Committed, caring and hard working. These are the words with which Stefanie describes her father Martien. On November 30, 2005, her father died suddenly in his sleep at the age of 50. Stefanie is then 20. Now, almost twenty years later, she looks back on her father’s life: “I now live as long without him as I lived with him.”
Martien grows up as the eldest son in a busy family with nine children in Boxtel. He helps his mother with caring for his brothers and sisters and starts working at the age of 12: “He wanted to be able to buy a present for his mother himself,” says Stefanie.
Her father is sometimes a bit shy and has difficulty taking his place in the spotlight. Until he sees Thea in the pub. He walks up to her and the rest is history. They fall in love, have two daughters and share life together in Boxtel: “They complemented each other perfectly. My mother, a real talker, helped my father to come out of his shell and stand up for himself more often.”
The father role fits Martien like a glove. “He always gave us so much love and my memories of him are very warm. Coloring together, playing Nintendo, walking the dogs, holidays – everything was fun with him.” Even later, when the sisters are older, Martien does everything for them. “When we had been out, he would bake us snacks in the middle of the night. Those are moments that I think back on with great pleasure.”
When Martien sees Raymond van Barneveld on television one day, he falls in love with darts. He purchases his first set of arrows, hangs a dartboard in the attic and invites friends to join in. “Every Sunday evening he played darts with his friends – who also had a dartboard at home,” says Stefanie. “But it didn’t stop there. Dad joined the darts club in the village and started playing matches.”
There is no shortage of fun in the lives of Martien and Thea. They have been building carnival floats faithfully with the association for years and every Saturday they go to the dance evening in the local café. “And in recent years they often went to the pub for a beer with friends and family on Sunday afternoons.”
Then Martien suddenly gets pain in his left arm. The doctor sends him away with the conclusion that his arm is a bit overloaded from his work: “We were not looking for anything behind this. Our dad worked in construction and that can be physically demanding. He was a bit quieter at the table that evening than we were used to from him, but later in the evening he went to check on his darts club. When he got home he went to bed early, hoping to feel better the next day.”
“I was very excited to go home.”
That morning, Stefanie gets ready for school. “Just be quiet, he has been tossing and turning in bed all night,” her mother signals. But when Stefanie arrives at school that day, she senses that something is wrong. “I was eventually taken out of the classroom and told that my father had died in his sleep. My friends already knew, so they could comfort me.” Her aunt then picks Stefanie up from school to go home: “I found that very exciting.”
At home, Stefanie runs upstairs to check on her father: “I wanted to make sure it was really true. I couldn’t believe it, the night before he was just sitting at the dinner table with us.”
The sadness within the family is enormous. “My mother no longer dared to sleep in the bedroom where our dad had died, so she slept in my room. We tried to carry on, because life goes on, but my father’s death had sapped all the energy from my mother.”
It has now been almost twenty years since Stefanie lost her father, but she still keeps him close: “I was only twenty then and I now live almost longer without him than with him and that hurts. I never let go of my father, so I tell my children a lot about their grandfather, whom unfortunately they never got to know.”
“I show photos and share stories about the special man he was. It is important to me to keep his legacy alive; that gives me a lot of comfort. Looking back on the beautiful moments we shared together feels nice.”
