Agnes Kombrink
From mourning dress to glitter dress
A conversation about loss, faith, and recovery
We know each other from Sundays, of course. A quick wave, a chat in passing. But this conversation is different. Deeper. I love to really hear people; to search for their testimony in life. Not to stay on the surface, but to ask further questions. Often, stories emerge that make you think: “I would never have expected that from that person.”
A childhood full of contradictions
“Did you have a happy childhood, Agnes?”
“Great,” she says ironically. “Let’s just say it was never boring at home, but it wasn’t exactly a warm and loving environment either. The relationships were rather… complicated.”
Her biological father suddenly disappeared from the family, driven away by the new man in her mother’s life. Agnes was too young to understand this, but old enough to see that things were going wrong. Her mother was running around exhausted. In the midst of this chaos, something happened that would define Agnes’ childhood forever: the roles were reversed.
“Parentification,” she calls it. “The mother becomes the daughter and the daughter becomes the mother.”
As an 11-year-old girl, Agnes ran the household and took care of her two younger sisters. “I dragged my mother through everything,” she says. That independence was praised by the outside world, but Agnes now knows better: “It was born out of necessity. I became a pleaser, doing everything I could to get a glimmer of attention or approval.”
The loss of innocence
That insecurity marked her adolescence. She was anxious and tried to be invisible, somewhere at the back of the classroom. Fear of failure dominated her life. “A self-fulfilling prophecy,” she says. “I thought in advance that I wouldn’t succeed, and so I didn’t.”
And then came the abuse. By her stepfather. It wasn’t the aggressive kind, but wrapped in a blanket of false love. “Very tempting,” Agnes recalls. “He presented it as education, wrapped up very lovingly. But what happened was, of course, pure violence.” He took possession of a body that she herself had not even discovered yet. She was only thirteen, fourteen years old. At sixteen, she knew: if I can disappear, I’m gone. She left home.
A light in the darkness
The turning point came through her stepsister. She had come to faith and could talk about nothing else but Jesus. Agnes, longing for real love but full of suspicion, was initially only irritated by this. “If you don’t stop with your Jesus, I’ll never babysit again!”
But her stepsister remained loving. “I understand why you’re angry. That’s just the devil stirring his tail for a little while longer. I’m praying for you, because Jesus loves you.” In October 1972, Agnes knelt down and surrendered herself to the Lord, weeping. “Everything became clear,” she says. It was a moment of complete clarity. When I looked at my mother the next day, I knew for sure. You are no longer my mother. I had changed, but she remained that bitter and rejected woman. She survived the war as a broken person and carried those wounds with her for the rest of her life. She never wanted to talk about it.
From nurse to grief counselor
Agnes chose nursing, almost a logical next step for a child who had to take care of others from an early age. She saw a lot of grief in her work, but the great personal loss came later. During a night prayer meeting, Frits Nijenboer sat her next to Teun. “So, my children…,” said the pastor prophetically and meaningfully. It turned out to be the answer to both their prayers. A happy marriage followed, until Parkinson’s disease struck.
A dream had already prepared her. She saw herself walking behind a wheelchair and woke up with the question: “Was that Teun?” Years later, that dream became harsh reality. “God is my coach,” she says of that difficult period. “He is the best director.”
The double mourning
Agnes cared for her husband for twelve years. Twelve years in which she mourned not only his decline, but also what she herself lost: the connection, the conversations, being together. “The love remained and even grew stronger,” she explains. “But accessibility diminished. The contact had become one-sided.”
The powerlessness reached a low point when Teun climbed over the high fence of the nursing home. Agnes received a call from a nurse: “He’s on the other side, we can’t get him back.” The disappointment in the care provided was enormous—after all, as a nurse, she knew exactly how things could have been done better.
Glitter in the darkness
The lockdown made her world even smaller. In the midst of that loneliness, her grandson sent her a drawing: a large heart, lavishly covered with glitter. When she opened the envelope, her entire lap was covered in it. “How sweet of that kid, but how am I ever going to get this off?” she laughs at the memory.
When Martin Koornstra happened to call her “glitter grandma” during an online service, it felt like a liberation. “In that, I saw the love of the Lord. It was a wink from heaven; I was having such a hard time. The glitter dress became the flip side of the mourning dress. Both are allowed to exist.”
Tried and tested faith
“Has your faith been tested?” I ask her.
“I am especially disappointed in how people deal with illness,” she answers honestly. “The awkwardness… People said, ‘Oh, Teun always took care of you, now you can take care of him. In good times and bad, right Agnes?’ Or, ‘You’re a nurse, you can do this.’ But I didn’t need an appeal to my professionalism, I needed comfort for my heart.“
She is clear about healing. There was once a prophecy that they would both be healed. Teun died, but Agnes later understood: he is now completely healed. ”That is human thinking versus God’s thinking.”
Alone, but not abandoned
Now she is alone. Sometimes that is nice, sometimes it feels empty. “I miss sharing. After a sermon or if something happened with the children, I would discuss it in the car on the way home. Then you had let it go before you crossed the threshold.”
Yet she experiences God very closely right now. “He says, ‘First, go make yourself a cup of tea.’ And then I hear, ‘I’ve told you before, but I’ll say it again: I love you.’” She now finds in Him the secure attachment she missed as a child.
A mission born out of pain
Agnes wrote a beautiful book about the journey from grief to recovery. Today, as a grief counselor, she counsels others who are stuck in their trauma or loss. She believes professional help is an absolute necessity, because no one can bear such a heavy burden alone. It is my deep desire to share this honest story. I want to help people make the transition from grief to faithfulness. That is what I call: speaking life.
Her dream for the church? “Real conversations. No meetings, but honesty. The truth sets you free, and only then can there be order and peace. The blanket of grief can be lifted.” She looks at me with a mixture of hope and realism.
Coming home
From the age of eighteen to now: a lot has changed. “Have you become richer?” I ask. “Yes, definitely, but it’s mainly a slow coming home. And I’m still working on that, with ups and downs.”
She no longer accepts everything from everyone. She listens more selectively and dares to say “no,” even though she sometimes still has to ask for the strength to do so. Agnes’ story is about trauma and triumph, about grief and glitter. But above all, it is the story of a God who does not let go. “He had been looking for me for a long time,” she says about that day in 1972. “But yes, I had to give my permission.” She still gives that permission every day. In the silence, with a cup of tea, listening to the voice that says, “I love you.” And that’s what it’s all about in the end.
When Agnes reread her testimony for correction, the tears came almost immediately. She felt deep in her heart how faithful God has remained to her life. That realization fills her with enormous gratitude.
@wimvanputten