“I might 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, it made me happy

“I might 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 at all. I was happy to hear it. This would be my first experience with a shroud and a carrier.

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 person for the last time. I thought back to my training at Meander in Zwolle. There, an event 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.

Monique Rang

Wikkelgoed was born the moment that Monique herself said goodbye to a loved one using a shroud. This experience with the closeness, the intimacy and softness of the shroud touched her so deeply at that moment that she decided to start making shrouds herself. She did this at home at a small sewing table, driven by the thought that others could experience a funeral the way she had. She started selling them, together with a carrier made of willow branches. A beautiful combination. And it became a success!

The shroud's last embrace

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 shrouding ritual to more and more people.

Farewell, step by step

In my first experience with a shroud, we carefully placed the body, which had been embalmed, on a stretcher with a shroud spread over it. Every day we folded the shroud a little further. On the day of the ceremony, the last step was to cover the head. How special her husband and the children found the way they could say goodbye to their mother, bit by bit…

This was the first time I was allowed to use a shroud, and fortunately there would be many more times to come.