Winkel (How a box becomes a bridge)

March 14,2016

I met a friend a couple of days ago while working at the hospital. Her mother in law had just experienced a significant stoke. A few days later she called me and asked me if I could help them build a casket. You see, Alice had been around me long enough to hear about some of the stories of transforming grief by making a simple pine box(SPB). Her husband loved the idea of making a box for his mom but he needed some guidance and someone to bounce ideas off of. We connected and had coffee, I lent him some tools and off they went.

One of the first transformations they experienced is that their son, Kevin took charge of much of the work. You see we forget that although a few people are inundated with things to do, there are those around who have very little to do. Kevin sprang into action shoveling the deck of snow and setting up the canopy, creating a work space on their deck just outside of their living room.

The next transformation the SPB provided was buy in from the funeral celebrant. You see, the Winkel's didn't belong to a church community. When Eric was thinking about what his mom would have wanted, words like simple, humble, respectful came to mind. He felt that a Church would create the right setting for his mother's service. The problem was that it was the Easter long weekend and although Eric had attended a local church once, the staff didn't know him or the family.  Alice called the pastor up and was told that because they didn't have a connection to the Church he most likely wouldn't be able to perform the service. (ie. you are not part of our village) The pastor then asked to speak with Eric, and Alice said that he couldn't talk right now because he was outside working on the casket. The pastor changed his tune almost immediately and suggested that he come by the house that afternoon and talk further. I don't begrudge the hesitancy of the pastor, I suspect that they screen a lot of requests like this and due to the limited time, they usually turn down requests that don't originate within their congregations. When he heard about the SPB however, it piqued his interests and it created a spontaneous invitation into the village. (for more on this discussion see the post titled "no service by request".

Not only did the casket create the bridge of connection for the pastor but it continued to be the thread through out the service, guiding the narrative of the story. The pastor had suggested that in all his years doing this work, he had never come across a family who build their own casket. He talked about how people are so disconnected from death. So many people now a days chose to not have services, thinking that it will be too difficult to deal with all those messy emotions.

Alice later told me that this was the perspective that her mother shared, up until she heard about the building of the casket. Her mom had thought that she doesn't want her casket to be present at the funeral. It is just too difficult, the grand kids would have a tough time of it. She didn't see the benefit or purpose of having the body present. It seemed like an old custom that has outgrown it's usefulness.

I would suggest the opposite is true from my experience. I have seen what happens when families take charge of the caring of the dead from the beginning (usually with the acceptance of working on the box). Once the families take ownership of the process, it seems natural to include opportunity for themselves and others to make similar connections. I have seen families who would have never thought to have the SPB present at the service change their mind and include it. They also may chose to be present when cremation or burial occurs. I think this idea of "out of sight, out of mind" has infected our beliefs around ritual and mourning. There is the thought if we fast forward over the messy bits, we will somehow skip the difficult aspects of the death experience. 

One of the things I sometimes hear from family is that they don't have a lot of time. Why would they add another task onto the "to do list".  I find it interesting how we try and cram this ritual into a compressed time frame. It is usually because of pragmatic details of how long out of town family are going to be around. I do find however that sometimes once you commit to the building of a SPB, it will be squeezed into the margins of the things to do and over time it can take centre stage and guide the family into the activities that are important. I heard this when the family found themself at the crematorium and were wondering what to do next.

As Alice suggested, "we are white, we don't have rituals around this kind of stuff". When a family chooses to take part in the experience, there are periods of time that are punctuated, a vacuum is created and spontaneous ritual flows in. This is what occurred when friends of theirs gifted them with the sound of drumming, and the power of story telling.

A SPB can create safe space for reflection. Death can be one of the scariest things we will experience. To have the opportunity to engage with our hands and our heads in a meaningful way can move that energy from fear to creativity. It was also interesting to hear feedback from the Winkel's village once they exposed them to this new/old way of doing. There was not one negative comment and others felt that they wanted to include this tradition when they go. My heart is warm when I hear people participating in ritual in such a way that links the reality that someday all of us will get to the end of our time...

NO SERVICE BY REQUEST!!!

How do you know what you don't know?

Or, how do you make a decision based on what you don't want.

I hear the "so and so didn't want to have a service " all the time in my work as a hospital social worker. Sometimes I have the time and space to unpack this complex phrase. Today I would like to take the opportunity to explore this question in more depth and make some suggestions. 

