I did this competition because of my mother, I did this in her honor. When I heard about her death I completely fell apart. I was crying uncontrollably and everyone around me at Dancing With The Stars couldn’t have been kinder. They were hugging and holding me and handing me tissues. Marie Osmond was holding me and saying she’d do anything to help me. Wayne Newton couldn’t have been sweeter, absolutely everyone. It’s like being in a giant family. It’s as if I’ve known these people all my life. I went home and cried a whole lot more and then went into a trance like state where I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I kept losing things, I kept not knowing what to do next. James told me not to worry, he was going to handle everything, and he did. We had to handle so much. He figured out flights so we could go to London, he helped Tony get a visa. We got on the airplane and I just kept thinking to myself, “how am I going to do this. How is this going to work? This is insane. We’re going all the way to England, eleven hour flight, I have to sleep. If I can sleep then maybe I can cope with this, maybe I can handle this.”

When I arrived in England I almost didn’t even dare get involved with funeral arrangements and everything. One of my best friends had already flown out to England to be with my sisters and help them organize the funeral and everything that had to happen. My sisters, my friends, my cousins, everybody picked up the phone and called as many people as possible to let them know. The whole thing was done in fast forward so that I would be able to attend my mom’s funeral. Tony, bless him, took me off the airplane straight into a dance studio in London. I felt like I was in a time warp. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. He did everything he could to get a tango into me in two and half days. It is impossible to learn a tango in two and a half days, it’s a twenty year experience to learn how to do a tango. Tony was relentless, he just kept moving my head and moving my body and he just said, “do this, do this, do this, you can do it, I know you can do it” What he was doing, he was making me focus on the dance, rather than focusing on anything else. I realized that I needed to do this. I also realized that I made the commitment to my mother that I was going to do this and if I was going to dance for her and if I was going to come back and manage to do all of this in the one week, that I had to focus on what it was I was doing at the time. I became very teary, I kept losing my focus. Tony was just amazing. He had the patience of a saint and at the same time he was really strict with me and made sure that I focused on what I was doing then.

Friday night I had dinner with my family and we cried and laughed a lot. We just thought about my mom and what she would like. We wrote the service for the funeral and we remembered how wonderful it used to be when we were all together with my mother having Chinese food, so that’s what we did in her honor. Saturday we got up, we went to the funeral and I couldn’t believe how many people showed up. All my mother’s friends, people I haven’t seen, some of them for twenty, thirty years. The service was the most beautiful service I’ve ever experienced in my life. We talked about my mother’s whole life and it was interspersed with people who would get up and speak from their recollection of that moment in her life. It was just beautiful, it was seamless. It was not a mourning experience, it was more a celebration of Mieke’s life.