An last saw Diny on their birthday, August 30. With her son Frank and his family she drove from Brabant to The Hague, to the care hotel where her sister had been living for three months. The move had been hard on Diny, she had deteriorated physically lately. She made no secret of the fact that she didn’t like the new place. When An called, she answered the phone saying, “With the crematorium.”
This time the mood was more festive. After coffee and cake, the children and grandchildren went for a walk so that the sisters could chat in peace. That day they agreed that if one of the two died, they would not attend each other’s funeral. They had, as always, been in complete agreement. They had turned 101, so there was no need to mourn for long. One day, and then it was enough.
An kept the promise. When Diny died a month later, she attended the funeral service from home, via a video link. “That made an impression, of course,” says An in her apartment in a senior citizen complex in Waalre. The butter cake she serves with the coffee is homemade, her royal blue cardigan is colored by the scarf around her neck. Son Frank (70), also joined, says that he does not have the impression that his mother is very upset by the loss of her twin sister.
“You didn’t worry much, did you?”
An: “I am sober in that regard. You are a person of the day at that age. It makes sense that one of them would go first.”
An and Diny van Lunteren were born in 1920 in a porch house on the Delftselaan in The Hague. Their parents hadn’t counted on twins: ‘Wait a minute, I think there’s one more to come’, the midwife had said when Diny was born. Three minutes later An followed. The girls were named after their grandmothers: Gijsje Berdina and Johanna Alida.
You don’t know better than the two of you
Their childhood, An says, was carefree. Mother Maartje was a seamstress and the girls always looked great. Father Leendert-Jan, a fervent amateur photographer, frequently captured them. “The family called us Annedientje, they never kept us apart.” Their parents were freethinkers: they believed in science, logic, and reason. Religion hardly played a role in the household. Father, who had risen from troubleshooter to chief technical officer at the municipal telephone, encouraged his daughters to go to secondary school. “He wanted us to move forward. The more you learned, the better.”
Sleeping with the cows
When the war broke out, the sisters were in their early twenties. An now worked as a national operator, Diny at the Postal Check and Giro Service. “Bad years,” says An. She remembers the “hunger trips” where she and Diny rode bicycles to the countryside and slept with the cows. They never went at the same time. “My father wouldn’t let me. He thought: if something happens, at least I’ll have one left.”
The bombing of Bezuidenhout on March 3, 1945 also made a big impression. English bombers targeted German V2 rockets in the Haagse Bos but discharged their payload too early and hit a residential area, their residential area, killing 550 people. The Van Lunteren family fled to relatives in Voorburg. When they returned in the evening, An says, only a few houses were still standing. Their street was one of the few that had not been hit.
Frits and Frits
During the war Diny and An met their future husbands. Both men – who is making it up – were called Frits. An married just after the war, on September 28, 1945. Like Diny, she continued to live in The Hague. While her sister soon had a son, starting a family with An did not immediately succeed. “When Dien became pregnant for the second time, she didn’t dare tell me. But of course she couldn’t do anything about it.”
The fact that a child did come is thanks to Ans’ determination. In 1949 she took the train to Leiden to visit the hospital: she had read an article about artificial insemination and was curious about what was possible. If you really wanted something, she thought, you had to give something for it. The doctor she met wanted to obtain a doctorate for the new technique and therefore had a certain interest in the success of the mission. After two appointments, she was pregnant with her own husband.
The sisters kept in close contact throughout their lives. Even when An moved to the east of the country in the 1970s, they spoke every few days. They had many mutual friends and went on vacation with their families. When their men were gone, they made trips to Austria, Morocco, Spain and Italy.
No secrets
They had no secrets from each other. And also, An says, the same taste.
Frank: “How often have you bought exactly the same thing independently of each other?”
An, lightly: “A blouse or a sweater, you mean?”
Frank, pointing to Ans’ glittery flowered feet. “Yes, or how about those shoes?”
“Oh, that one. That was a coincidence. They were in a booklet.”
Until Diny died, they were the oldest twins in the Netherlands. An finds it difficult to answer the question of how this is possible. A bit nonsensical too. She didn’t do anything special for it and left nothing behind. As far as she knows, the same goes for Dien. Perhaps, Frank suggests, it’s because they’ve been living “fairly stress-free”? Yes, An nods. “That’s it, I think.”
Other than a problem with her eyes – macular degeneration, Diny had it too – she is healthy. She goes for walks, joins a book club, takes no medication and has never gotten a flu shot.
How old does she feel?
“Seventy.”
What’s it like to miss someone you’ve been with for over a century?
“Yes, of course I miss it. You don’t know better than that there are two of you.” She still often walks to the phone, says An. Diny’s number is listed under speed dial 1. „Soon I will probably think again: ‘Just call Dien’. That remains.”
#Twin #Sister #Lost