In memory | A day was always too short for Gerard de Haan (55) from Erm, with his windmills, his music and other hobbies

A summer day in a meadow near Gees. The planes have just left and Gerard de Haan comes to clean up the area of ​​the fly-in. He has daughter Sanne with him in his open-top Opel, his cross car. “Stand up,” he encourages her. With her upper body out of the skylight and her arms wide in the air, she lets herself be torn around the grounds, her hair blowing in the wind.

These are memories that his family – his wife Marjolein, daughters Sanne, Coco and bonus daughter Kaylee – cherish.

Sailor, engineer, miller and more

Life with Gerard was not easy. He was a bon vivant, musician, cook, miller, voice actor, speaker at the water polo tournament and much more. He sailed at sea as a sailor and engineer. Until he was thirty, because he didn’t want to be a father who was always away. He knew from fellow sailors with sailing fathers what a loss that is for a child.

Gerard was born in Winsum in Friesland, the eldest of three boys. He was a cheerful and, according to his mother, an easy-going boy. When he was three, the family moved to Schoonebeek, where father started working in oil extraction for NAM. At school, the small and frail Gerard initially snowed a bit. That changed when Ard Zwiers came to the village: a big guy with a trendy bicycle. They became classmates and friends for life. Gerard got more bravado and dared to come to the fore with Ard by his side.

To see the world

After secondary school, he enrolled at the nautical school in Delfzijl. He wanted to see the world. And it worked. It came to all continents except Antarctica. He noticed how fragile life is at a young age. Frank, a good friend of his and a former fellow student, had an accident on board. He didn’t survive. It made Gerard realize that it could suddenly be over. And that you have to do the things you want to do now.

The honeymoon with Marjolein therefore became one of six months. The two had met at the nautical school, which Marjolein’s brother also attended. She regularly attended the parties there. At the time of their marriage, Gerard had said goodbye to shipping – just as he had intended before he turned 30 – and he was working at Winel, a company in Assen that makes ship hatches, among other things. He took half a year of unpaid leave and Marjolein resigned.

,,We didn’t want to wait with such a trip until we were retired. I’m so glad we went then,” she says.

Night diving

They went to Moscow, Beijing and moved on to Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia and Indonesia. Got their diving license there. Night diving was Gerard’s favorite. He came back from his first dive as happy as a child.

Once the father of Sanne and Coco, Gerard stopped working for a while to take care of the children and to be able to do more with music. He had taught himself to play the guitar on the high seas, where there was not much else to do anyway. He would later make CDs with Boes (Bandje Oet Emmen and Schoonebeek), just like with Jutter en Kok, the duo he formed with Edgar Smit and with whom he played performances at schools and nurseries.

Musician

A day was almost always too short for Gerard, with all his hobbies. He helped Marjolein with her cooking studio in their hometown of Sleen, started a network café for entrepreneurs there and took up miller’s training, because the technology of such a mill and its dependence on the weather intrigued him. He got hired as a draftsman, musician and cook and was on the school paper and game week when the kids were young. Wrote a ‘corona battle song’ in corona time that he sang with the children at Het Talent primary school where neighbor Corine works via an internet connection.

And he was invariably a speaker at Moby Dick’s water polo tournament in Zandpol, saying, like a kind of Gaston Starreveld, “Good morning water polo friends!” shouted to wake up the athletes at the campsite for another day of competition. That cheerfulness was not appreciated by everyone at that early hour, after the party the night before.

Mills in mourning mode

Gerard still had all sorts of plans. For example, he was setting up a new company with a friend, a technical consultancy firm. They had already had their first so-called ‘inspiration weekend’. In London. They could go to the Greenday concert there.

But it turned out differently. Gerard died in his sleep on May 20. At home in Erm, where they had moved in 2021. Earlier that month they had been on holiday to Bonaire. The day before his death he had worked a bit and cooked extensively. He didn’t feel any different. “You just popped out,” the obituary reads. Swimming club Moby Dick blacked out its Facebook page and the sails of ‘Gerards’ windmills in Oudemolen and De Groeve went into mourning mode.

His relatives comfort themselves with one thought: Although Gerard’s life was too short, he lived 200 percent.