Yesterday (Saturday) morning princess Juliana, queen Beatrix’s mother, died. She was 94-years-old and many people consider it to be in some ways good, cause she was severely demented. Juliana had already retired from queendom for six years when I was born, but from what I hear she was a very humane queen. Now I’ve never been really royalistic, but still. From what I hear on the news and what memories folks have she seemed to be a very “normal” queen, just like all the other Dutch folks. Only she was quite pacifistic, which wasn’t really good in the 1950s (Cold War), cause the government wasn’t either.
Juliana’ll be buried on March 30th in the New Church in Delft, where all royals are buried. Queen’s day and prince Friso’s marriage however can still go on, cause they’re after the period of familial mourning.
Dad immediately said: “So next Monday we’re going to have another minute of silence.” We had three minutes of silence for the Madrid terrorist attack victims, two for a teacher who was murdered on a school in The Hague and so forth and my Dad thinks we’re having way too many moments of silence due to disasters. He says that when he was in highschool, he’d experienced it once, and that was when Wilhelmina (Juliana’s mother, queen from 1898-1948) died. I to some extent agree with that, but yeah, when a folks were silent for a moment when Wilhelmina dieed in 1963, we should do so for Juliana’s death as well.
Astrid
