Coffins Were This Idea's First Tinder (Addendum to Part 2 of 4)

An idea for combining writing with woodworking—and the experiences that led to it

When I wrote about writing’s role on my evolving canvas last week, I forgot to include something I’d promised in the conclusion of the previous post: an idea for combining writing with woodworking. Allow me to fulfill that promise in this addendum.

It’s funny how experiences can pile up and rub together—tinder for ideas that smolder within, waiting for a spark that sets them ablaze. Here’s a clue to this idea, a box. But what is the box for?

Basic box I made at a workshop in the spring of 2022.

Let’s begin with the tinder.

The first tinder was meeting Jaime Robinson Fawcett, then Executive Director of the Poe Museum, and learning about a quirky craft of hers that predated her arrival there: coffin-making. What an eerily fitting hobby for someone focused on sharing the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe. In much the way that studying literature by women or learning about female scientists had when I was growing up, this knowledge expanded my imagination of what women did. Without my being aware of it, it also formed a tinder nest of dry pine needles inside me.

At that time, I served on our congregation’s lay pastoral care team. I met with congregants struggling with grief, aging, illness, dying, or difficult dynamics with family or colleagues. My role was not as friend, therapist, or problem-solver, but as a calm, compassionate, non-judgmental listener. As a person inclined to problem-solve, this took some practice. Thankfully, our co-leaders were patient teachers.

Being called on to apply similar listening to writing provided the next scraps of tinder.

When a friend’s brother died, she called to see if I could suggest a poem for his memorial service. Friends sometimes ask me to suggest poems for occasions, so this wasn’t unusual. Then it was. Nan explained that her brother Donnie had been gay and closeted, and that her siblings mostly thought of his life as tragic and lonely. But she knew he had once loved a man who loved him back. Did I know of a poem she could read at his gravesite that would tell them that for her? I did not.

Then, with warnings that I hadn’t done this before and it might not work, I offered to try writing one.

What emerged was my first remembrance poem. It integrated active listening with what I’d learned creating documentary poems, many of which are written in persona. Informed by a series of conversations with Nan, it braids real details she recalled about Donnie with imagined ones.

The first three stanzas of “Imagine” reflect some of those real details:

First three stanzas of “Imagine.”

The last three stanzas focus on imagined details:

Last three stanzas of “Imagine.”

After drafting the poem in second person, I switched to first person so that when Nan read it to her siblings, she could embody the “I.” The creative process, from her initial question to the finished poem, involved a level of shared vulnerability I didn’t anticipate. There were times she choked up while telling me about him, and there were times I cried as I wrote from the places her stories took me. Picture crumpled paper and slivers of bark falling into that tinder nest.

In one of the stanzas between, the poem references an exhibit at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2012 called Living in Limbo: Lesbians in the Deep South. Donnie met Nan and her wife Sam there to see a portrait of them holding hands, standing beside each other as they face the camera, Nan’s gaze resolute, a gentle smile on Sam’s lips. This photography collection by Carolyn Sherer attracted over 17,000 visitors in six weeks and is now one of the museum’s traveling exhibits.

Last year, a queer community space in Birmingham installed Nan and Sam’s portrait with “Imagine” beside it (though not with the line breaks or spacing intended). I hope someone like Donnie can draw solace and strength from their portrait and this remembrance. You can read the whole poem (with line breaks and spacing intact) here.

As I continued to grow as a lay pastoral care associate, I began coordinating the training segments of our meetings. This prompted me to examine my own understanding gaps. Most noticeably (in the context of lay pastoral care), I hadn’t yet experienced the death of someone close to me (though I have since). Worried that this limited my effectiveness in serving congregants grappling with such deaths, I attended an end-of-life doula workshop. That’s where more tinder found me.

Among the ways that end-of-life doulas might support someone who’s dying is by designing personalized rituals, including remembrance rituals. The conversations and shared vulnerability that inform a remembrance poem could be one such ritual, the poem itself an artifact from it. Yet, for folks uncomfortable with poetry, I wondered what other vessels, beyond photo books, might hold a person’s memories. That unanswered question drifted like a dry leaf onto the rest of the tinder.

When the pandemic hit the next year, I embarked on a woodworking journey by building shed steps and a dining table with the help of talented friends (here’s the post about that if you missed it). Now sawdust speckled the pile of pine needles, bark, leaves, and paper.

Sparks for that accumulated tinder arrived in quick succession in the fall of 2021. While I procrastinated about sealing and finishing the table, I encountered Ruchi Gupta’s word-infused ceramics at the 43^rd Street Festival of the Arts. Standing at her booth in the September heat, I held the fusion of words and vessel I’d pictured.

A few weeks later, while researching green burials and home funerals as a potential training topic for lay pastoral care, I ran across Chuck Lakin’s web site, Last Things. Along with being a master woodworker, retired reference librarian, and funeral alternatives advocate, Chuck makes coffins that can be used as bookcases while they (and their future occupant) are above ground. Trust a librarian-woodworker to come up with that!

I remembered Jaime and her coffins. Could I build bookcase coffins, perhaps using woodburning or another technique to inscribe lines from a remembrance poem on the coffin’s walls? The tinder lit.

Then I thought about all the people I knew, including me, who plan to be cremated. They have no use for a coffin. What could I offer them? In a class the following spring, I stepped toward an answer.

Although I used tools at Woodcraft for which I have neither the money nor the space to acquire, I made my first basic box (the clue pictured near the beginning of this post), a foundation for the idea sparked from that tinder: simple, personalized wooden urns featuring lines from remembrance poems (or from the kinds of conversations that inform them).

There are details to figure out if I pursue this idea, such as what size boxes to make. When I ponder that, I hear the voice of a friend who died suddenly two years ago. As we sat on stools around the kitchen counter, I read “If I Die First” which opens with these lines (hold phone horizontal to view lines in couplets):

After the burning’s done, pour
what’s left in a Mason jar—nothing new,

but one washed clean of applesauce or pickled beets,
the clear kind that kids keep fireflies inside.

When I finished, she was smiling and said it was one of my best poems so far. Then she asked matter-of-factly, “Have you ever seen cremains? You’d need a very big Mason jar.” Indeed. She was right (as she often was).

Once I settle on the size (or sizes) and designs, perhaps making urns will be part of my next chapter. The fire that rose from that tinder still glows, its light soft and steady.

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