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Illustration by Drew Shannon
In the corner of my friend’s workshop sat a pile of weathered Western Red Cedar fence boards, rescued from a neighbour’s yard. Ross and I liked to work together building small tables and bookshelves out of repurposed wood. We’d sell these items and send the money to outreach projects in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. At some point, we planned to use those cedar boards to build and sell garden planters. But when my wife of 55 years died, I had a new and different idea.
What followed all too quickly after Sandy’s death was a reluctant trip to the funeral home. My daughter Joanne and I were greeted with respect at the door, followed by a somewhat ritualized conversation of three distinct parts. The first was to outline the funeral home offerings, such as the use of the chapel and cars. The second part was tedious – filling out legal documents that left me fumbling for places and dates. This part, albeit necessary, felt incongruous alongside raw feelings of grief. The third part moved on to choosing a casket.
Sandy, in moments of serious conversation with me, made it clear that when her time came she wanted the simplest and least expensive of funerals. Practical she was. My eyes were drawn to a plywood box, somewhat hidden from view, in a corner of the room. The quoted price was, I thought, rather high for a plywood box.
“Why not,” I thought, “build a box for my partner’s body made from those old cedar boards?”
I voiced this possibility to the funeral director and while he had a somewhat ambiguous response to such an unlikely proposal, he agreed that such a box, given adherence to strict dimensions, would be acceptable. I wasted no time in floating the proposal to Ross. “Let’s do it,” he said.
My two grandchildren, Adam, 15, and Ella, 20, were within earshot of the conversation. They spoke up, in unison, stating in no uncertain terms that they would want to help build the box.
I felt reluctant at first. Neither grandchild had much experience with handling tools nor did they know much about the art of carpentry; however, that was not the point. A desire to honour their grandmother through the building of the box was the point.
The following day the three of us trekked over to Ross’s neatly arranged workshop. Our first task was to pick through the pile of boards. Not all of the six-foot-long, rough cedar was even close to being useable. Ross, more meticulous than I, drew a detailed plan for the building of the box that needed to measure 76-inches in length and be 18-inches wide and 23-inches deep. His drawings called for a plain plywood lid: ”Good surface for writing messages,” he suggested.
Sanding these bristly boards would be the second and major task. Following a brief orientation on the do’s and don’ts of a belt sander, Adam and Ella took to the work. Belt sanders require a slow, rhythmic and thoughtful movement. In my 84 years of living, I never could have imagined what I was now observing. Standing at a distance, I saw their faces take on a look of delight when these old boards were transformed and the Red Cedar grain became vivid and beautiful.
The three of us made several trips to the workshop. Ross became a kind of carpenter mentor to my grandkids while I was quietly reflective watching them. I couldn’t help but see their sanding as a symbol, a kind of transformative, transitional event. I could feel my heart being warmed and my spirit enlivened. I recognized in their careful and compassionate work a transitioning of one generation to the next.
In the end, it was a fine-looking cedar casket. When it was finished, we wrapped it in a blue tarp and maneuvered it into the trunk of the car. We had a chuckle when we saw how three feet of the box wouldn’t make it into the trunk. So, we tightened a few straps to hold it in place and drove slowly to the funeral home.
“You better put your rear flashers on Grandad,” Adam cautioned.
At the funeral home, we carefully removed the tarp and the three of us carried the box inside. We were met by a somewhat astonished funeral director. “It is so beautiful!” he exclaimed. We mentioned that we had a few items to put in the empty box. “No problem. Come by tomorrow,” he said.
The next day the three of us returned, joined by my daughter and my son. We carried green cedar boughs and small stones in the shape of hearts that Sandy had collected from the beach where she grew up. I also carefully placed a love letter in the box. We took our time. The funeral director offered us coloured felt pens and we drew images and wrote farewell messages to our Nana, our Mother and to Sandy, my lifelong partner and friend, the love of my life and the centre of our family circle.
Then the time came for each of us to take hold of the box and set it in the waiting hearse. At the crematorium, her body would be placed in this handsome, home-made cedar box accompanied by words and symbols of our love.
As the hearse slowly moved out of sight, we put our arms around each other and held tight. The moment felt like a good and natural leave-taking, done with intention, love and sadness.
Don Robertson lives in West Vancouver, B.C.
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