Here are some of my thoughts why people don't want a service:

1.  I am not a suit and I don't want to embrace the Victorian experience of pomp and circumstances.

2.  I don't feel comfortable in a funeral home, where every time you turn around it costs another few hundred dollars. Unfortunately for many, especially those that don't know what their choices are, the death care industry can seem like a huge upsell. When the dust all settles you can't believe the final total of the cost of the funeral. It leaves you with a huge pit in your stomach and you feel guilted into making decisions you later regret.

3.  I am not part of a church, synagogue or temple. In these spiritual communities there is a central figure in whom you have known for years. You trust this person to take charge of your arrangements.

4.  I am a humble person and I don't want to make a big deal of my death. The flip side of this is people might feel insecure and are worried that no one will show up ... or even worse, they feel that someone how they are not worth the bother. I don't deserve ...

5.  I have never been to a funeral I enjoyed. This can mean you haven't attended a lot of funerals in your life, and the only time you "had to go" is when it was when someone in your inner circle has died. At this point it pushes you so beyond your comfort zone you are in  total dissociative haze and you think if you don't have a "gathering" you will protect those closest to you in having to go through that experience.

You see we no longer live in a village where we go to gatherings in our community. The old guy who lives on our street who dies a natural death after a long productive life. You may know him because of how he kept his front yard perfectly landscaped, or he was a master gardener and always shared some potatoes with your family in the fall.  In this type of Gemeinschaft community, relationship and connection are central and a funeral is just one of those rituals you take in.

Here are a few principle's that can guide us in exploring some options:

1.  It is not all about you. The real purpose of a gathering is to assist those around us to come together and create an opportunity of connection, Many people don't realize how much of their loved one's lives they don't have the opportunity to hear about. It is only in their death that people feel they are granted the permission to come together and share some of these stories.

2. You have noticed that I have replaced funeral with the word gathering. This gives us the opportunity to rethink and reframe this experience to customize it to reflect our own personality and circumstances. I would recommend that unless you have lots of experience in these rituals, that you enlist the assistance of a professional funeral celebrant. They understand the power of ritual and recognize all the ingredients that are required to create a successful product. It seems weird to discuss this like you would a wedding cake, however you must realize that it is kind of like planning a wedding in a week in the midst of the most difficult emotional/psychologically stressful period you can imagine.

3. Gatherings can add to your story and can guide the future conversations.  Narrative therapy teaches us the principle that rarely is our story simple enough to be black and white, and to remember that our story is not over once we have taken our last breath.

4. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean it is not healthy. I have suggested it before in this blog, but the words seem to ring true. The more you engage with the difficult process and leave the professionals out of the death care process, the less you require a professional counsellor later to piece together and make sense of your narrative.

Cam's Dad

Today my good friend Cam called me to tell me his dad had died suddenly in Kelowna. His dad was 80 and was out working a landscape job with a friend, when he suddenly just dropped dead. 

Now you have to understand that years ago Cam drove me to my uncle Ernie's garage where we ended up having a spontaneous informal viewing of my grandmother in 2008. It was also Cam that drove me to the medical examiners office to pick up my son in September 2015, and transported him in the back of a pick up truck he borrowed from a friend. He has been one of my main wing-men, not out of conscious choice, but coincidental happenstance. You see Cam is the kind of guy that never says no when a job needs to be done. I just happen to by the type of person who doesn't have good boundaries and asks people to do outrageous things. This is why it was difficult to tell him that I didn't have a box on hand to ship to Kelowna to help him in this pinch. However I knew that Cam had experienced enough of my stories to know how the making a box can shift one's perspective.

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I emailed him a few construction details and suggested he talk with the rest of his family about building a box when they got to Kelowna. It took a few days for them to buy into the concept. Cam directed his sisters to my blog and told them that dad wanted to be put "in a simple pine box". They were told by the funeral home, it would cost $1000 to rent a box and then an additional fee for the creamation container. It just made more sense to build something on their own, especially given the fact that dad had given them "permission" to do so.

Saturday morning, my sister who was most hesitant came to me and said it would be a good idea to build my Dad a simple pine box. My Brother-in-law and I then put the wheels in motion. I contacted Brent, and he sent directions. We purchased materials Saturday afternoon from Home Depot. With people visiting, and funeral planning responsibilities, we did not start building until Sunday evening; cutting pieces to length, dadoing grooves into the laminated pine boards, and dry fitting the boards together for the box.

