How the Dutch Memorialize Their Lonely Dead

I have always found it heartbreaking when someone dies alone. To be buried without anyone at the cemetery is just as sad.

In Amsterdam, roughly twenty people die alone every year. No one to plan the service, speak, grieve, or attend. The people who are without family and friends are from all walks of life.

A civil servant for the Amsterdam Department of Funerals, named Ger Fritz, held a funeral for these lost and forgotten folks so they departed this life in a respectful way. He chose the music that would be played at what would become known as “lonely funerals.” Since this started several decades ago, Fritz accompanied over 500 people to their final resting place and placed flowers upon their coffin at the service. He also arranged for pallbearers.

Around the time Fritz began the lonely funeral idea in Amsterdam, a city poet for the town of Groningen named Bart FM Droog was being composed for that town’s unclaimed dead.

A few years later, Amsterdam poet Frank Starik decided that the unclaimed dead in Amsterdam also needed poems. After many attempts, the reluctant Fritz agreed.

Starik said, “People are story machines. . . What the Lonely Funeral does is return stories to people who have somehow lost theirs along the way. These poems are read aloud at the service. The funeral is a moment of reckoning and someone needs to put in a good word for you.”

Starik died in 2018, but over the 30 years since he started writing poems for the lost and forgotten, the team of city poets has grown. In an attempt to craft a personal poem the poets gather information from city authorities, speak to neighbors, and do quite a bit of detective work of their own.

Eventually, Ger Fritz would hold a contest for poetry to be read at lonely funerals.

And when the house is finished death arrives.
Those words, read long ago god knows where,
once haunted my thoughts for days,
I had moved, kept painting,
the work completed, death stayed away.

You too moved into a brand-new house.
The floors, people said, you left bare.
The walls remained unstripped.
Only the bedroom was used.
There you withdrew further into yourself.

The house remained unfinished. Even so, the end came.
You were a human being. Lived unimpeded.
Who could have painted your walls?
Who could have given you words, warmth, light?
Thinly veiled shame. This stripped poem.

Unofficial translation by Inga Buyse, with permission of The Lonely Funeral Foundation

In the announcement, Fritz noted the ever-hovering presence of death in the poem which was prepared for GM (1942–2016). He was born in the village of Polistena, Italy, and died in an Amsterdam hospital. His home in Amsterdam was bare and, except for one bedroom, was unused. No contacts could be found for him. The music selected for the funeral service was Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin.

The Lonely Funeral is really as much for the living as for the dead. It assures the living that no one will leave this world unremarked. It speaks to our compassionate heart that no one need be unclaimed at death.

Mr. Starik co-authored a book titled The Lonely Funeral

h/t BBC and Christine Ro at Ploughshares