It's Just Dying: A Flemish Family Saga in the Long Twentieth Century

As each of her children died, she remembers the color of the light streaming through the west window as death crept in, invariably in tiptoes through the back door.

After the death of his father in 2014, Kempen resident and former head of Vredeseilanden Jan Aertsen decided to save as many stories from the life of his pioneering farming family as possible from oblivion. He spoke to witnesses and those left behind, read historical works, and dug through archives and his own memory.

Together, these puzzle pieces form a colorful family portrait of daredevils and doers, of dreamers and brooders. But the book became more, it became an image of Flanders in the extended 20th century, of its farmers and notaries, its wars and its churches, its mayors and its little people. And in the end it turned out that a lot of death was done in all those stories, sometimes too much.

Using his very own lively style, which effortlessly switches from brutal to tender, the author made a family saga of the facts and stories, written with love for the portrayed, love also for a village in a bygone era, but without any false sentiment. Whoever writes honestly may spare no one, not even himself.

I am a Sunday's child, born on Wednesday, September 14, 1950. As the fourth boy of eight children, I drifted quietly through my childhood.
Once a father and grandfather myself, I was thrown back to the past and to myself during major emotional events: Jan van Fons van Kees van Sus van Geertjes. I stood in steep admiration for my father, a pioneering farmer, and for those other daredevils in agriculture.
Who were those adventurers who came before me?
I went looking for the history of those enterprising men and their even more powerful wives. And that search became this book, the story of a farming family, but just as much the story of so many families in Flanders and the Netherlands in which the farm formed the pivot of existence for generations.

't Is ook maar doodgaan is a collection of stories that together form a family portrait and picture of the times that is as faithful as possible, written with love, but without mincing words.

Jan Aertsen