Corona sadness is not easy to wash away in the sauna

Ed, 83, carefully places his thin, naked body on a bench next to a log cabin. 25 minutes at 90 degrees, he even fell asleep for a while, delicious.

He came to sauna de Heuvelrug in Veenendaal once a week for corona and he is happy that it is possible again. He used to be a dredger at Ballast Nedam, and when in winter 57 the dredger lay frozen off the coast of Finland and the word cold took on a whole new meaning, they had all walked across the ice to a sauna ashore. and he hasn’t wanted to be without it ever since.

He closes his eyes, the vapor blows off him.

How does this first sauna visit feel, the reporter wants to know. Is it perhaps a small, gratifying step towards the old normal?

Ed immediately opens his eyes again. Normal? No! There is nothing normal. The exaggerated measures, the culture of fear, the vaccination passport that reminds him of a Star of David and how he is just healthy and how that whole jab, no, that whole corona can be stolen from him completely.

The only thing he has received from corona is through television, which was permanently on to distract his terminally ill wife. The endless chatter about the virus drove him crazy. As the woman he loved for 62 years deteriorated, press conferences and talk shows followed one another, and it never stopped.

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And now she’s gone. She died last March, not even from corona, but from cancer that kills many more people every year.

He shrugs. It’s not easy to talk about it. He will soon be moving to East Groningen, to his son, but he is not a talker either. There is absolutely no normal to go back to.

Resuming Rituals

The regular guest of Sauna De Heuvelrug, deprived of his relaxation for months, is looking for his rituals again on this first day. A piece of fruit after the infusion, sweating in the Ottoman steam bath, a lap in the pool, staring at the sky from the whirlpool. Only the talk about the weather has been exchanged for a talk about the vaccination campaign.

Although owner Hans Lebbink has considerably reduced the maximum capacity, it almost feels like old times. The sauna has survived financially, despite the fact that Lebbink has continued to pay his staff. Strangely enough, the lockdown also gave peace of mind, he says. Kind of a forced sabbatical. But he’s happy.

Just like his most permanent guest Huib Beekhuis from Leersum, he normally comes here every evening. Due to a car accident, he needs quarterly botox injections in his neck, he benefits from the heat. When De Heuvelrug closed, he bought a big screen and took out a Netflix subscription, he lives alone. “Netflix is ​​fun too,” he says, “but I’d rather come here.”

And although the past year went well with Jeanne and Ton Baltussen from Bemmel, they are glad they are here. Jeanne’s brother barely survived three weeks of IC and the strict visitation arrangements caused a lot of suffering among the dying in the hospice where Jeanne works. But the two, both in their early seventies, are looking forward to what is possible again. The brother is recovering, the weather is getting better.

The hairdresser ate her piggy bank

But on the lounge sofas in the smoking corner, the chagrin and sadness of last year cannot be washed away so easily.

The young roofer is upset with the tension in his group of friends that the crisis caused, everyone reacted so differently. How he had just wanted to put on his mask in the supermarket, how a friend had almost aggressively ripped it off his face.

The hairdresser thinks about her piggy bank that she ate during the two lockdowns. Was it all really necessary, she wants to know. And what should she think of the billions the government threw at it?

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A bald, toned forty-something – “my name in a newspaper?” – don’t want to go back to normal at all. He springs up from the pillows at the first question, clenched fists. Normal? Normally what the world leaders want with their lockdowns, their scare tactics, their cameras over the highway, their cookies on the internet. Why is the Russian Sputnik vaccine not on the market here?

Before corona, he was not so concerned with it at all. He went to work, the gym, a festival. But it took him a week and a half in March last year to see it. That it wasn’t about a virus, but about control. For power. That there is a plan, a script. No, you won’t get it back.

Emotions in the dark

The courtyard is empty. In the hottest sauna, Ed stretched out on the top wooden bench.

It’s hot, so hot, and it’s dark and quiet, and then he tells me anyway. About the visiting restrictions, while his wife loved seeing people so much. About the funeral and the corona measures, about the text his son had selected, that if love had a name, it would be her name, about that dark last week of her life to which his thoughts often turn against his will. dating, about who she was, and he apologizes for his emotions.

An hour later, he is again briskly walking through the courtyard. The reporter can write everything down, but he’d rather not have his last name, it was such a long story all at once. “Good evening,” he calls out. “We must move forward!”

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