The 109-year-old Marina van der Es-Siewers – born and raised in Van Ewijcksluis, and after a short break in a nursing home in Wieringerwaard for a week and a half back in Hippolytushoef, where she has lived since 1974 – was already the oldest resident of the municipality of Hollands. Kroon, but has also been the oldest in the Netherlands since Saturday.
Until a few years ago, Mrs. van der Es-Siewers, who was born on March 4, 1913, was still very spry. For example, in 2017 at the age of 104, she released still out her voice in the elections to the House of Representatives. She thought it was important, and only logical. “I’ve voted all my life,” she said to the cameras of NH Nieuws.
Back
Since she broke her thigh when she fell down the stairs at the age of 93 – until then she still lived independently in the house in which she and her family had lived for years – she lived in a care home in Hippolytushoef. She had to leave here in 2020, because the house was closing. She lived in a nursing home in Wieringerwaard for about a year and a half, until she could return. “A week and a half ago she went by ambulance to the Hof van Wieringen care home,” says her daughter-in-law Elly van der Es. “Back to Hippolytushoef.”
Mrs. Van der Es does not have a large family: she is an only child, just like her husband Henk, who died in 1998, and she herself had a son. And this one took care of her only grandchild. Although her memory regularly fails her, and she is elderly, she is still very healthy. “She has had the corona vaccinations without any problems and is not taking any medicines.”
Backwards
But the corona period has not done Mrs. van der Es any good, according to her daughter-in-law. “She has deteriorated a lot during that time. Before that she walked every day to the coffee table, but now she no longer had a daily chat. We could only talk to her through plexiglass. I have the idea that she has sunk into her thoughts.”
She therefore does not really realize that she is the oldest. “If you tell her, she won’t believe it. But at other times she says ‘I’m very old already’.”