When Gitty Versteijlen from Eindhoven was twenty weeks pregnant, she heard that her child had only a chance of survival of one percent. Yet she wanted to go for it: “Let’s go out of possibilities, I said.” But Thijn lived for a few hours after being born 16 years ago. The impression he made on his mother is indelible: “I still think of him every day.”
Gitty had tried to get pregnant for six years. After she had already given up hope, it succeeded anyway: “I was so very happy. I was hoping very carefully. At the first ultrasound everything was fine, with the twelve weeks ultrasound too.”
Because her mother had several miscarriages, Gitty got another ultrasound after twenty weeks. “That took longer. A colleague was taken and then the medical mallem mill started.” It was wrong. Gitty missed amniotic fluid and there was something wrong with the kidneys of her unborn child.
“Life should not be suffering, then it is ready.”
In one fell swoop the pink cloud, Gitty’s world, collapsed. Even though her child had only a very small chance of survival, breaking the pregnancy, she did not want to: “Every percent is one. Yet I was realistic. Living should not be suffering, then it is ready.”
Her pregnancy changed completely. “I didn’t go to pregnancy gymnastics to prepare for a birth. Because I didn’t want to sit among happy people who complain about pains.” And because the hospital in Nijmegen specializes in kidney dialysis in babies, she decided to go there for delivery. Thijn was born on the last day of the Four Days Marches.
The birth went fast. “It was letting go,” Gitty looks back. “It was no longer in my hands. I did everything I could, but from now on he had to do it himself.” According to Gitty, doctors expected her baby to be born or deformed. “But Thijn was not at all deformed and he took breath. Pediatricians took him to the Intensive Care. Then the exciting wait. “
After a while doctors came to tell that Thijn was not doing well. He had a blow, they couldn’t help him. “Then I drove to the IC on my bed. I saw him lying in his incubator. His life was suffering so I immediately said it had to stop. Then he was removed from the ventilation.”
“The most beautiful and toughest came together.”
Thijn died quietly in Gitty’s arms. “It was very, very, very heavy. The most beautiful and the heaviest came together.” Then she took him in the bath and dressed. Plaster prints were made of Thijns feet. Looking back, Gitty hadn’t wanted it otherwise.
When they got home, they put Thijn in his room. “My ex worked just before the DELA, one of his colleagues put everything at home in order.” A pendulum with the text ‘There was once a son’ hung in front of the window: “People became silent”.
After a fierce funeral, life went on: “Until then, people were understanding. But after a few weeks they think that life should continue. And I just thought: how then?” Three weeks after Thijn’s death, her father told him that he was incurably ill: lung cancer. He died a year later.
“Life was no longer normal,” Gitty summarizes. “I was a mother without a child.” But not for long. Because four months after the birth of Thijn, she became pregnant again. “That was not smart. The pregnancy hormones were still screaming through my body, with the fear that Thijn’s disease was hereditary.” She was in great uncertainty for the first sixteen weeks. “I was terrified that I would lose my child again. But luckily everything went well with Mark.”
“Parents do not realize what wealth they have.”
This year Mark 16. And Thijn is said to have turned 17. “I realize even more what I have. I think some parents don’t realize what wealth they have, how special it is.” Gitty and her ex incorporated the grief about their loss in different ways. “There is a lot of attention for mothers who lose a child, but not for fathers,” she looks back. “We have grown apart.”
The death of Thijn has permanently changed Gitty’s life: “I have the feeling that I have lost a piece of myself that a piece of me has been struck. Doing something thoughtless, that is actually off.”
Gitty got a new relationship. From his son, her bonus child, she will be a grandmother for the first time this year. In her life, Thijn is still present every day: “And when they ask Mark if he has brothers or sisters, he says:” I have a brother, but he is dead. “He has always been his brother, we never kept silent about it.”
