One Year After Building My Mom's Coffin

A year ago Saturday was the funeral Mass for my Mother, with her body laying in the coffin my family and I had built for her on the other side of the country. Her death was sudden and unexpected. Although 88, she’d driven on a Saturday afternoon to visit some friends who were under covid lockdown in their retirement community. Arriving home she’d fallen at the base of some steep steps while walking up to her apartment from her car. She had a minor fracture and was going to need a little rehab. After a few days in the hospital, she developed sepsis and was dead the next morning. “88 good years and one bad week,” was how my brother summed it up.

It was true that she had 88 good years, despite being married to a man who couldn’t keep it together and having to single parent two boys while working as a secretary. How could that be? My mother was an incredibly positive person who only digested what she sowed even if it did not always appear to be a happy harvest from the outside.

She wrote my brother and me a goodbye note a few years before she died and stashed it with her important papers. Within it, she instructed me that she’d like the words “Be Not Afraid” carved in her casket.

I used to think she was gullible or naive and, God help me, I exploited it when I was young. But no, she was something else entirely, she was good. She was not afraid because her perception of how the world worked was formed by how she worked, and the evil that is a part of our pilgrimage could cross her path – monstrously sometimes – but it could not corrupt who she was; it had no hospitable medium within her in which to grow.

My mother did not need to whistle when she passed a graveyard and I am eager to see her again.

Remember November

 Remember November Day 1

Death has been very close lately. Last week I returned from clearing out my Mother’s apartment and visiting with my Uncle; maybe for the last time. Friday I attended the funeral of a man who shined brightly at our humble little island parish and showered affection on my family from the moment we arrived. A good friend’s brother went from diagnosis to departed in a few months and I am finishing his coffin today. Death has been very close to many of us lately.

How is it affecting you? Is everyone as anxious as we read? I hope not.

Yesterday was All Saints Day and today is All Souls Day, kicking off November, the Month of Death. This is a gift, a month of remembrance. Remembrance of those who have gone before us and where we are ourselves headed on this pilgrimage.

Good journeys, calm journeys, rich journeys are ones we are well prepared for. Preparation can turn curveballs into homeruns. 11 years of coffin making has focused me on three critical categories under which we can organize all the important things in life. I put them in a specific hierarchy:       

Prayer      

Order

Love

People who I’ve witnessed live this hierarchy seem to steady the Earth’s wobble with their presence and ultimately die well. They are not caught unawares.

Let’s not waste the gift of Remember November.

TGIFreeday — Break the Chain

My pastor asked me to write an insert for our bulletin of my view, as The Coffinmaker, on Washington State’s legalization of “human composting”, set to begin in May, 2020. Here it is:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws 

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas

-T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

When I was 23 years old, working a job in Center City Philadelphia that meant nothing to me, stuffing my face with cheesesteaks every day and Budweiser many nights, I made my buddy Scooter give me his word: If I should die a tragic, early death, he would pluck my body from the coffin at my funeral, drive it to the Jersey shore and dump it into the Atlantic Ocean. “At least I can feed some sharks.” I meant it, I guess, as much as I meant anything at the time.

I worked that job for a year and a half before escaping to Missoula, Montana under the guise of studying to become a wildlife biologist. There, amidst the mountains, rivers, fresh air and silence I began to sober up. I fell in love with the natural world -- biking around town, hiking in the Rattlesnake Mountains, canoeing on the Blackfoot River and camping by and fishing in the little lakes that lie amidst the Bob Marshall and Mission Mountain wildernesses.

My newfound sobriety came with a price.  I looked backward with regret over wasted time and forward with no clear path. I decided to get to work doing something physical and hopped the Greyhound to Seattle and Fisherman’s Terminal where I was hired to work on a purse seiner, fishing primarily for pink salmon in Southeast Alaska. It was a solid job and the scenery was spectacular. But, smooshed though I was into a small space for months on end with four other men, I began to experience a profound aloneness. The little village of Craig on Prince of Wales Island was our home port and when we would tie up there to unload our fish, refuel and get groceries, most of the guys would head to a bar. Instead of joining them I would go for long walks by myself. On one of my initial walks I meandered into the Craig Cemetery. It is located on its own little island, Cemetery Island:

At first it was a place where I could just sit quietly for a bit and soak in the tranquil surroundings. As I repeatedly returned, I began to read the markers and think about the people who were buried there. It dawned on me that I felt a stronger sense of community in the silent stillness of that graveyard than I did amidst my frequently frantic and frustrated fellow fishermen crammed onto a 57 foot boat. On the boat we were all banging against each other and trying to muscle our way through, but in the cemetery the dead gave me guidance, gently proclaiming the wisest words natural life can offer:

“As you are we once were and as we are you one day will be.”

I had never deeply considered my mortality before that. I had grown up in a broken home where the unsteadiness of everyday life cultivated an expectancy of impending catastrophe in me, but, oddly, no concrete recognition of the transitory fact of my own earthly existence. In the Craig cemetery I was wobbled by both gratitude and horror at the realization of this truth.

Having been raised Catholic I would like to tell you that I was quickly steadied by turning to scriptural and dogmatic assurances. But I was raised in the 70s and 80s and the life-giving waters of our faith appeared muddy. Frankly, I felt doomed. But, my eyes were now open and I was desperate for answers. Shallow pastimes no longer held any appeal for me as I stumbled forward with the heightened perceptions of a dead man walking.

After a disorienting year in limbo, I had a profound encounter with God’s merciful love. My fear of death went away and I spent a graced period vividly aware of the His glory shining forth in everyone I met. I was single and living in Seattle and I spent much of my free time wandering the streets, going to Mass and hanging out with the homeless.

I had a trust in Jesus that allowed me to live as a free man. No doubt it was that sense of freedom that made me attractive to someone so out of my league as my wife, Kelly (even though she says if she would have known I was Catholic she never would’ve gone out with me!).  It was that sense of freedom that left us open to the blessing of children, and it was that sense of freedom that led me to become The Coffinmaker.

My many visits to the Craig Cemetery awakened and cultivated a reverence for the human body and an awareness that the way we acted, spoke and yes, even “funeraled”, especially as Catholics, was out of whack. But, after I had started Marian Caskets, when I told friends what I was doing -- trying to build affordable and environmentally friendly coffins so that our faith would have the last word -- I was often met with a response akin to: “the body is just a husk anyway.” This was the exact opposite of what I wanted to convey. I was trying to defend the sacredness of the body! And yet I found myself to be at an unusual loss for words.

10 years later, many holy deaths witnessed first or second hand, many reverent funerals attended, I am at a loss for words no more. Our bodies and our souls are intimately bound together and it is how we choose to live our bodily, material, existence that shapes our immortal soul over the course of our earthly pilgrimage. No action, from what we consume (or don’t), to what we say (or don’t), to who we embrace (or don’t) is taken without leaving some mark on our soul. And, though our bodies and souls will likely be separated for a short time, they will be reunited in the resurrection.

So, our earthly existence is not a fleeting matter of little consequence in a throwaway costume, but rather a glorious opportunity to increasingly manifest Christ, bodily, in the world.

When we find ourselves excited by the idea that it would be a crowning achievement to someday vanish into the food chain of this passing natural world, be it as compost for a tree or chum for sharks, we should take that as an indication that we have lost our way. Get off that path and head instead to Jesus Christ in the Sacrament of Confession, where The Way mercifully waits to lead us to our rightful, eternal, place in the Kingdom of God.