The pebbles in my pocketa book by Mathijs Assink from Assen, with the subtitle If you outlive your children. A book in which he describes what it means when he and his girlfriend José lose two young children in 2013 and 2016 to a rare hereditary lung disease. Thomas was sixteen months old and Fréderique was less than a year old.
Both children suffered from LIC syndrome, the lung disease-immunodeficiency-chromosome breakage syndrome.
“The book is the end of a phase, and I and my partner José are proud of the result. But of course I would rather not have written it,” says Mathijs Assink in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata.
“It is a form of therapy. I have been out of action for a while, which is of course understandable. And during the therapy my supervisors said: ‘Why don’t you write it down? Write it down.’ It started as grieving , but it has become a book.”
