Last week Friday my colleague, business partner, friend of 15 years, Frank Verschoor passed away. As I, we, as a team at the company we founded together, knew he would and have known since he made his decision. To exercise his cherished autonomy before his lethal progressive cognitive disease would erase him further.

Last Wednesday at his memorial service and funeral was the final goodbye. A goodbye in a long line of goodbyes in the past months.
At last year’s company Christmas dinner I very deliberately already said my thank you’s to Frank, because I knew the turbulence ahead, even if not its precise shape. When we as a team spent a beautiful week in Portugal in April together, we knew what was coming. When we said our goodbye internally early July it wasn’t just that he was leaving the company. When we did the same with our network and clients a week later, it wasn’t just that he was leaving the company. Frank was upfront about it, radical transparency as always, to all he knew, in the final months. Yet we also saw the forms on the office printer much earlier this year. We knew the actual date that was set, he told us, a thing which wasn’t mine, ours, to share. When people asked about his health, showed their concern, expressed their empathy, I said it might be a matter of just months, keeping it vague and as if it might still be longer, seeing the shock in others that things might progress so fast. Then came the moment I said it might be no more than weeks, then I said he may not make it to the coming weekend.

And on the chosen morning we knew for months would come, I sat in my thinking chair in my home office. And thought. About the path we shared for many years, how in hindsight it is more apparent when the first signs something was amiss showed up. Changes in his attitude and behaviour. Remembering the way Frank and I could do workshops together like no other, as if it was a flowing dance, leaving the participants and ourselves on a natural high. How I deeply miss those, and had missed them for some time already. Cried for Frank. Yet also for how I had to put my own recovery from burn-out on hold for 9 months or more, a burn-out in itself a product of this whole process with roots 3 years deep. About how I feel I failed my team this entire year, right when leadership was needed, because I was already spent. My sadness at needing to become confrontational in order to save the company we both hold dear, at the potential cost of my personal connection to him. Gratitude towards my two other business partners for stepping up in all the ways I could not. Gladness about how we succeeded in getting all the paperwork on transferring Frank’s share of our company done at a time scale that still could mean something significant for him this summer, and how our co-founder who years ago left the company helped make that possible. How we hung together in all that, saw it through. Grateful for how our team for a year encircled Frank with care and assistance, but also sad about the cost my amazing team took on their shoulders for it, the marks it is leaving.

Such deep shame about how I have longed for the end of this process so I might rest and start becoming me again.

Deeply grateful for our last exchange the day before Frank died, words I hadn’t realised I needed so much to hear.

At the memorial service there was a wall of photos from Frank’s life. The images from around when we just started working together jumped out at me, the look in his eyes. It made me realise that the Frank we founded our company with had been gradually going missing for a long time already, and how much energy, creativity and joy had already slowly been eroded without us noticing much or finding other more immediate explanations for.
At the end of the memorial service, the final song on his self selected play list, was one about autonomy, just after his brother in law at Frank’s request explained to all how and why he came to his decision for assisted dying. Like for Frank autonomy is at the absolute top of my list of key values as well. Back in 2016 when I was doing some sessions with a coach shortly after both my parents died and our daughter Y was about to be born, a good time for introspection, the coach asked me about values. I put autonomy first, and optimism second. When she asked me about what a lack thereof would mean to me I spontaneously and immediately said imprisonment and death. The song Frank chose as a final song for the memorial service hit me right between the eyes. It was the same one he picked and sang with an adapted text for me during our internal goodbye party early July.

Last Saturday E, Y and I saw the last performance of the musical Hadestown in the Carré theatre in Amsterdam, a modern day version of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hermes, the narrator, says it’s an old story and we all know how it ends, yet he’ll nevertheless will retell it. That it’s a sad song, that nevertheless will be sung again.

Frank helped shape much of the character of our company, the way we are connected to each other, the way we approach things. He’s been a mentor to many on our team, a friend. A friend, a colleague, a brother in arms for transparency, responsible data use, and putting humans and human connection always front and center in any contemplation of the use of technology. To give people more autonomy.
I have many stories, in my heart and in my head.
We have many old stories, we know how they end. We’ll still tell them regardless.
We carry what we know is a sad song, but we’re still going to sing it.

Goodbye Frank. Thank you.