At 6 o’clock in the morning René joked: “Hey carcass, just phone sex ‘- Wedding

Peter Henk Steenhuis – 03/14/15, 16:01

© anp. Peter Henk Steenhuis interviewed last night deceased René Gude several times daily newspaper Trouw. In this file photo former Thinker Laureate was knighted by the Amsterdam mayor Eberhard van der Laan.

“This is mood management to the max.” As defined René Gude, thinker of the Fatherland, last week his situation. He felt sick, but was working with two laptops on your lap. Tonight he is deceased. Although he seriously for months, was very seriously ill, you would die strangely ‘suddenly’ be called.

• His personal assistant Florian Jacobs told me: “Rene is working singing.”

That suddenly stopped along with his vision the life. When Gude 2013 Thinker of the Fatherland, he was already ill. Which disease he has on his mind constantly involved during the thinker shelf. And his temper, which was almost always well despite his illness. “Henki” he cried, when I walked into his houseboat on the IJ. Whether he called morning for six hours, as we saw at the email traffic that we both were working, “Hey carcass, just phone sex.” And then he hung up, to go to work again.

After the previous week had gone several days very bad with him, said Florian Jacobs, his personal assistant “Rene is working singing.” That sentence, pronounced a few days before his death, will always be an example for me.

In the first interview I declined him as Thinker Laureate clouded his fatal illness already directly on the philosophy. He talked about the first meeting with the doctor, when he was told the bad news. “In this situation storms impressions certainly at you. (…) This is what the Stoa (ed. Filosoefieleer) mean by flaring emotions while you sense the wire is completely lost. I had to get a grip on my mind, to not to continue stabbing panic. ”

Do not panic!
Do not panic, that was the last months of the contract if he was suffocating. That could only be if he could keep control of his mind and his emotions. Gude certainly not meant that he had to thoroughly see his emotions to club down. ” Rather, René advised the emotions have their way. “With your mind,” he wrote, “make a mess of it, so by controlling your mind, you can prevent it.”

From letters and e-mails that we inside were at the newspaper, and from numerous reactions he received, for example, his performances at The World Keeps Turning, we know that with his vision of life, illness and death others has been tremendously supportive. Rightly, he was in 2014 Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau.

To the intellect and the emotions under control stand us, Gude said last week in this newspaper, civilization techniques available. Exercise programs. Through art, philosophy, religion and sports we can train our mood, so we ‘get a little understanding of the case. ” Those four exercise programs ensure that “we can imagine what goes on in other people, that we have the courage to persevere and that we can keep size, it ‘s not go too far.”

• The beauty of nature shines like someone tireless one setback after another collects.

  René Gude quoting the Greek philosopher Aristotle

Tomorrow I look in peace
If you train in this, you can even develop a perspective in the face of death. According Gude there were two wrong ways to react to your own impending death. The first: “If I still die, than it does for me no longer. I retreat into myself and wait angry or sad end off. The second, ‘get me they are not small, I’m sure nothing’s wrong. ” René has not done either. And in public, he told openly about his illness and his impending death. In the wonderful broadcast of the EO program “The coffin ‘, he even stopped in his own, bespoke coffin lie.

Last night, a few hours before his death, yet he mailed us about it book project and “By the word – by the image ‘, which he has spent the last few months with boundless energy. For the presentation of the book, in a few weeks, a video portrait was created. That was off. The creator, Kim Zeegers had emailed him the portrait. “Do not look,” he emailed back, “but I am very happy and honored. Tomorrow I’m going to look in peace and then hear you again. What a fantastic project, unbelievable.”

In an interview in TVNZ he quoted at a given moment, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, “The beauty of nature shines like someone tireless one setback after another collects, not because he did not feel, but because it is someone with an indestructible good humor.”

For me this quote apply to knight René, our Thinker of the Fatherland.