Annette Herfkens was on holiday with her fiance when their plane went down, killing everyone but her. Three decades later, she reflects on how the trauma changed her
nnette Herfkens and her fiance, Willem van der Pas, had been together for 13 years when he booked them on to a flight from Ho Chi Minh City to the Vietnamese coast. After six months of working in different countries, it was meant to be a romantic break. Van der Pas was a banker, Herfkens a trader. The plane was tiny, just 25 passengers and six crew. Being claustrophobic, Herfkens initially refused to board.
was of being “surrounded by leaves”. Green and golden, sequinned with dew, sunlit through her eyelashes. Time and again, Herfkens turned her focus on them, their light, their colours, movements, away from the man beside her, now dead, away from the white worm crawling out of his eyeball and the leeches on her own skin., as well as the film or TV series she is writing.
In some ways, this mindfulness was foisted upon her by her body. When, after a couple of days, the man who had been beside her died, Herfkens realised she was alone in the jungle. “And I had never been so entirely alone. I panicked.” Her collapsed lung made it hard to get the air in. She had to breathe intentionally. “And by breathing, I got back into the moment, back into the now.”
Herfkens thinks that she probably has attention deficit disorder and that if she were a child now “they definitely would have diagnosed me”. Growing up, she was reckless and forgetful, routinely mislaying her hockey stick. She learned to be “inventive and charming” and thinks that if she had “had Ritalin as a kid, I would never have developed the qualities I had for surviving the jungle”.
When her son was diagnosed with autism at two, she found it helpful to apply what she had learned in the jungle to her life in New York. Herfkens felt the news as “a cold hand around my heart”, having read about some people’s experiences of autism – “the aggression … that you’ll never be able to connect to your child”.
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