We stood, on that chilly fall evening, in the
sacred place with the people we loved, the aroma of fragrant flowers mixing
with the scent of burning pine. The beautiful, manly body of my eighteen year
old nephew, Clayton, rested under the rounded top of a lovely casket. We wept
and laughed and wept again as we remembered him; recalled his terrible string
of jokes at our family reunion, his escapades in scouting, his artistic gifts
just on the early spring side of brilliant blossoming when that piercing
irretrievable moment came and his motorcycle laid him down on a concrete road.
We burnt our names in the wood of his casket. Little love notes to hover over
him.
I stood next to my mother.
"It's out of order, don't you think?"
She was referring to the fact that she was
burying her grandchild rather than her grandchild burying her. Mom turned to my
nephew Elliott, Clayton's cousin, who is a master builder.
"I want you to make me a plain pine box when
I go. Nothin' fancy...just a plain old pine box. Promise?"
Elliot smiled.
"You know I'm serious."
He smiled again. Then nodded.
So when the dreaded day finally arrived, when my
mother closed her eyes, drew a breath, and leapt into heaven, the nudger of
truth kept poking Elliott as we huddled in our sorrow and made plans for our
matriarch's final bow. He whispered his commitment to fulfill his Gram's
wishes, and we embraced and wept again.
So began the space in time when the earth turned
round and round and round again, but the lights in the shop at Atmosphere
Studios never went dim. Atmosphere is where Elliott and his wife Katie work. Elliott had begun as a carpenter and moved
on to other things in the company. But he knows those tools well. And they know
him. The generosity of the Atmosphere staff, especially the foreman and
carpenters in that shop, will never be forgotten. They moved their tools and
supplies and current projects to other work tables and allowed Elliott to
design and oversee the building of his first, and he swears his last, casket.
With the assistance of his father, (my brother John) and my son John, who is
also a builder, they set to work. It began with the selection of the best wood
they could find. Straight, true, well seasoned and beautifully grained pine of
a certain thickness and width.
They planed and shaved and cut and trimmed.
There are carpentry terms I don't know that would do better justice to their
labors. My husband, and brothers, and sons and nephews and grandsons all pressed
their hands against that wood in some form or another, helping the project to
completion in the short allotted time. Meanwhile we who know less of such
things ordered flowers and wrote tributes in word that fell short of her
magnificence. We swept and cooked and cradled and fed. And late at night, when
the rest of the city had watched the news and fluffed their pillows and turned
out the light, we drove down to Atmosphere Studios and took nourishment to the
boys. There in the silent summer night, when the only other sound was the distant
moan of a train whistle, we listened to the anguished squeal of a sharp steel
blade pushing her way through good soft pine. It echoed against the walls of
the building across the parking lot. We inhaled the smell of earthy fresh
sawdust, swept into pile after pile under the table. They worked in a sort of
sacred silence, no construction worker laughter or crass joking. Just good,
steady labor with intense focus, and a nice selection of well written music in the background.
One morning, when my sisters and I were there, the
foreman opened his door, which was up a small set of stairs just above the main
workspace. He stood with a cup of coffee in his hands, and looked down at us.
"This is a real nice thing you are doing for
your mom." He paused for a minute to clear his throat. "I've never
seen anything like it before. Real nice."
There are no nails in my mother's casket. No
screws either, except for the simple hinges that hold the top that lifts. The edges are tongue and grooved. And the
wood is bound together with biscuits, little oval shaped pieces of flat wood
that fit into holes sawed into the edge of the wooden planks. The little
biscuits, about two inches long, are covered with glue and inserted into the
holes created in two pieces of wood and the result, when dried, is screwless,
almost seamless bonded wood. The names of every one of Gram's kids, grand kids,
great-grand kids, and sons and daughters in law, are written on the biscuits
that hold our mother's casket together. You can do things like that when you
build your own casket.
Day after day they worked, coming home in the wee
hours of the morning weary with the labor and the sorrow. I cannot imagine the
burden Elliott felt, having never before designed nor constructed such an
intimate and yet public thing. His love for his Gram is so deep, and his desire
to give her exactly what she wanted in the most perfect form possible, had to
have weighed heavily on him. I see his face in my memory, his brows pursed and
beautiful eyes focused, his hands on his hips and his head bent to the ground
just slightly as he thought through the process. Measure twice - Cut once, his
Gram always said.
Finally the construction was complete. They sanded and sanded, blowing away the powdery
residue, their faces down close to the wood, as if they were blowing her
kisses. Then they brushed soft satin finish to seal the wood. While they did
this, we daughters met at an old well worn building in Salt Lake City and chose
a simple cotton fabric for the liner on our mother's casket. On the first floor
of that place were a number of imported coffins, all made of lovely woods from
exotic places. The owners were not all that impressed that we would want a pine
box for our mom when we could have one of these elaborate dark wooden ones, all
polished and fancy. It doesn't matter that they did not understand.
There is something therapeutic in moving one's body
with real intent, sweating away the sorrow in a time of loss. There is
something about the creative process that keeps the mind alive and active when
its tendency is to micro focus on the deep loss and freeze frame in that empty
place. Something about falling bone-tired into bed and letting sleep take over.
Blessed with a mortician who is also a neighbor
and friend, we were able to offer our mother a deeply personal and highly
personalized vehicle for her departure. I can see her shaking her heavenly head
and saying, in the end, that all that really mattered is that her spirit got
home safely. And yet I can also see her stopping whatever it is she is doing up there, and biting her lower lip as her angel heart races, calling out to those
around her: "Well will you look at that! Look what my kids did, just for
me. Isn't it just so lovely! Just so lovely!"
We cleared the living room at our mother's house,
which is also our sister Libby's house. Cleared out the couches and bronze
statues, and we placed our mother's blessed body in her pine casket over
against the east wall. We flung open the tall front door and her friends and
family lined all the way down the front stairway out to the street. The light
of a late August sun streamed through the windows, falling on masses of flowers,
releasing with that bit of warmth an aroma of spring. So much love passed
through that door it was almost beyond our ability to contain. It still spills
out each time we open the windows.
That night, when the outer circles of love had
embraced and departed, we of the inner circle gathered around the casket and
Norris Nalder, our friend and mortician, taught our children's children what
the word casket means.
"The word coffin means a box for burial that
is shaped like the body. It uses less wood, and it kind of scares some people.
But the word casket means a treasure box, often holding precious jewels. This
casket is unique. There is not one other like it in the whole world, because it
was built especially for Afton Hansen, by the people who love her. She is the
treasure for which this box was made. And she is the finest kind of treasure
God ever created."
In the end, Elliott led the pall bearers when
that beautiful casket was given to the earth. Elliott, his sister Emily, and their cousins.
There
are twelve of them...Gram's grandchildren. Like her own set of disciples. They
all lifted her earthly weight and allowed it to go where Gram always wanted to
go...how she always wanted to go: The hands of her posterity sending her off.
All her grandchildren but two: Joseph, who is on a mission in the Czech
Republic. And Clayton, who is with Gram.
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