10/26/2026
In 2002, Bart FM Droog, the city poet of Groningen in the northern Netherlands, decided that no one in his city should die without being acknowledged. Some people die with nobody left to mourn them, no family, no friends and no one to stand at the graveside, and Droog's answer was to send a poet.
Later that year, the poet and visual artist Frank Starik brought the idea to Amsterdam, where he set up a formal foundation. Its rotating group of poets is known, with some dark humor, as the Poule des Doods, or Pool of Death. The project became known as the Lonely Funeral, or Eenzame Uitvaart in Dutch.
Before each funeral, the poet on duty works closely with the municipal officers who investigate the person's life. They gather whatever details survive, a few remaining possessions, medical notes or a landlord's recollections, and from those sparse fragments the poet writes a poem meant to honor that one particular person.
At the service, the poet acts as both eulogist and mourner, standing beside the coffin at the graveside or crematorium and reading the poem aloud. Often the poet and a few officials are the only people there to hear it.
The tradition has since spread to cities across the Netherlands and Belgium, so that even people who die isolated or unidentified leave the world with a goodbye written just for them.
