“There was nothing left of the hugely successful, smart and charismatic man, it was horrible”

Liesbeth: ‘The spark flew during a Shell conference in England. Pascal had had about eleven girlfriends before me, but after his initial fear of commitment he gave in and at the end of 2007 we got married. It was a fairytale wedding. Pascal was very emotional, he was an oyster that I had opened and he was uninhibitedly happy. We went to New Zealand for our honeymoon, traveling around in a motorhome. In a beautiful lodge, Pascal said: ‘When we are married for 25 years, we will come here with our family.’

We really wanted children, and when that still hadn’t happened after a year, we had it found out why. Through a regular blood test we found out that Pascal had leukemia. After the initial shock, it turned out that it was a chronic form of leukemia that can take you very long. We were about to move to London. The doctors advised him to have a blood test every three months and above all to continue living as if nothing was wrong. A year later, I was now six months pregnant, it turned out that Pascal’s blood values ​​were not good. When I was heavily pregnant, he was in the hospital for chemotherapy. Pascal became very introverted during that period. When I sought the connection, he often reacted very unfriendly.

When Anne was born in early 2010, the chemo had been completed. The expectation was that he would be able to continue with that for a very long time. We were overjoyed with the baby and confident in the future. Since we were already a bit older and wanted a large family, we went straight on and Sophie was born a year later. I can still remember the summer of 2012 very well because we were very happy. The weather was nice and we often sat together in our London garden in the evenings with a glass of champagne and a cigarette. On one of those summer evenings, our third daughter was conceived. A month after I found out I was pregnant, Pascal was told by his doctors that now was the best time to have a bone marrow transplant. Since he was still young, his chances of recovery were the best. In order to carry out the transplant, he first had to undergo a number of heavy chemotherapy. Physically he didn’t get sick from the chemo, but it did make him grumpy, his mood hung like a dark cloud over our family.

bone marrow transplant

In September 2013, he got his bone marrow transplant and he didn’t want me to be there. I found it very difficult not to support him and felt very left out. After two weeks he came home and although his immune system was weakened, he was doing quite well. He wasn’t sick. He was just very absent, I couldn’t get in touch with him at all. We had a busy London household with three young children, two dogs, a nanny and I had a full-time job. I almost couldn’t take it anymore, I was just caring and surviving.

At one point I said, “I understand you’re having a hard time, but we have a family together, and you’re not there for me at all.” Instead of being kind or understanding, his solution was to get a second nanny, also one for the weekend.

A month after the transplant, Pascal suddenly got worse. At first he could not hear well, a moment later he spoke with a double tongue and lost his balance and appetite. We didn’t understand what was going on, he was very restless and angry, but he couldn’t express himself anymore. He was hospitalized in December. I remember going to see him with Lara in the maxi cosi. When I entered his room, he had a sort of tantrum and threw all his pills at me. I can still see myself sitting in a corner of the hospital with my baby. I cried really hard because I realized I had lost him.

Virus

He had become something of a mental patient and because he was so restless, he was put to sleep so that they could give him his medication and food. While he was in a comatose state, they took a brain biopsy. At the beginning of January I decided to quit my job and move back to the Netherlands. Pascal was in intensive care in London and was flown by ambulance to an intensive care unit in Leiden. A month and a half later, the biopsy examined in America showed that a virus had entered his head that had affected his entire communication system. There was nothing they could do for him in the hospital, so he had to go to a nursing home. There was nothing left of the hugely successful, smart and charismatic man, it was really horrible.

In consultation with his mother, sister and close friends, we decided that it was degrading to keep him alive. He wasn’t even a greenhouse plant, because then at least he would still be quiet and peaceful. He was very restless, kept falling out of bed, constantly pulling out the tube feeding and moaning all day long. It was a well-thought-out decision to stop the medication that would cause him to die. He came home on Ascension Thursday to die, the expectation was that it could take a while. But from the moment he lay upstairs in bed, it went very fast. As if he’d been waiting for him to get back to our house. While the family and friends were drinking wine in the living room downstairs, I lay down in his arms. I could say goodbye to him in a very loving way, he couldn’t push me away anymore.

At half past two in the morning he took his last breath in the midst of family and friends. After the undertakers donned him a suit and he lay stiff on such a board, a friend said, “You can’t do this to your children.” Though it was all moving way too fast for me, I had Pascal taken away by the undertakers. When the kids woke up, I told them Dad had died. ‘Where is he then?’ “Well, he flew away.” That is of course a strange story and that did not feel right for the children. In the morgue he lay in the coffin like a prince with his eyes closed, he looked really good. I said, ‘I don’t want him to stay here, he’s coming home with us.’ They didn’t know if that was still possible, to which I replied: ‘I don’t care, I have a big car, I’ll slide it in in a minute.’ Of course it turned out to be possible, so he came home again, which was very nice. I told the children, “I gave daddy a lot of kisses, but he won’t wake up.”