Gea Eding has been a volunteer at the funeral association in Valthermond for years. A place where farewell is central and that is precisely where something started to go wrong. “You want to say goodbye at your own pace, not in a hurry and perhaps in the middle of the night,” Eding explains. “You often do this by appointment, at fixed times and you have the feeling that you have to leave again after a while.”
That didn’t always feel appropriate to her. “Sometimes you just want to sit down for a while or come back later.” That thought became the start of something new, a 24-hour funeral home in Valthermond.
The Funeral Association Gildevereniging Valthermond already had an auditorium, but there was simply no room for a 24-hour funeral room. We looked further, ideas came and went, until Eding entered a small house in Bakkeveen. “A kind of tiny house or garden shed feeling.”
“Then we thought, this could be possible.” The choice fell on a separate unit next to the building. Costs: 45,000 euros. “But we were able to get it subsidized through all kinds of funds from the wind turbines, without that help it would never have been possible.”
What started as one space was eventually split up. The coffin is in one room, in the other you can sit. “In many spaces you stand for a while, and then you leave again,” says Eding. “You can sit here without feeling uncomfortable.”
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