United in Death: the linked headstones of Het Oude Kerkhof!

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2 months ago Robin

The Grave with the Hands, or Graf met de handjes in Dutch, is a 19th-century funerary monument in the city of Roermond, in south-east Holland, near the German border, that comprises two almost identical tombstones on either side of a wall separating the Catholic part from the Protestant part of Begraafplaats Nabij de Kapel in ‘t Zand (Cemetery Near the Chapel in the Sand), each with a carved arm and hand that clasps the other across the wall.
These are the graves of Josephina van Aefferden, a Catholic, and Jacobus van Gorkum, a Protestant, who were married in life, but had to be buried in separate sections of the cemetery.

Jacobus Warnerus Constantinus van Gorkum (1809–1880), originally from Amsterdam, was a son of cartographer and engineering officer Jan Egbert van Gorkum.
He became a cavalry colonel in the Dutch army, and militia commissioner of Limburg.
On 3 November 1842, he married Josephina Carolina Petronella Hubertina van Aefferden (1820–1888), a noblewoman from Roermond and a member of the Van Aefferden family of Dutch-Belgian nobility.
The marriage was controversial for many reasons: the colonel was Protestant and his wife Catholic, their families had fought on opposite sides of the recent war, he was 11 years older than she was, and he was a commoner while she was of noble birth!
To avoid provocation, their marriage was conducted in the German town of Pont, near Geldern, just across the border, and the couple raised their five children in Catholicism.
Historically, in the 19th century, the Dutch lived with the so-called Pillarisation, a policy which seperated public establishments by religious and political affiliations.
The Protestant husband died first, on 28 August 1880, and then his wife, on 29 November 1888.
They wanted to be buried alongside each other, in Roermond Kapel cemetery, but the policies of Pillarisation made that impossible.
After she died, their children implemented her last wishes: a double grave, with markers on either side of the wall, connected by two arms reaching across the wall and holding hands. They were likely made in 1888, the year of her death, possibly by the Roermond firm Atelier Cuypers-Stoltzenberg, and the motto Vivit post funera virtus (virtue outlives death), originally from the van Gorkum family coat of arms, was chiseled on both monuments.
Despite the religious divide of the lives and cemeteries, their gravestones clasp hands still today across the border, and two stone hands were added to the back of their gravestones, clasping across the wall that separates them, symbolizing the connection between the spouses across the boundaries of religion, family alliances and even death.