Marianne la Bastide, obituary

For many summers, it was a lovely tradition to have my aunt Helma and her friend Marianne la Bastide from the Netherlands come visiting us in Denmark for a couple of weeks. That was while my mother still lived in her big house in Gundsømagle with plenty of room for guests. In addition, Helma and Marianne came to visit me in Stockholm, July 2017. This was when we first noticed that something wasn’t quite right anymore. Marianne kept forgetting things and seemed very confused at times. These were the first signs of dementia, and the last years of her life were spent in a caretaker home. She passed away end January in her eighties (1937 – 2025). I will always remember Marianne warmly for her kind soul and elegant humor, and I still see her all dressed up for giving it a go in my mother’s huge garden. She sometimes shared fragments of her dramatic childhood in Indonesia during World War II, where she and her Dutch family ended up in Japanese prison camps. The men in one camp and the women in another. Very limited access to food and extremely stressful, which she said was something the body and mind never forgot. Thank you Marianne for being a ray of sunshine in our lives 🙂