Marie Koster

I haven't been very active on my bog lately.

With a reason.

I have something important on me the last weeks.

My grandmother.

Marie Koster was her name, widow of Wout Oudshoorn, my grandfather.

She was finished with the thing that drives us every day, the thing that feels so logical we hardly think about it, the feeling that goes on and on, forever...?

Life, it's the thing making us breathe, think, move, love every day.

But sometimes it's not as easy as it sounds. At some point you can get to an end with that 'thing'.

That is what my grandmother had been struggling with. Last week was the final end of her struggle.

Ninety-one years of life ended last Friday, with a week of struggling...

Now, I can tell 1001 stories about how I admired my grandmother, about her strength, her big working hands, how hard she worked, about all her children, my aunts and uncle, about the farm she lived on...but, it's all to say with just one word. Love.

My dear 'oma', I just love you...

(Picture: my grandmother when she was a young girl. Me and my brother are colouring all the black and white pictures we have. You should all do that for your old grandparents when they're still alive. My grandmother would have loved to see herself in full colour again.)