Rev. Cwirla's Blogosphere

I was surfing the net the other day looking for stuff on eucharistic “remembrance” when I bumped headlong into this book I just had to own:  Remember Me: A Lively Tour of the New American Way of Death by  Lisa Takeuchi Cullen.

According to the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly, this book is a travelogue of American funerals, unearthing such delights as Hawaiian, tango, or Harley-Davidson-themed funerals (I’ve seen with my own eyes a Marilyn Monroe theme package offered at the local burial mill), beer-inspired caskets, eco-friendly funerals, “human diamonds” manufactured from a loved one’s ashes (diamonds are a girl’s best friend, after all), and a Colorado town that celebrates a do-it-yourself cryonics pioneer with its Frozen Dead Guy Days Festival, now a major tourist attraction (in Minnesota they call it “ice fishing”).  Ms. Cullen takes a reporter’s perspective on the burial business, without engaging in much criticism or reflection.  The deepest she goes theologically is to say, “death is a big, huge bummer.”  This looks like a promising read, if you ask me.

Lent is as good a time as any to reflect on this “big, huge bummer” that is the wages of our sin we all have to deal with sooner or later.  I heard a great comment from John Michael Talbot at a concert of his several months ago.  He said, being 52 years old and still playing electric guitar, people were telling him he was in the middle of a midlife crisis.  He replied that if this is the middle of his life, he was going to live a lot longer than he really wanted.  Now there’s the right attitude.  “To live is Christ, to die is gain.”

I’m getting bone weary over the sentimental sewage that has backwashed from weddings into funerals of late.  I used to prefer funerals to weddings 10:1; the ratio has sunk somewhat, but I’ll still take a good burial any day of the week.  At a funeral, you at least have a corpse in a coffin, which is the greatest object lesson in the world bar none.  At a wedding, you just have a groom who looks like a corpse (unless the bride is into Gothic, in which case she looks like the corpse), and a bunch of giddy bridesmaids in bad dresses along with a church load of guests who can’t wait for the drinking to begin.  Some have already gotten a head start at breakfast.

With the Disneyfication of the world and everything from themed weddings to birthday parties, the burial industry is quickly catching up to the wedding crowd for marketing to the self-absorbed. There are powerpoint presentations, videos, testimonials, roasts, and those interminable eulogies from golf and fishing buddies, not to mention the crazy aunt from Arkansas who fancies herself called by the Lord to be a preacher, along with the boom box rendition of Frank Sinatra singing “I Did It My Way” or the theme from "Beaches" sandwiched between readings from Holy Scripture.  Dies illa, dies irae.

I have a particular fondness for bogus symbolism gone awry, as when a couple was having difficulty lighting the “unity candle” at their wedding so the mother of the bride snatched the taper from the groom’s hand and lit it herself.  I’ll let you work out the symbolic meaning of that one.  People seem to be into releasing symbolic stuff at funerals lately - balloons, doves, butterflies.  It’s the funeral equivalent of rice or bird seed at a wedding.  The theology is straight out of the Bhagavad Gita, but that doesn’t seem to deter anyone.

The best story I heard along these lines came from a local mortician who shared this with me as we were riding in the hearse on the way to cemetery for a burial.  A family wanted a dove release at the funeral of the family matriarch.  They first let loose a single white dove with the solemn words, “This dove symbolizes our mother.  May she forever fly free in heaven.”  Upon release, a Cooper’s hawk that had been circling overhead swooped down and nailed mama’s surrogate in mid-heaven, leaving a shower of white feathers to rain gently on the mortified guests.  The other doves were spared a similar fate.  “He’ll lift you up on eagle’s wings,” as the Bible says.

Culturally, we’ve lost touch with death as a way of life.  People tend to die away from home, warehoused in a nursing home or tucked away in the back wing of a hospital.  Much of the reality of death is covered over with fakery and fluff.  The pile of dirt next to the grave is covered with astroturf, and few people ever stick around to see the casket lowered into the ground, let alone get their fingernails dirty with a good fist full of soil.  I remember the funeral of a dear old black lady in our congregation in which the whole family stayed not only to watch the casket lowered into the ground, but to see the dirt and sod put back.  They wanted to make sure everything was done right.  After the workmen had gone, we joined hands, sang a hymn, said a prayer, and went off to dinner.  You felt as though you had buried someone.

Another great loss to burials is the old-fashioned wake, for which the “viewing” at the funeral home is but a weak-eyed second cousin as friends and relatives stand around with their hands in their pockets looking desparate for a drink.  As Robert Farrar Capon aptly observes, “They don’t allow liquor in funeral parlors.”

Much of what goes on at the funeral service these days really belongs at the wake where people sit up all night and tell off-color stories about you while you are laid out dead in the living room.  That’s perfect, as far as I’m concerned.  Tell stories about me at my wake, and raise a glass or two of something good and expensive in my honor.  Then come to the church and hear about the good, dark  death of Jesus that swallows up death forever and His Life that will not let you go and will raise you up on the Last Day.  Pour a good stiff drink at my wake, and then take a belt of 200-proof good news at my funeral.  But don’t get the two drinks confused, and don’t forget to get your hands dirty before you go home.

Capon, who has a better nose than most for the outrage of death, hits the coffin nail squarely on the head with his description of the burial of twins who died at birth in his novel Exit 36:


One way I deal with death is to build coffins.  Caskets, actually.  Caskets are shaped like treasure chests with lids.  Real coffins are those six-sided oblong jobs, like the one in which Pope John Paul II was buried.  Nothing says dead and buried quite like a coffin.  Pope John Paul II had a great coffin.  I want one just like it, except for the Marian “M” next to the cross of Christ.  I loved the big dovetail joints, and you can’t beat cyprus wood for coffins.  I may have to build it myself.  You can't leave important work like this to hired flunkies.

