My wife, Marianne Vanderklugt, died unexpectedly on 2nd May 2024. She had been battling cancer for 14 months, but we had both thought that she was steadily overcoming the hideous disease, so her death did come as a shock.

Marianne was a warm, remarkable and wonderful person, and woman. She was a ‘real person’ with a genuine, honest, courageous, and intelligent personality. She was an excellent life partner to me, and her loss has changed just about everything for me. We had a very close bond with each other. We loved each other.

She was highly sensitive, highly intelligent, highly educated, highly qualified, with clear thinking skills, excellent social skills, had an excellent sense of justice, and was very aware of a wide range of news and current affairs. She also loved languages. She had amazing skills and understanding with learning and using many languages. She was an inspiring language teacher, who was highly qualified, highly experienced, but also seemed to have a natural gift for effective teaching. She prided herself with being able to answer almost all of the questions she might get from her students, instantly, using clear and easy to understand explanations (because she understood so well, the intricacies of using good English). She could explain any tricky grammatical queries that came up, instantly, again using clear and easy to understand explanations.

Marianne was a go-getter. She got things done, and she just did things that others might only be hoping would happen. She often used a lot of self-discipline to work on the things she wanted to achieve, and she was prepared to work hard for the things she achieved. She usually had the “vision”, along with strong determination to try to get the results she wanted. I can remember many times when other people would try to block Marianne from doing that she wanted to do, and then seeing that in the end she had managed to do what she thought was possible. She had the ability to stay focused on achieving the things she did. She ran her own college for 7 years, and during that whole time, she tried to run every lesson as if every student doing that lesson would feel that their particular needs especially were being met, regardless of what their language level or their background understanding was. She kept track of each student’s progress, lesson by lesson. That was a very demanding way to teach in her own college, and it was surprising that she lasted for seven years before finding that she was just too tired to continue.

Marianne had excellent hearing and a very good memory. She often remembered things told to her by her students (usually along with the context involved), sometimes years after when they were said.

I think Marianne, up to about 15 months before she died, would have felt that she did have a very good life, as have I with her. She enjoyed many things, and especially getting to know so many interesting people from all walks of life. Marianne was able to effectively talk to and genuinely relate to people from all strata of society. She enjoyed her teaching, and doing it the way she felt it should be done. She especially enjoyed running her own English Language College! She had a very high level of moral development. She understood the truth about the nature of life and death. She had a very good understanding of what things were important in life. She also had a very good sense of humour. She was highly intelligent and made good considered decisions about important aspects that affected either or both of our lives. She had been very successful at a wide range of jobs, but was especially successful with her teaching. She took responsibility for what she did with her life. She felt proud of what she had achieved. I felt very proud of her, and of what she had achieved.

Marianne loved Languages. She loved their intricacies, their grammar, their ability to express people’s feelings, and their ability to describe the things that we see around us in the world. At one time, she spoke fluent Dutch, English, French, German and Italian. She was amazing to travel with through western Europe. She could also understand Latin, as well as a lot of Spanish, some Portuguese, some Vietnamese, some Danish, some Slavic languages, and some Japanese. And she was very interested in the Australian indigenous languages. She kept each language separate from all of the others. She rarely mixed her many languages.

Marianne loved speaking English, and getting her command of English as high as she could. She had a much better understanding of English than I do, and she spoke as fluently as if she was a native English speaker (which she wasn't).

As mentioned earlier, Marianne loved teaching, and loved most of her students. Marianne always tried to teach in a student-centred manner. She loved empowering her students, with genuine understanding and proper skills in using English (not the silly short-term shortcuts or ‘vagaries’ that most of the other ‘English Language teachers’ practised). Many of her students have made comments like, “she was the best teacher that they had had in their lives” (and they didn’t mean just the best English language teacher, but any teacher).

