PLYWOOD COFFINS: Having Fun with a Plywood Coffin

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Having Fun with a Plywood Coffin

A plywood coffin shipped from Grand Rapids, Michigan to an address even 50 miles away would cost many times more that the price of making it locally. So please make your own and don't request shipping. But such a coffin offers more than simply saving money. A couple of years ago a family stopped to purchase a coffin at the request of an elderly man who was dying. Immediately after his funeral, the grandkids (and great-grandkids) were given magic markers and asked to draw pictures and write messages. They widow returned to our shop and told me what sense of peace and joy that gave her. On that same day, she ordered her own coffin and not long ago, her family stopped by to tell of a repeat of that "tradition" immediately following her funeral service.

Funerals in the vast majority of cases aren't fun---particularly in instances when someone dies too young or dies violently. I speak to that issue in my latest book: Black and White Bible, Black and Blue Wife: My Story of Finding Hope after Domestic Abuse against women takes many forms, including the often-hidden crime of domestic violence. Check out my book on ruthtucker.com

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Initial Research Findings

We are pleased to find few roadblocks in our plans to be buried inexpensively. Memorial Alternatives (see website) has no objections to working with our own plywood coffins, which would cost less than $100. Their own cheapest coffin is partly cardboard and costs over $200. Rosedale Cemetary (where we have our burial plots) tells me that a plywood "container" is fine as long as it can be easily handled (with handles, as Husband John proposes). All burial containers must go in a vault, and that, as I understand, is Michigan law.

A Funeral At Home: "Dead Wrong"

by Ken Picard (01/31/07). Any mother can appreciate the bond that held Elizabeth Knox to her daughter on the day in October 1995 when 7-year-old Alison Sanders was pronounced brain-dead from the impact of an airbag that deployed during a low-speed car accident. Even after the life-support machines were disconnected and her heart stopped beating, Alison was still Knox’s child, and the mother needed time to let go. Knox had delivered Alison by natural childbirth and stayed home to raise her. She’d always put her daughter in car seats, taught her to wear a bicycle helmet and instructed her on table manners. To be told by the hospital nurses that “some stranger” would take over the care of her daughter’s body was anathema to her. “Not only was I sending my daughter to a place that I had no positive feelings about — the hospital morgue — but it was completely off-limits to me,” Knox recalls. “And yet, people are forced to make that choice constantly. I knew there was another way.” Knox, a fourth-generation Vermonter living in Maryland, decided to handle the funeral herself, though she was utterly ignorant about what it entailed. The hospital staff told her, incorrectly, that Maryland law requires a licensed mortician to transport the body. So Knox found a funeral director to bring her daughter home, where family and friends held a three-day vigil. Afterward, Knox rode with her daughter’s body to the crematory and watched as the body was loaded into the cremation chamber. Several hours later, she came home with Alison’s remains. The experience of caring for her daughter’s body after death had a profound effect on Knox and her family. “People all told me, ‘This was so lovely! This was so much better than my other experiences of being in a funeral home,’” she recalls. “In the face of this terrible, terrible tragedy, that was not lost on them.” Two years later, Knox founded Crossings. The nonprofit educational organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland, teaches others how to care for their dead. Crossings has helped hundreds of families arrange their loved ones’ “after-death care” — the one- to five-day period between the time of death and the burial or cremation. Knox sees it as the final act of love a person can perform for a family member.

Personal Reflections on Funerals

My own ideas about funeral traditions have been forming since my youth when I wrote an essay on the high cost of laying someone to rest and the disgust of looking at a dead body with make-up and hair-styling. I pointed out that some of us don’t even go to the salon and wear make-up alive; why would we want to when dead? Well, that was back in the early 1960s and I might not be so dogmatic about funeral viewings today. But I wish I’d saved the essay. Since my heady high-school days, my disgust for the high price of coffins, however, has stayed with me. My frequent throw-away line for many years has been, Just put my body a Hefty bag and leave it on the curb. But now I am dead serious. Lesser is more when it comes to burial. The example set by Ruth Graham is one I am determined to follow, and in the meantime I will seek to bring others along.

PLYWOOD COFFINS

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Having Fun with a Plywood Coffin

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Initial Research Findings

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A Funeral At Home: "Dead Wrong"

Personal Reflections on Funerals