Vivit post funera virtus

"For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom 8:38-39)

In 1842, the 33-year-old colonel of the Dutch cavalry Jacobus Warnerus Constantinus van Gorkum (1809-1880) married a 22-year-old woman of noble rank, Jonkvrouwe Josephina Carolina Petronella Hubertina van Aefferden (1820-1888). The marriage was highly controversial, not primarily because of their difference in rank, but chiefly because of the difference in their religion - van Gorkum was a Protestant, and van Aefferden was a Catholic. The two communities lived in great mutual hostility. The two of them fell in love, but their wish to marry met with great resistance because of differences in faith, status, wealth, political allegiance and origin. Despite these objections, they married in 1842 and enjoyed a happy marriage for almost thirty-eight years. The marriage was blessed with three children: two sons and a daughter. Josephina remained a Catholic, Jacobus remained a Protestant, and the couple somehow managed to defy the intense hostility from both sides, until death parted them - for a time.

Despite the prevailing culture of segregation at the time and the social pressure that culture encouraged, the two of them remained together for decades after their wedding, parting only when van Gorkum died in 1880. He was buried in the Begraafplaats Nabij de Kapel cemetery in the Dutch town of Roermond. The site of the burial seemed oddly chosen: not within one of the neatly ordered rows, but outside the railing, against a wall that stood next to the Catholic cemetery - the whole of Roermond must have expressed its surprise. The gravestone is crowned with a military coat of arms, showing a plumed helmet, and below it, in the arms, a skull and crossbones.

And then, eight years later, it became clear that the reason for the unusual position of his grave was the grave of his wife, who was laid to rest on the other side of the wall, in the Roman Catholic cemetery.

That segregation was, at the time, taken very seriously - every community had its own schools, media and cemeteries. The Begraafplaats cemetery was no different in this respect. Van Gorkum had to be buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery, like every other Protestant of that period. When van Aefferden died eight years later, she could not be buried with her late husband. Even in death, Catholics were expected to remain with "their own", and Protestants with "their own". While she was alive, however, she had clearly stated her wishes - she did not want to be buried in the family vault, but wanted to be as close as possible to her husband. The solution to this problem can be seen above the graves.  Photographs taken at her burial site show two gravestones separated by a wall, above which two hands reach out and join across that wall. Buried on the other side of the wall is her husband - Colonel van Gorkum.

This was an elegant way around an absurd system - a solution of the kind we generally hear of only in epics and fairy tales about a timeless bond between two people. What gave rise to this symbol of defiance against the norms of the time was a sincere love that recognised no boundaries of Dutch "pillarisation" - a system of vertical social segregation (a type of segregation in which society does not consider one group more important than another, but requires the segregation of different groups according to predetermined criteria), based on religious and political convictions, which aimed to divide social institutions and organisations (schools, media, political parties…) along these lines, on the assumption that one "pillar" of this "equal but separate" society would have little or no interaction with another pillar of the same society. It was only after the end of the Second World War, more than a hundred years after the system of pillarisation was first imposed on their society, that this division was overcome in the Netherlands.

Such experiences are constantly repeated throughout human history. For example, the inhabitants of East Berlin grew accustomed to living " ad Absurdia", an utterly absurd everyday life (Cyril Buffet). Thus the mother of a certain Maxime Leo, a trainee journalist who had chosen the East, discovered, with growing bitterness, that her job consisted of copying out the proclamations of the "apparatchiks" with no possibility of changing a word or even correcting a spelling mistake. Some subjects, and even many expressions, were forbidden (for example, "washing machine"). In short, everything that came from the West. And yet those same Berliners "lived by day in the East, and by night in the West", listening to the radio or watching broadcasts from West Berlin, which was of course forbidden and subject to the harshest penalties.

So too the two spouses suffered various attacks throughout their life together: several times people tried to set fire to their home, they were constantly insulted and mocked in the street, their dogs were hanged, and various bans were imposed on them in the town's shops. Yet none of this managed to destroy their love. Before her death she wrote a letter to the parish priest in Roermond, expressing her wish to be buried as close as possible to her husband. Her last wish was fulfilled, thanks to the priest's help. The priest, moved by compassion, deeply touched and full of admiration for the strong and great love of the two spouses, which had so powerfully withstood every persecution, had her buried, at the time of the funeral, close to the wall dividing the two cemeteries. It seems he had previously arranged with the Protestant minister to do the same for her husband. In the upper part of the gravestone we see her husband's coat of arms, and below it her family's coat of arms: at the top, a crown with a six-pointed star in the centre, apparently above an umbrella shape. Symbolically, this could represent Mary, under whose protection Josephina's family placed itself. The two coats of arms, united on her grave, symbolise their unity, despite the immense differences between the two families.

In the following months the priest had two domed structures built, at his own expense, above the gravestones; they still rise above the wall today. Within them, two marble hands reach out, clasping and holding one another firmly. In doing so, the sculptor took care to show the woman's hand emerging from a buttoned cuff at the end of a sleeve, and the colonel's hand from a plain, straight one. As the couple were in life, so they remain united in death, despite every social  and religious effort to keep them apart. It is a monument to marital love and faithfulness. The two gravestones, both close to the wall that divides them, these two hands above the dividing wall, will remain firmly joined and united for eternity.

In 2015 the "grave with the hands" was restored, so that the inscriptions and sculpted ornaments are once again clearly recognisable. Both sides of the double grave are adorned with the same Latin inscription: "Vivit post funera virtus" - virtue lives on after death. The "Graf met de handjes" is a powerful symbol of a love that not only rose above walls, but also bears witness to a love that is stronger even than death.