She had a very high level of moral development and loved discussing moral dilemmas with her students, trying to get them to look at various problems from the different points of view available to each situation, and then require her students to clearly express those different points of view using good English. Her favourite moral dilemma was “the girl and the sailor”, but she knew plenty of other good moral dilemmas.

She loved books, as physical objects, with paper pages, harder covers, etc. She loved reading. She read many library books, her own books, magazines, newspapers, online articles, etc. She is sure that through reading, she had developed a huge working vocabulary in English.

She loved reading newspapers (her favourite of the past 15 years or so was the “Australian Financial Review”. She no longer enjoyed reading “The Australian”. She used to enjoy reading it many years ago, but she noticed that it had become too ‘right-wing’ biased. She also enjoyed watching the news and current affairs on Television (mostly on ABC, of course). She had an excellent understanding of current affairs and most things happening around us.

She loved earning her own money, and feeling financially independent. She had found lots of employment during the 1980s and 1990s, and did many different types of work (even though these were often mainly menial types of work). She loved the worlds of economics and finance, in terms of the use and control of money. About 20 years ago, she read up about superannuation, to make sure she knew how it worked, and how she could get the best returns from it. She helped me with my superannuation. She also realised that to run her own college (2000 – 2007), she would need to have a very good understanding of finance and economics. She read a lot, learned all she could, and attended various workshops. She did develop an excellent understanding of finance as well as important considerations for effectively running a successful and ethical business.

She loved real estate, and the way that savvy investing could be highly rewarding. She had bought her own flat around 1984, as an investment. We bought our first house in 1992. When we sold that house in 2005 (13 years later), we had tripled its value. She was amazed by that type of outcome.

She loved travel, and meeting people living very different lives. She had travelled to France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Greece, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and back to The Netherlands.

She was never interested in having her own children. She would often say to me that to her, some of her students felt more like the children she would rather have.

Marianne loved intimacy with me, as I did with her.

She was highly competitive! Throughout her primary school education, she was always top of her classes. Throughout her secondary school education, at a selective high school, she was up near the top of the classes that she wanted to be top of (languages, history, and geography). Table tennis was one of the few sports she was interested in playing, but only in the informal manner that we played. We played table tennis together most nights for about 20–30 minutes. She was definitely not interested in playing competition table tennis. She wasn’t interested in AFL football, or netball, or the Olympics, or any of the sport that is promoted as being so important in Australian society. She wondered why sports people were always idolised in Australian society, instead of scientists, business entrepreneurs, volunteer firefighters and so many women, who had to quietly endure a subservient life in a very ‘blokey’ society, and who were largely responsible for raising the next generation of our society.

She loved walking, but only if she felt safe. Before getting ill, she would go for a half hour walk every morning, and another mid afternoon. She said that walking was really good for her mental health, as well as her physical health.

She loved a lot of Vietnamese cooking (from her time of working as a nanny for a Vietnamese family). She also loved eating hot fried potato chips (with chicken salt and maybe with some mayonnaise).

Marianne loved morning and afternoon teas. She loved a good coffee, and she loved having some rich European-style cakes.

She loved meeting people who were sensitive, honest and not caught up in social status. She came to know and like many people who were bi-polar. She sometimes wondered whether she had just a touch of bi-polar herself.

She did not like the patriarchal society she realised she was living in, and was always interested in ways that might address the inequities that she saw.

She loved talking about lots of things from a wide range of topics. She had an excellent understanding of a wide range of topics.

She hated medical treatments, but knew she needed to endure them to (hopefully) get over the cancer she had. She undertook all the procedures and treatments as directed by her small team of oncology specialists (who were also upset and surprised by Marianne's death).

Some of Marianne's history.

Link to Marianne's English Language Teaching website (modified) (most of the original website, as of May 2024, provided for historical reasons only)

(Written by Neil Huggett, Marianne’s husband of 31¾ years, in May 2024. I have been close to Marianne for about 38 years. I miss her terribly! Her death has changed my life completely. If you would like to email me with any comments or questions about Marianne, please email me here.)