The corona period was very difficult for Tineke de Nooij, who made her last broadcast on the radio last week. “I’m never used to being alone. I’d rather be alone for a few days, that’s not the point at all. But I’m really alone,” she says in the barber chair in The Cut Guest. “You are alone for almost two full years. That you can’t go out with friends and you don’t have your old life anymore. That made me mad. I do feel lonely sometimes. I miss someone who loves me. But a new lover, that’s all hassle.”
Tineke had to say goodbye to her husband Peter IJkelenstam in 2018 after a long illness, whom she married in 1991. ,,I had the most ideal marriage with him that you can imagine. We have had the happiest years of our lives together. But then he gets a cerebral haemorrhage and another stroke and that lasted sixteen years. Sixteen years of someone not being the man you once loved. I don’t want that to happen to me again.”
She says that she even forgot the beautiful side of marriage for a while. “Sorrow has supplanted the happy time. No one ever prepared me for that. That the bad years are so incisive. That when he’s dead, only those bad memories remain. There is then a kind of relief that he has passed away and then very slowly all the good memories come back. I’m glad they’re coming back.”
After his stroke sixteen years ago, Tineke’s husband was admitted to a hospital in Cape Town. It was a British hospital so there were scones with the tea. She saw that he had completely crumbled the little buns on his plate. ,,I then walked into the hallway and cried terribly. This is not good, I thought. This is terrible. My first husband Tony was in a coma for twelve days, he also had brain damage. So I knew what was going to happen to guys with brain damage. I thought it was terrible. I knew it.”
The first year went well, but after his admission to a home it became harder and harder for Tineke. “In the end he didn’t know who I was anymore. Reluctantly I went to the home. What do you think will happen to you then? Then you are not proud that you stay outside in the car and think: I don’t feel like it anymore. The last two or three years have been terrible.”
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