These beautiful pictures were taken 1 month and 11 days before my dad died of cancer, today it’s 19 years since he died.

Don’t we just look wonderful in our hats?

Dad we miss you terribly…

Our thoughts are also with Ewald Kooiman, who would have celebrated his birthday two days from today, but who is no longer with us and is also very much missed.

My brother’s homage to our father following this link.

And my mother’s homage to her beloved husband following this link.

Estas preciosas fotos se tomaron 1 mes y 11 días antes de que mi padre muriera de cancer, hoy hace 19 años que murió.

¿Verdad que estamos fantásticos con nuestros sombreros?

Papá, te echo de menos una enormidad.

Nuestro pensamiento también está con Ewald Kooiman, que habría celebrado su 72 cumpleaños dentro de dos días, pero que tristemente ya no está con nosotros y a quien también echamos mucho de menos.

Puedes ver el homenaje que hace mi hermano a mi padre siguiendo este enlace.

Y el homenaje de mi madre a su querido marido en este enlace.

This picture was taken in August 2008 in front of the Somontano vineyards in Spain.

Last Wednesday, February 4th 2009, we said goodbye for the last time to my friend and father-in-law Ewald Kooiman. My own father having died in 1991, Ewald took the role of a second father to me, and was a beloved husband, father, grandfather, colleague and friend.

His death, at 70 years of age, came very unexpectedly. The very picture of health, I’ve never met in my life anyone so fit, so health conscious, so careful with his diet, so fanatic of exercise and bodybuilding… but yet his heart stopped on the 25th of January while he was sleeping. He was on holidays, enjoying the sun…

He was at the peak of his career and of his life.

A worldwide famous concert organist and scholar, he was recording for the 3rd time the full organ works of J.S. Bach , this time for the Aeolus label.  He was two thirds through the recording, and it will be a great loss to all the fact that he will never get to finish this task that he so enthusiastically had undertaken.

You can see him and hear him play on this video made during these last recordings:

And this link is to another video made during the recordings.

We will miss his music, but much more so he will miss him, because the void he has left behind will be impossible to fill.

We have (and there are) no words to describe what we are feeling, what he meant to us, how much we love him, the immense feeling of loss, the need to see him again, to give him a big hug, to make some jokes, to tell him that surely this was some ridiculous misunderstanding, that he is not really gone…

…but he is, and our heart is broken.