As a woman, mother, sister, eldest daughter and beloved, I am above all someone who embraces life.
I grew up on a farm, with divorced parents, and started working as a nurse. Later, I became a mother of five children, built my own practice and lived as close to nature as I could.
While I fully embraced motherhood, I felt an ever-growing desire to develop myself and discover who I truly am.
After my divorce from the father of my children, I followed the call of my heart and emigrated to Portugal.
I left my children with their father, who remained living in the Netherlands in our former farmhouse, so they could stay with their friends and in the familiar surroundings they knew.
It was a choice I could understand with my mind, but one that deeply touched my heart.
The grief of missing my children from a distance has become part of my life story.
It is one of the deepest forms of grief I have known in my life.
Because as a mother, distance is not measured only in kilometres.
Wanting to be there, but not always being able to be.
Perhaps I knew that feeling much earlier.
When my parents divorced, we lived with my mother, but I remained with one foot with my father.
Life sometimes asks us to make choices in which love and closeness cannot automatically exist side by side.
I have had to learn that loving someone deeply does not mean being physically present in their life every day.
It carries its own form of longing, grief and letting go.
And it has taught me something I carry with me today:
Sometimes love also means allowing someone to live their own life, while your heart longs for them to be closer.
I know the grief of someone being there, and yet still feeling far away.
That, too, is grief.
My life continued, with one foot in Portugal and one foot in the Netherlands, with my children to this day.
In the middle of nature, living a simple off-grid life. First in a yurt, then alone in a beautiful valley, and eventually returning to the little village and another quinta, where my Portuguese adventure had once begun.
The silence, the rhythm of nature and the simplicity of life brought me back to something I had lost along the way: myself.
Life as a teacher
My life has often asked me to let go.
My mother died at the beginning of 2019. She had Alzheimer’s.
Precisely through her dementia, another way of meeting each other emerged. Less through words and more through presence. Here, I was able to feel unconditional love.
Later that same year, I chose to continue on my own, without a partner, and moved to a beautiful valley in Portugal.
I was not only building a house there.
I was rebuilding myself.
For years, I literally put my shoulders to the wheel.
Meanwhile, I came face to face with my own fears.
The fear of having to do everything alone.
The doubt about whether I was doing things right.
The fear of not having enough.
The pain of relationships that had changed or been broken.
And the question of who I am when I no longer have to be responsible for another person’s happiness or fear.
These were not lessons from a book.
I had to live them.
Sometimes it means daring to acknowledge what is, creating space for something new.
I, too, cannot do it all alone.
And I have learned to dare to ask for help.
In the summer of 2022, I travelled to the Netherlands, a journey that had been planned long in advance. While I was travelling to my youngest sister’s 50th birthday, my father began his final journey.
That same week, my father was cremated.
Family from both sides, met within the space of one week.
Not in the same places, but in the same heart.
The thread of life
Another thread running through my life is wool.
I have spun wool since I was six. I knit, crochet, weave and felt. Ancient processes.
Spinning wool cannot be forced.
You feel the tension, give way, hold on when needed and let go when the time is right.
Perhaps that is one of the most beautiful images for life itself.
We cannot determine everything.
But we can learn to feel when it is time to hold on and when it is time to let go.
Death has been walking alongside me for a long time.
From a young age, I felt called to be there when someone was passing over.
I remember my grandmother’s death well, but also experiences closer to home, through the tradition of Naoberschap.
Being there for someone who is dying.
Waking up.
Being still.
Holding a hand.
Listening when there are words.
And staying when the words disappear.
Later, in Portugal, I was once again asked to be present with people going through the dying process.
Not only dying in the sense of leaving the body, but also when life’s path takes an unexpected turn.
It became increasingly clear that this is a hidden part of who I am and of what I have to offer.
And so I grew into my work as a death doula and soul doula.
Not from a method or a step-by-step plan.
But from my own experience with loss, farewell, love and change.
I don’t need to take away the dying.
I don’t need to make it more beautiful than it is.
I can simply be there.
With attention.
With gentleness.
With trust.
And I walk a little way with you.
While my own life continues to move.
In April 2023, I set off by bicycle from my home in Portugal, with a tent, travelling to the Netherlands via Santiago de Compostela and back.
Literally in motion.
But also on the inside.
My house was rented out and later sold. For a few months I travelled with my partner in a camper. For two years I lived in his house, together with two others, sharing the place and everyday life.
I lived in my Kangoo for a summer…..
I supported, among others, someone with early-stage dementia who wanted to emigrate, and helped him and his family along the way.
And so I have known my former neighbour for more than 50 years. Now, as she enters the final stage of her life with dementia, I want to support her in making this phase of her life as meaningful and enjoyable as possible — together with her cat.
Again and again, I notice how special it is to be allowed to stand beside someone when a life changes.
Not to determine where someone should go.
But to be present while someone discovers for themselves what the next step is.
Where I am now
On a quinta in Portugal, where there is plenty of space beneath the olive trees for a tent.
“Slow travellers “are warmly welcome in my garden.
And even now, I don’t know exactly what my life will look like in a few years.
Perhaps that is precisely what life is teaching me:
that I don’t need to know everything.
You cannot always imagine the changes that are coming!
Sometimes a new phase presents itself.
A farewell.
A loss.
A move.
A relationship that changes.
A body that changes.
A life taking on a different shape,
until the approaching end of life.
And sometimes you simply don’t know how to move forward.
That is where I want to be.
Not with all the answers.
But with attention and space.
With trust in what presents itself.
Because I know what it feels like when the ground beneath your feet changes.
And I also know what it is like to learn how to stand again.
More and more, I allow myself to enjoy life.
To live from joy, where much of my life used to be driven by suffering.
To feel what is right.
To keep my heart open.
And to trust that even when something unexpected happens, space can emerge for something that is not yet visible.
We may trust nature.
The nature around us.
And also your own nature.
That is where I am.
And that is how I also walk a little way with you, when your life changes shape.
I love rhythm. I love rituals.
Every week I dance — 5Rhythms — and sing — bhajans — together with others here in the community.
This is how I keep my vibration high, so that I can simply be INA — Yellow Sun Tone 1, Yellow Sun.
I eat (bio)logically, preferably from my own garden.
“If everything had remained logical, biological wouldn’t even be a word,” I used to say to my children whenever they called me a bio-mother….
And so I carry the light within me and can be a channel through which it can flow to you.