At the end of her book White Raven Floor van Liemt calmed herself down, she didn’t have to go through everything that takes another person years. She had just turned 21, the treatment for her metastatic lung cancer seemed effective, she had called the last chapter Hope. That hope would evaporate in the years that followed, but reaching for the future, she gave her life great meaning, with columns, two books, a foundation and above all: with the gift of putting into words what she experienced and with her commitment to other young cancer patients.
Shortly after the diagnosis, her mother Alexa Gratama gave her notebooks, advising her to start writing. Her psychologist liked the stories so much that she joined the NRC introduced. She received a weekly column, which culminated in a book. ‘That helped her so much,’ says her mother. “I don’t have a degree, she said, but I’ve become someone.”
For twenty years her life was carefree. Father entrepreneur, mother judge, two younger brothers, childhood years in Curaçao, two school years in Wales, a parental home in Twente, a student room in Utrecht. Until that diagnosis, in December 2017, basically a death sentence. Since then she felt time pressure, she said in an interview with de Volkskrant.
‘In those four years she matured more rapidly’, says her mother. ‘She became the person she was deep down. With a great talent for reading people and situations and an enormous creativity.’ Her friend Jeroen Buitenhuis calls life with Floor ‘an enormous pressure cooker’. “Everything became more intense, the positive and the negative things. She had always been driven, but when she got sick, she only went faster, she couldn’t sit still.’
founding
With her foundation F|Fort Foundation, she wanted to give young adult cancer patients solid ground, with mental and practical support. Her mother: ‘I saw how her daily life was turned upside down. In young cancer patients, the development gets such a blow. Love, independence, desire to have children, she had so many questions and problems for which little attention was paid. The doctors are of good will, but they are older, speak a different language.’
Three months before her death, she presented her book in the Rijksmuseum The common denominator, with photos and short texts about the emotional world of young adults with cancer. Until her deathbed she was working on a documentary, a triptych about the question of how people experience time. ‘She was fascinated by that, her own experience had given her a different perception of time. Outsiders told her it was such a shame that her life was too short, she saw it differently.’
Immunotherapy
Hope remained, almost to the end. Last summer she had decided to stop the treatments and that decision had given her peace, says her mother. “She didn’t want chemo anymore to live a few months longer, she wanted to stay Floor as much as possible.” But then her doctor told her about immunotherapy, a 3 percent chance that it would work. “It echoed in her head. I can’t pass up the chance on life, she said.’
Floor was not part of the 3 percent. She passed away on New Year’s Eve 2021, aged 24. ‘We’ve only been together for a few years, but it’s as if it took forty years, we’ve been through so much,’ says Jeroen. After her death, he received messages from complete strangers. “It proves how she could move others with her words.”
Her dream was that every young cancer patient would receive a copy of her photo book, and that it would be in all consulting rooms. Her foundation is now continuing that mission.