Grave with the Hands

The cemetery Begraafplaats Nabij de Kapel in 't Zand [nl], colloquially known as "Oude Kerkhof" (the "Old Cemetery"), originally served as a Jewish burial ground. By 1785, in reaction to Emperor Joseph II's order that forbade burials within churches and city walls within the Holy Roman Empire, it was expanded to accommodate Christian residents of Roermond. Architect Pierre Cuypers undertook a redesign of the cemetery in 1858, walling off separate sections for Catholic and Protestant burials, and reserving a place for his own family [nl].

Jacobus Warnerus Constantinus van Gorkum (1809–1880), originally from Amsterdam, was a son of cartographer and engineering officer Jan Egbert van Gorkum [nl]. He became a cavalry colonel in the Dutch army, and militia commissioner of Limburg. The 1839 Treaty of London divided the province of Limburg in two, with the eastern part going to the Netherlands and the western part to Belgium, and van Gorkum was one of the military men from Holland who settled in the Dutch part of Limburg.

On 3 November 1842, van Gorkum married Josephina Carolina Petronella Hubertina van Aefferden (1820–1888), a noblewoman from Roermond and a member of the Van Aefferden [nl] family of Dutch-Belgian nobility. She was the ninth of ten children. Two of Josephina's brothers, Albert Pierre Joseph (1808–1892) and Felix Hendrik Johannes Hubertus (1811–1842), had previously raised a battalion of soldiers at their own expense with the aim of fighting on the Belgian side against the Dutch during the Belgian secession.

The marriage was controversial for many reasons: van Gorkum was Protestant and van Aefferden was 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 from Venlo. The couple raised their five children in Catholicism.

After his death, on 28 August 1880, van Gorkum was buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery. His widow desired to be buried next to him, instead of in the family mausoleum, but as a Catholic, she could not be buried in unconsecrated ground. After she died on 29 November 1888, 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 [nl]. The motto Vivit post funera virtus (Latin, transl. Virtue outlives death), originally from the van Gorkum family coat of arms, was chiseled on both monuments.

The neo-Gothic grave markers, placed on a limestone base, consist of sandstone columns with a gable-shaped top that are higher than the wall separating them. At the top of each of the grave markers is a cross. On his side is the coat of arms of the van Gorkum family and on her side her arms of alliance. There is a wrought-iron fence around the base of each.

The two hands, a man's hand from his monument, clasping a woman's hand from hers, symbolize the connection between the spouses across the boundaries of religion, family alliances and even death.

The grave was listed as Rijksmonument number 520489 on May 27, 2002.

The story of Josephina van Gorkum was dramatized in 2016 in Les Culottées, a French webcomic by Pénélope Bagieu that depicts short biographies of unusual or inspiring women. Les Culottées was published in two printed volumes, and then translated into English and released in a single volume in 2017. In 2020, it was adapted into an animated series that aired on France Télévisions. The animated series also was translated into Portuguese and broadcast on RTP2.