“I may have a strange question”

In this blog, Freddy van Eerd, funeral director at Tempus Uitvaartzorg , talks about her experience with a shroud.

Not a strange question, I was happy with it

“I may have a strange question,” the son said during the preliminary interview. His mother would die in the foreseeable future. “We have no interest in a coffin, nor in a basket, but we were thinking about a shroud.” Not a strange question. I was happy with it. This would be my first experience with a shroud and a bier.

A precious ritual

How beautiful it is to wrap a loved one in a soft fabric yourself, in preparation for saying goodbye. It is often experienced as a cherished way to be close to a deceased person for the last time. I thought back to my training at Meander in Zwolle. There, a day was organized for us, aspiring funeral directors, to get acquainted with non-traditional forms of body covering after death. There, I met Monique Rang with her company Wikkelgoed, among others.

Monique Rang

Wikkelgoed was created at the moment that Monique herself said goodbye to a loved one in a shroud. This experience with the closeness, the personal and softness of the shroud touched her so deeply at that moment that she decided to make these shrouds herself. She did this at home at a small sewing table, knowing that others could experience a funeral as she had done. She started selling them, together with a stretcher, made of willow branches. A beautiful whole. And it became a success!

The last embrace of a shroud

At that time she did not yet know that she herself would become ill. She passed away in the spring of 2015. Of course, when she passed away, her children wrapped her in one of her own shrouds, a farewell that made a great impression on them. At the moment, her children are continuing her passion with Wikkelgoed, and they are spreading the intimate experience of the shroud to more and more people.

Farewell, step by step

In my first experience with a shroud, we carefully placed the deceased on the stretcher on which the shroud lay after she had been embalmed. Every day we folded the shroud a little more. On the day of the farewell, the last step was the covering of the head. How her husband and the children found it nice afterwards to say goodbye to their mother in this way, bit by bit…

So this was the first time I was allowed to use the wader, and fortunately there would be many more times to come.