The daughter of 3JS singer Jan Dulles died December 19, only three months old, from complications arising from a tear in her diaphragm. A few days ago, the Volendam band released a song as a tribute to the girl. Dulles told Humberto Tan’s talk show last night about the difficult time, almost 800,000 people watched it. “Caroline’s valleys are deeper than mine, she carried Donna for nine months and then had her breasts all that time. A mother has such a strong bond. And when she’s sad, I’ll go into survival mode. Then I try not to get emotional. Somehow I manage to do that well, just so well that I was worried about it. ”
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They receive help from a befriended psychiatrist, who approached the couple shortly after the funeral. “He said: you shouldn’t do this yourself with the two of you, so we come there every three weeks now,” says Dulles. “The first thing I asked him is why I don’t cry out every day in misery, why I don’t cry.” He describes the condolence, in which his girlfriend Caroline stood with the embalmed Donna in her arms and almost everyone who entered “fell over with misery” at the sight of it. “I thought: I’m wrong here, but I’m looking at a situation that is not mine. Fortunately, I was told by the psychiatrist that it is a normal reaction. You feel so much that you are locked. So much emotion that you no longer have any emotion. ” He is still wearing ‘that protective jacket’ and that is how he can play the song. “As if it’s not about me.”
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Watch an excerpt from the interview with Dulles below.
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When Tan shows some pictures of the family and baby Donna, Dulles turns his head. “You don’t have to take them away, just show everyone how beautiful she was. But we don’t look at pictures of her, that still hurts too much. The more beautiful the picture, the more painful it is, ”says the singer. Son James (2), who does not understand what happened, drags the family through. “He’s so happy, and he makes us happy.”
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Dulles wrote the song Strange emptiness for his daughter, when he entered the studio the day after the funeral. “Jaap (colleague of the 3JS, ed.) Sent me a message that he was going to write to producer Gordon Groothedde. It was not the plan to write a song about this at all. We just wanted to mess around a bit and I didn’t feel like doing anything, but went along anyway. It started to bubble anyway. ” It became, in the words of singer Nielson, a ‘not normally beautiful song that should never have been written’.
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“Music has always been my outlet, only when this had happened I didn’t feel like doing anything anymore. I couldn’t actually listen to music either, but I had to, before the funeral. Tears in heaven I thought of Eric Clapton – who has also experienced something like this – a hackneyed song, but now I discovered the load. Or So quiet from BLØF. That’s how I found out again how important music is, ”says Dulles, who performs the song live after the conversation. That’s easier for him than talking about it. “It’s not a relief to talk about it, it just brings me back to what happened, while I prefer to hide that emotion a bit.”
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Dulles’ account makes a deep impression on viewers, who say on Twitter that they are moved.
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