I learned this art from a friend and fellow woodworker who built one for each of his parents.  He’s an EMT guy with the LA city fire department, so he deals with death in the streets every day.  He came to me one day with a bright idea of building a casket for a mutual friend who was dying of cancer.  It sounded like fun.  We dubbed it Opus 3, a fine piece of work in soft maple that ended up in the veteran’s cemetery in Riverside.  Opera 1 and 2 were my friends’ parents’ coffins.  We inscribed “Return to Sender” on the bottom of Opus 3, just for grins.  No one ever looks at the bottom of coffins.

Opus 4 was built for my mother-in-law.  When I tell people that, I usually get weird looks.  It was a labor of love, actually.  I loved my mother-in-law dearly.  She raised my wife to be a normal woman.  That was reason enough to love her.  Actually, Opus 4 was my wife’s idea.  She approached me during Lent with her proposal, which at first surprised me.  Her mother was weakening from a very prolonged illness, and we knew she would soon be with the Lord.

I used the week after Easter to build it out of black walnut.  We usually go away for that week, but woodworking is my relaxation and Easter is a great season for coffin building.  “The fight is o’er, the battle won.”  Karen worked on the inner bedding, lining, and pillow.  We did the handrubbed Danish oil finish together. - three coats with wet sanding in between.  No shortcuts.  Coffin building is a great way to embrace the death of those we love and keep the hands busy at the same time.  I understand that Sam Maloof, the master furniture designer and craftsman, built the coffin for his wife Frieda together with his boys immediately upon her death.  There is nothing like wood and nail to deal with the grief of death.

Opus 4 went together smoothly.  By Thursday, I was fitting the hardware - hinges, lid supports, and latches.  The lid of a casket is split in two and hinged.  I successfully installed the lid support on the head side and was working on the foot.  I had the two halves clamped together so that the supports would hold them equally open on both sides.  Though coffin builders always bury their mistakes, I’m still a perfectionist when it comes to working wood.  I was installing the foot end support when I dropped a screw, which naturally bounced twice on the concrete floor and then skittered sideways out of sight under the air compressor.

As I crawled around on all fours with a magnet searching for the prodigal screw, I must have bumped the saw horse on which the casket was resting because the next thing I knew, there was a crashing blow to the top of my head.  Fortunately, my wife happened to wander into the garage at about the same time to tell me that dinner was almost on the table.  Apparently what happened was that the unsupported part of the lid popped out of its clamp and fell off its hinges.  Fortunately, the top of my head broke its fall, otherwise lid might have been seriously damaged.  Woodworkers have their priorities.

Nothing bleeds like a head wound.  My workshop looked like a scene from CSI.  All you needed was yellow tape and a chalk outline.  There was enough blood evidence to convict me for life.  I put a damp shop cloth to the top of my head, which almost immediately turned crimson red.  I proceeded to sand out a slight scratch where the lid hit the assembly table after bouncing off the top of my head, and refinished the area.  It was barely detectable.  I wrapped another wet towel around my head and had dinner with a nice glass of Cabernet.

My wife insisted that she drive me to the emergency room for stitches.  I didn't think it was that bad, especially after the Cabernet.  We compromised.  She went to choir practice; I drove myself to the after-hours clinic.  My head must have looked pretty impressive because the admitting nurse let me go ahead of three colicky kids and some guy who looked like his heroin fix was wearing off.  I got fifteen stainless steel staples to the crown of my head; otherwise, I was none the worse for the wear.  The attending doctor and nurse loved the coffin lid story; it was more entertaining than the colicky kids or the heroin addict.

I attribute the severity of the injury to the density of black walnut, a truly magnificent domestic hardwood not always appreciated by modern designers, and to the exceedingly fine quality of my miter joints, one of which left a dent on the crown of my head.  Of course, I had to retell the narrative to all the neighbors, since the combination of blood drops and a full-sized casket in the middle of the garage, not to mention a big bandage on my head, tends to raise neighborly suspicions to orange alert.  I'm glad my wife and I don't argue.

I always make it a point to clue in the neighbors when I have a coffin project in the works.  I figure it’s the neighborly thing to do.  There is inevitable morbid curiosity.  As Opus 3 was awaiting its final destination, some of the boys from the neighborhood stopped by to see what was happening in my New Yankee workshop.  One kid took a look and said, "Woah, is that what I think it is?"  "You bet it is, “ I said as I slowly opened up the lid. “ Wanna take it for a test drive?"  His eyes got as big as saucers as he backed nervously out of the garage saying, "No way, dude!"  It’s always good to keep the little guys on edge.

My next door neighbor always comes by to ask what all the sawing is about.  "What are you building in there, an ark?"  he likes to ask, even though we’re in the middle of a drought.  "In a manner of speaking,” I say.  “Actually, it's a coffin," trying to catch a bit of Flood typology along the way.  The neighbor is, of course, oblivious.   "You mean for a joke, right" he clarifies nervously.  "No, actually for a body,” I say with a smile. 

My dear mother-in-law sleeps in Jesus now; Opus 4 got rave reviews from the relatives at the viewing.  There may be a few more in the works.  “We face death all the day long.”  I’ve read that Davey Crocket and others carried their own coffins around wherever they went.  Some monks even slept in theirs.  “If I die before I wake....”

The neighbors tend to keep a very close watch, especially when I do any digging around the backyard.  Needless to say, I’ll be looking forward to Remember Me and Lisa Takeuchi Cullen’s report on America’s way of dealing with death.  Given the spiritual state of our culture today, I’m sure it’s going to be a big, huge bummer.


WM Cwirla
March 2007