Children make coffin for dying teacher | Metro.co.uk — Well, this one has me baffled. Is it sick? Or charming and sentimental? I prefer the latter.
A Dutch primary school teacher who is dying of cancer is overseeing one last project among her beloved pupils – they are making a coffin for her.
Eri van den Biggelaar, 40, has just a few weeks left to live after being diagnosed last year with an aggressive form of cervical cancer. Always popular at school, she asked the arts and crafts teacher to build a casket for her.
‘Why don’t you let the children make it?’ replied her colleague and woodwork teacher Erik van Dijk.
Now the youngsters, who normally plane wood for baskets and placemats, are putting the finishing touches to what will be the final resting place for Miss Biggelaar. The children have sawed more than one hundred narrow little boards and glued them together, and only the lid needs to be done now.
The coffin is standing in the middle of one of the classrooms. Some of the children play with it, climbing into it and pretending to be U-boat captains.
found by Tallwookie
“Some of the children play with it, climbing into it and pretending to be U-boat captains.”
hahaha that just did it for me
definitely a unique story…i don’t know if i could bear watching someone (especially sweet little kids) assembling my coffin. although it would be quite a gift, would save your family thousands of dollars and the hassle of dealing with our profiteering death industry.
good for her though, not avoiding or minimizing reality, but facing it with some creativity.
You know – we all have to die, approaching it positively shows she’s somehow got the most out of her life, including it’s end. Perhaps her kids in this class will appreciate their own mortality a little more because of this.
My guess is that she thought it would be educational for them. My guess is she is right. Bright woman.
Death is part of life. This is a priceless gift from the students to the teacher. We should all have such devoted followers when our days come to an end.
I agree with you, John. There’s nothing sinister about death, we as a society need to learn to cope with it in a more natural way, and IMHO this is happening here. Great story, great people.
The Metro is a crappy free newspaper distributed on the bus in the UK and Ireland. Don’t think too hard about it.
KF The Telegraph is also reporting this story.
This is a tragedy. Here is a VERY smart person dying while millions of complete idiots remain breathing.
Loss to the human race.
Cursor_
I too think this charming and sentimental. It also, IMO, teaches these children about the reality of death, its inevitability, and rational acceptance of those facts. Not to mention the brave and realistic approach demonstrated by Biggelaar.
It seems she is a brave woman, and I suspect she will be appreciated long after she’s gone.
This is the sort of news story that actually gives me some tiny shred of hope for humanity. Or, at least some small part of us.
The last casket I helped buy was almost $8K and came from an automobile like assembly line. In the slumber room the funeral director bragged about it being 20 gauge steel instead of 24. Like that really made a difference. I walked out and told my sister to just pick what she wanted.
We fear death only as a built in survival mechanism. It’s when man rises above our primeval instincts that we humanize ourselves. What better lesson to teach these children than this?
I seriously hope that these kids are better at woodworking than I was in middle school. Last thing you want at your own funeral is to have the casket pop open, sending you tumbling.
I know I sound insensitive during a dreary topic, but that’s honestly the first thing that popped into my head. Seriously, I hope they’re better at it than I!
It sure beats sanding and repainting the school chairs.
I was living with a fairly poor rural family when their grandmother died.
The guys of the family hand-built a coffin for her in the couple of days between her death and the funeral.
It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.
It was clear to me that the process of building the coffin was part of the grieving process.
For a lot of people –not just guys — being busy and working together on a project is very healing.
Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, anyone?
Imagine the splinters….
Along with most posters, I agree this is a great idea.