A Pillar Falls

by John-Peter Gernaat

On 9 October 2025 we lost one of the pillars of our congregation.

Anne-Marie came to South Africa in 1985 to marry Jacob van Dijk and together they set up home on the West Manse. Anne-Marie had been born Catholic and thus felt a very strong sense-of-belong to a church. She had encountered Anthroposophy in her studies as a nurse and had changed her allegiance from Catholicism to The Christian Community.

She had a vibrant personality and immediately engaged in the life of The Christian Community in Johannesburg, which became her home for forty years. She and Jacob were married in The Christian Community and renewed their wedding vows on the event of their 25th anniversary.

Jacob and Anne-Marie became the distributors for Steiner Books on behalf of Armand Nicaise and began importing wooden toys to sell at the Bryanston Organic Market. They were a central feature, quite literally, with their colourful and beautifully crafted wooden toys. They later added wind chimes so no one could miss where they were installed.

Anne-Marie had a passion for miniatures and imported and sold miniature components for miniature houses at markets all over Johannesburg. She was also a very accomplished crafter and the Advent Fair Craft Stall was a cornucopia of crafted, sources and assembled handcrafted treasures for Advent and Christmas that Anne-Marie put together with Hazel Fornali and small dedicated group of crafters. 

Jacob and Anne-Marie bought a house in Cresta with westward views from its high perch on the hill above Cresta Centre. Here Jacob ran a massage practice and Anne-Marie managed her businesses. They transformed the garden into a riot of colours and the swimming pool into a natural pond for koi and water lilies.

Together, they loved to travel and visited many diverse countries returning with slide shows, photos and stories deeply rooted in the history and culture of the countries they had visited.

Anne-Marie was born as the eldest child to a family that would eventually consist of four daughters and one son. Post-World War II Europe was impoverished and large families found it difficult to make ends meet. As a result, Anne-Marie was shipped off to her grandmother where there were also some aunts still at home. She missed out on a large portion of home life with her siblings. No sooner had she come home and she was sent to boarding school. This made her independent and once she had left home to study as a nurse, her siblings received very little news of her personal life. Anne-Marie became a highly qualified cardiac nurse. During further training she encountered Anthroposophic medicine, and this changed her life completely. It was during one of her training programmes that she met Jacob van Dijk who was training in Rhythmical Massage.

Later in life, Anne-Marie began to suffer from mobility issues and placed her full faith in the medical world to come to her aid. She had several joint replacement operations, and each brought her some relief, but the enhanced mobility in one joint placed additional strain on another joint. Eventually, it appears that the cumulative effect of the interventions became too much and she developed complications for which she spent the last 126 days of her life in the Intensive Care Unit.

Anne-Marie came from the hospital directly to the Wake Room. In the last two decades of her life, she had seen the need for the dead to be cared for in a dignified manner. She had taken it upon herself to become the guardian of this threshold for our congregation. With much resistance from undertakers, she had managed to receive training as a mortician and became the person in our community who prepared the bodies of those who had died for their Wake and Funeral. She researched the use of cooling aids in funeral homes and assisted in determining the requirements for the construction of our Wake Room and equipping our facility with a cooling blanket. It was into this well-prepared space that her body came, as she was departing from physical life.
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Anne-Marie’s wish to enjoy colour to the very end was honoured in her request to have ribbons tied to the handles of her coffin and fresh flowers at the altar. The Memorial Gathering was shared with her brother and two of her sisters. Members of the community shared the deep impact she had had in their lives. Finally, her ashes were placed adjacent to the plant she had planted over the ashes of Jacob and a plant selected from garden marks the place where she is now at rest.

A tableau of Anne-Marie’s life