Monday was a busy day again, with family arriving and other planning duties: putting together an obituary and PowerPoint, meeting with the funeral director, and finalizing plans for the funeral.

Monday evening we put together the lid and put the finishing touches on the box, Dad’s brother, my uncle Dave, is a finish carpenter and was able to quickly put the box and lid together  and with a few pieces of finishing trim on the box. The simple pine box was looking good by Monday evening.

Tuesday morning, we completed the box; drilled holes in the lid and sidewalls for the dowels we would use to pin the lid to the box, and brought the box to the funeral home around 2:00 p.m., to give them time to put Dad’s body in the pine box and prepare for the family viewing in the evening.

The viewing time was very emotional. We brought felt pens to allow family member to write thoughts or messages to Dad onto the box.  I cherish the notes and drawing my wife and daughters put on the casket.

At Wednesday’s funeral, we arranged that the box would not be brought into the service, but remain in a side room, so that guests could go in and add more notes.

Just before the service started, we put the lid on with just the mourners present. Those who wanted to could drive in the wooden dowels: me, my wife, my sisters, Dad’s grandchildren, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, and his friends. It was a very emotional time, but good for us to mourn in this way.

One of my cousins, who I thought would want to put in a dowel, said he just couldn’t do it. He said it just didn’t seem right for him to “put the last nail in the coffin.”

Many people told me they were impressed with the coffin, there were no negative comments at all.

My Dad was cremated the morning after the funeral. Just my sister, her husband, my cousin, and I attended.

I wanted to be there, mainly to take a last look at the coffin and record what people wrote. 

I thought it was a bit like a graveyard service in the crematorium. It was more emotional than I thought it would be, as I pushed the coffin into the furnace.

One of the best compliments I received concerning the simple pine box was from the funeral director, just before we left. He said, “I was impressed by the coffin you built for your Dad; I made sure all our staff came by to take a look at the coffin when they arrived this morning.”

Thank you Brent, for sharing the concept of the simple pine box: the idea, the plans and your guidance. Building Dad’s box gave me time to be with family while we worked together on the box; it gave us a medium to say our final goodbyes to my Dad; and together we were able to give my Dad the pine box he would have wanted.

Nancy's box (can I interest you in the floor model)

Today I got a call from my partner, that Nancy was transferred to hospice house this morning. The family had called her and she was on her way to see Nancy. (Nancy has been like an adopted mother to us.)

The amazing thing was just two weeks ago this was Nancy and I and her son Erik taking chickens to Vanderhoof to get butchered. (Sorry about the quality of the picture).

Nancy was someone who lived life on her terms. It was on this trip that she told us what was going to happen when she died. She made it clear that she didn't want any unnecessary expenses spent on her final arrangements. I had thought we had more time to put a box together. I had envisioned making her a custom box, perfectly shaped for her petite but tough as nails frame. Little did I know that she only lived a few hours at hospice. We now had 24 hours to make a box and pick her body up from hospice. What were we going to do?

Well if you are like most people you would not even consider doing all the arrangements yourself. Making the box, completing all the paperwork, and transportation to the crematorium. You would call the funeral home and they would be there within the hour to transport. You would sign the check and be done with all the "messy details". As you know by now, I am not most people. Nancy was special and had given explicit direction that we were not going to follow the status quo. While I was confident that I could make a box in 24 hours if I had a workshop and didn't have anything else to do. But paperwork needed to be completed and more importantly I wanted to sit vigil with the family. All these thoughts were rushing around my head as I drove to hospice. The problem was already solved by the time I arrived. You see, I had built a box at home and it was sitting at the end of the hall. It was kind of a template I had created a few months before. Most people would not find the humour of Nancy getting the "floor model" but we thought it was exactly what Nancy would have appreciated.

The box was only put together with a handful of screws and so we had to dismantle it, glue and screw it all together. As with many of my box builds, the weather wasn't conducive to having glue set up so we moved the box to the kitchen and did the assemble there.

 After a quick sanding of the box the next morning, we added some hay for bedding and off we went to pick her up from hospice.















I would love to tell the whole story but I think I will create a separate blog in order to tell it properly.