By Kelly Cammack
“You need to change your phone message,” Donna said on the other end of the line.“Why?” I asked, laughing, “because you can hear the boys building the coffin?”
“What?” she replied, “No, because you sound so sad, and what do you mean they are building a coffin?”
Of course I sound sad, I thought. Jeff was gone. My husband, partner in life and laughter, father of our sons, grandfather of babies not yet born, the man that took care of all the systems, the creative force in the family, and my great love, gone. Of course I was sad. Through my sadness, though, I found the humor in the absurd. And yes, my sons were building a coffin for their dad on my back patio. And yes, it made me happy.
Four long days before the coffin-building started, I made the painful calls to our sons, in-laws, and all of our combined friends and co-workers. If this was a cliff, the edge being the day he died, the following days were an endless tumble to the rock bottom of reality. The days of interruptions. Flowers arriving on the doorstep in fragile glass vases, fruit baskets arriving by courier, casseroles being delivered by the well meaning, brownies being baked, friends at the door, ferocious hugs, and the inevitable tears. All the while my watchful eye aimed at my son Chris, the youngest, who was in his dad’s life for a short twenty-two years. Not long enough to earn a father’s praise for the accomplishments that were to follow. Not long enough to accept his wisdom, to be told he would be alright, that he was on the path to a good life. Not long enough.
Josh, the older brother at thirty-three, had nothing to prove to his dad, he already finished school, become a teacher, a farmer, built a home from scratch. He used the important skills shared by his father and discarded the ones that didn’t speak to his life. Those really important conversations a son and father would have were done.
On day two post-Jeff, my sons accompanied me to the funeral home. We met with the director, a quintessential Ichabod Crane of a man, with a small ghoulish head, shiny forehead, and forlorn sunken eyes that spoke of being the witness to so much sadness. I blindly made the decisions one makes. Cremation vs. burial, cremation please. How many death certificates would I need? He suggested ten. Ten, I said. Then came the time to pick the coffin. We were brought into the room that housed everything from the ornate French Provincial with satin and velvet to the economical pine box. Light classical music was coming out of hidden speakers along the wall, nothing too somber and nothing too jubilant. We let the director extol the virtues of the higher-end coffins while we squirmed in our seats.
I explained that my husband had been very conservative with money, hoping he would understand that to mean cheap without me having to voice it.
“We won’t be getting a fancy coffin for him. He wasn’t a fancy guy,” I said. “Less is more.” All the time thinking, if we could take him to the top of a mountain and build a funeral pyre that would suit the man who believed heaven was here on Earth and the top of a mountain was as close as you could get.
“What do you have that is a little less expensive?” I asked, carefully choosing my words. He showed us the proverbial pine box in a modest Shaker design. Even it cost more than three thousand dollars.
“No, I am sorry that is still too much” I said, “and a waste of a good reproduction piece of furniture.”
If you could call a coffin a piece of furniture. After all, it was going to be torched in the end, wasn’t it? This might be a good place in this story to tell you that we owned an antique and fine-wood furniture store. Finally, Ichabod told us of the cheapest box in his possession. The bare bones (no pun intended) coffin made out of press board a.k.a. particle board in the furniture biz. I don’t think he was prepared for what happened next. We, all three of us, burst out in simultaneous laughter. Followed by, ha, should we? Could We? Followed by, oh my God, that would be hilarious. He tried to follow the conversation but how could he? He didn’t know that my husband owned a furniture store and for years had proudly displayed a sign on the window with a huge red X overlaying the words Particle Board. It would have been the ultimate practical joke, and I didn’t think I was beyond that. In the end, our laughter subsided, and the director looked at my sons and aptly picked that moment to ask if either of them had ever done any carpenter work. My son Josh had built his own house and proudly proclaimed that he was a builder.
“Well would you want to build your dad’s coffin?” he asked.
I was surprised by this well-timed empathy because that was the exact right thing to say.
“I will give you the specs and when you have it done, deliver it here and we will take care of the rest,” he offered. And so the plan was hatched.
It took the boys a short minute to decide that Douglas Fir was the wood they would use.
“That’s Dad’s favorite tree,” they both agreed.
It’s a dense, heavy wood and burns beautifully. This is this is where I should also add that their dad had been a forester for twenty years before opening our store.
They ordered up enough one inch by ten-inch planks from Home Depot to build a very, no, the most substantial coffin ever built. I was sure by watching the struggle of them lifting it into our delivery van that it weighed close to five-hundred pounds. The funeral home staff would not have thanked them for building a coffin to last to the next millennium.
The construction started with Josh taking the lead and Chris following his direction. The older brother had now become the teacher, the coach, the father figure. There was much laughter, cursing, and crying. Neighbors and friends stopped by to watch the coffin-building project advance to completion. They shared stories of Jeff, their connection to him, and became part of this story by honoring the man that we all were missing. Every recount was filled with the humour and wit that was Jeff. I am certain that they were thinking, as I was, he should have been here. He would have been the center of the party, but I guess in his own way he was. I am also sure that when eventually lit, the fir burnt long, with sparks and embers as high as a mountain, befitting of the man it housed. He was a man of great insight, morals, and intelligence. A man who loved life the way he did shouldn’t go up in a flash, he should take the long route home in a slow burning bed of coals. In a coffin of his liking.