Estelle van ‘t Schip is in deep mourning. She still misses her mother Daniëlle van ‘t Schip, who died in October last year at the age of 55, every day. “It feels like I’ve been amputated.”
Estelle is having a hard time. Since the death of her mother, she has lived with her father John van ‘t Schip to mourn together. “For me, there is a life before mom’s death and after mom’s death,” she says in conversation with Vriendin. “Luckily I feel her soul, but she is not really there. We were so entwined that I often really felt amputated.”
‘She couldn’t take it anymore’
Just before Daniëlle’s death, something special happened, Estelle remembers. “She looked at me and wondered out loud whether she should hold on a little longer… I became completely happy. But she changed her mind because she said it to me to please and not for herself, because she could no longer. She expressed that she saw this as her last life lesson: she now had to choose for herself. I then looked at her and said: ‘Mom, you can go’. Then she said that sentence The Lion King: ‘I live in you, you live in me, forever’.”
Worst of all
People ‘to please‘ is something Estelle also recognizes about herself. But since her mother’s death, her outlook on life has changed. “For the first time in my life I now manage to choose for myself. That is a beautiful process, but at the same time I would have liked to share this with mom,” says Estelle. She has grown as a person in recent months. “I can be very insecure, but you know what’s crazy? I think now that Mom is gone: the worst thing that could happen to me has happened to me, so what am I worried about? In recent months I have noticed that this uncertainty is increasingly disappearing.”
