums get pilfered for pictures to include in memorial albums and for a presentations at funerals, or in the case of my mother, her celebration of life. (Today, this act is replaced with scrolling endlessly through phones, which is a different experience.) Photo albums, with their limited number and size of pages, are curated in most cases — as is true for my family — by the matriarch/mother/wife. So, as Martha Langford, a scholar on the social histories and significance of photo albums reminds us, it is her — my mother’s — perspective of our family that we see.

In the process of going through our family albums, I came across photographs of me as a child accompanying my parents on some of the countless visits they paid to family and friends. I was a hapless (though sometimes willing, then later definitely grudgingly) part of these events till ‘visiting’ ended sometime in my teen years. I’ve thought about those visits a lot over the course of my life, particularly since having kids of my own, thinking about the specialness of those opportunities that don’t seem to be a part of the social fabric that envelops me anymore, and I wondered why.

In my growing up, those visits were either announced as ‘bezoek’ — Dutch for going to visit — with family or alternatively ‘having coffee’ with friends. It could be ‘bezoek’ with friends too if we were in The Netherlands or if they were Dutch expats in Canada. My mother was very skilled at ‘bezoek.’ It was she who often took initiative to go through her little contact booklet (at some points she even had the classic ‘little black book’) to call people, yes, on a corded telephone, arranging a date, time, and details. Alongside her contact book, she had a small wallet-size calendar that tracked visits, and — when on family vacations to The Netherlands — would get filled for the two weeks or so that we’d be there. Details she kept only in her head included such things as if it would be midmorning coffee, light lunch or an afternoon visit. These details mattered in a way she never divulged, but it determined what we would be expected to bring to the home of the host/ess. For instance doughnuts, flowers, pie or maybe chocolates.

A younger me? I’m not sure where this visit took place; my mother is smiling at me with the cigarette in her hand.

Thanks to my years of anthropology studies, it’s hard not for me to see ‘bezoek’ from a ritualistic or social practice / meaning perspective. Indeed, a classic anthropology account by Renato Rosaldo (1993) considered visiting among the Ilongot of the Philippines as a form of “social grace” and a way of shaping the tempo and rhythm of everyday life. While he applies his observations and interpretations to distinguish their pace of life versus that of clock-regulated Euro/North-American's , ‘visiting’ with my mother always felt like it had its own speed.

Certainly, there was a different pace to life when we went on “bezoek” when visiting family in The Netherlands. Likely this was because I was young and didn’t feel time pressure as I do now, but also because we were travelling and thus ‘on vacation’, which impacts pace. Often the visits would begin rather formally, greetings of three kisses between us and host family members, sitting around the coffee table and a tray of cookies/cake along with carafe of coffee or pot of tea. As stories were exchanged, the conversation might move from family updates (and really not much gossip) to local news and then international politics. The length of the conversations not infrequently would end up with lunch or dinner…depending on what time we might have arrived. I never got the sense we were being shooed out or seen as overstaying our welcome.

She didn’t feel, as I do, that the longer I stay, the more boring I must be becoming, or alternatively feeling like I am wasting my and other people’s time by delaying some important form of ‘production’ with this ‘leisure activity’. (Why all this pressure on myself? Why not just sit and enjoy people’s company like my mother was able to do?) The tempo of these visits was also something I have to attribute to my mother. She enjoyed visiting people. It was a family responsibility she took on, but one she did without ever it being a labour or task/chore. It was just an “given” that “bezoek” would take place, be expected, and not something that — sigh — “had to be done.” It was a pleasure.

Eventually she turned this enjoyment of visiting into her job. When she finally did start working at the time my sister and I were old enough to walk home from school alone and come home to an empty house, she became a visiting homemaker. Homemaker, funny term. I imagine in the 1940s-50s, that this was one of the few professions women could do ‘respectably’. There certainly was a long history of ‘privileged’ women, such as the pastor’s wife, the Sunday school teacher, the church ladies or the well-to-do housewife to visit for political and/or philanthropic reasons. As with characters in Jane Austne novels, some of these women would have been nosey busybodies more interested in gossip than genuine care. As charity work evolved, and as women were performing (and made to be seen performing) care-work for the less fortunate, there was even an expectation that ‘friendly visits’ would become a surreptitious way of ‘casing’ (as in case work) situations to determine level and type of care. As such ‘befriending’ people to do “good deeds” without actually being upfront about it, in true paternalistic, upper-class fashion. While for others it was a means of (re)claiming some control over the lives of neglected, abused, exploited women. For my mom, and others like her, it was a way for her to be her interested and caring and diligent self, while making a little money for the family. The visiting homemaker association she worked fro still exists, though renamed as “VHA: Home Health Care” to reflect the increased medicalization of social care, and still (likely) hiring many first-generation immigrants (which my mom was).

In thinking of it, it certainly seems something of a privileged existence to have had this opportunity to go “visiting” in my childhood. We were not affluent, but we did have means to travel every few years to Europe to visit family…a family that was close, loving and also able to welcome us. I can joke about it having been rounds and rounds of ‘bezoek’ and coffee and cookies and bringing flowers, tarts and cakes. Yet I recognize that this is not something that was possible for all children and families to do. Even just a generation or two before mine, there was less of the leisure time (with substance work or political conflicts) to do this. It is definitely what I would think to be characterized as bourgeois behaviour. I’ll have to check, and maybe someone else knows off the top of their head, but I feel someone like Jurgen Habermas would describe this type of behaviour as emerging with the rise of middle class private life (verging on public).

I considered the kind of visiting we did as kids with our mother as a ‘lost art’ because it was largely only possible because we grew up in a era where one income was enough to be able to support, not excessively, a family of four, enabling my mother not to work (or not work full time) till we were in middle school. Visiting was a big social expectation for the ‘gentry’ in the Victorian era (and beyond), with specific visiting times, norms of behaviour and even 'accessories’ such as “carte de visite” picture calling cards and such. But it became less possible or not at all for families where every able bodied person was expected to contribute to the household income — before many of the labour rights we have today. But it was a bit of a golden era of visiting when we grew up. Today no one really visits like we did, instead people ‘meet’ for coffee at a shop or if at someone’s house it’s often associated with children and be called "‘play dates”. These are different than the “bezoek” we did with our mother (mostly our mother) as ‘visits’ today are squeezed in between work and other structured activities. Visiting for my mom was about social connection, coffee, cigarettes (till she quit) and conversation at a pace of her own design. Gesellig.