I went home and tried to pick up my normal life once more. But only two days after my return, I was taking my morning shower and I noticed something stinging me, burning me, here on my chest, just below my heart. And when I looked down, there was a burn in the shape of the steering helm of a boat, a circle with thirteen rays. I showed it to the nurse, and she was astonished, she said it was inexplicable, but that I should just accept it, that something had been burnt into me, body and soul. It lasted for about two months, forming a scab, like any other burn, before it finally healed and faded away.

For two or three months after that I was completely empty, destabilised. Maurice died in 1981 and it had taken me twenty-one years to give birth to this suffering; now I had nothing left. After a few months, however, I began to feel liberated. Although one is, of course, never truly free.

The bottle was my idea. I already knew that I needed to do something and I had thought of a letter in a bottle – why not. Then after I saw the film Message in a Bottle I decided that was exactly what I would do. The year before, we had spent New Year’s Eve on a boat, and I saw these wonderful bottles, and brought one back, I thought it was beautiful. It appealed on a purely aesthetic level; I couldn’t put the letter in an ugly bottle. I kept it for over a year. I had realized I needed to do something to let him go, but the whole thing was triggered by a dream, the dream that I mentioned in the letter, I had this beautiful dream about Maurice, and I finally understood that it was time, time to let him go. ‘For a long time he travelled between two waters, between two lights . . .’ That’s because I couldn’t let him go, I was holding him back.

So that’s when I decided what to do. It took me about two months to write the letter. I’ve kept the drafts, I read it onto a Dictaphone. In fact when I met with Christine, the message was already all sealed up, so she never saw the letter, she saw only the bottle, with the letter already in it. I gave her the Dictaphone, and I went away while she listened to it. Without Christine at my side I wouldn’t have had the strength to carry it through.

The locks of hair I included with the letter – there is one lock from me and one from my son. My hair is the darker lock, his was a little lighter. It’s the last lock of hair that I cut from his head when he . . . when he left.