The coffin he built for his mother

Joelle Hahn

Todd Frankel

Narrative Feature Writing

13 April 2014

The Coffin He Built for His Mother

Wentzville, Mo. – It’s 8:45 p.m. on a Friday and you’re in Home Depot in middle-Missouri with your boyfriend buying lumber.  Everyone is staring you.  They’re staring at your boyfriend because he’s drunk.  And wearing his mother’s coat – a tattered fleece coat with horses.  He’s singing “Oh me, oh my, oh…” over and over.  The same verse, the same aisles, over and over.  And they’re staring at you because you’re crying.  You’re crying because your boyfriend is drunk and short-tempered.  You want to be anywhere but here, but you try to understand the importance of the trip.  Your boyfriend has to buy lumber to frame the grave he dug for his mother.

He will bury her tomorrow.  He will bury his mother in the coffin he built for her.

Barney Gierer is not a woodworker, nor is he a gravedigger.  The youngest of 11 children, he was always the inquisitive one – by the age of five, he was tinkering around with the engines of the various jalopies that made their way down the dirt road and through the creek, to the old wooden cabin nestled in the valley where the children were raised; in later years he would convert a shed on the property into a small, comfortable one-room cabin using pebbles for the floor that he had collected from the creek; the new windows in the family’s home he handmade using wood milled from the 50 wooded acres surrounding on the property.  

On the way home from buying lumber that night, Barney said his mother’s hands felt different the last time he held them - the last time he will ever hold them.  They were cold.  Her hands had always represented life to him, he said.  The hands, he said, with the veins that pulsated with the blood he shared with her.  

It’s the same blood that had pooled into Suzanne Gierer’s brain more than two years ago.  When Peter, her oldest son, began to worry that his phone calls to her were going unanswered, he called his brother Ben to check on her - he lived closer.  But she didn’t answer his calls either, nor did she answer his knocks at her door.  There she lay – unconscious on the hard, pebbled floor of the little cabin; blood smeared on her recliner; blood on the floor; blood under her fingernails; blood spilling into the left side of her brain.

It was a stroke, the doctors said, perhaps several, and they didn’t know the extent of the damage to her brain, nor if she would even survive.  Days at the hospital spent wondering if she would survive turned into weeks spent guessing the extent of the effects several strokes would have on an 86-year-old woman.  

Though she did survive, the strokes were life-changing.  She would never again regain the use of the right side of her body.  She would never speak again – at least in the exquisite language she had spent her entire life honing.  Even though her brain told her she was speaking normally, the gibberish heard by everyone else was undiscernible.  At first, hospital staff thought she was speaking in the ancient Celtic language of her Irish immigrant parents.  But instead, it was the jumbled language of a stroke.  

Receptive Aphasia is the medical term of her language impairment.  She would spend the next two years being cared for by her children, while speaking to them in her own garbled language.  For more than two years they took turns caring for her in her home – all 11 of them now caring for her as she did them.  They bathed their mother, cooked for her, cleaned for her, did her laundry, grocery shopped for her and tucked her into bed at night.

But lately her children had noticed she was growing tired.  She was becoming weaker and they sensed the time was drawing near.  They saw an opportunity to be prepared.  They planned a family meeting to discuss their mother’s funeral.  Prior to the meeting, Barney said he received an email message from Robin, one of his older brothers.  The message contained pictures of handmade coffins.  But it was little surprise to Barney.  “Interesting,” is all he said.  The family had always relied on him for repairs and construction projects.

  

But the preparation meeting did not occur, nor did the coffin get built – at least not before their mother passed away.  Barney said he was woken in the early morning hours of Tuesday, April 1 by a phone call from Ben, the sibling on-duty that night, and also a registered nurse.  “Mom passed away this morning,” Ben said.  “I got up in the middle of the night to put more wood on the fire and she wasn’t breathing.” 

Barney wasted no time in packing his bags.  With the darkness of the night still lingering, Barney and his constant companion, a Pit Bull named Frank, climbed into his little white pickup truck and began the hour and a half drive to his mother’s house say his final goodbyes.  It was the same trek he and Frank had made every Thursday for the past two years to care for his mother.  Thursday through Saturday was Barney’s shift.  But this time, he didn’t know when he would return.  This time he would stay until his work was done.  He would stay until the coffin was built.

“I made them up,” Barney said when asked where he got the plans for the coffin.  He had made boxes before, he said.  So Barney began to draw.  He started to sketch the plans for the box in which he would lay his mother to rest.

By 6:00 that same afternoon he was ready to present his sketches to his siblings at his older brother Matt’s house, where they all agreed to meet. They loved them.  They said they knew their mother would be enthralled by the care and time devoted to making the handmade box for her.  And they knew if anyone could do it, it would be Barney.  He said he felt honored his siblings had trusted him such an important task.  

An important, complicated, intricate task he would have only two days to complete.  

And so Barney made his first trip to Home Depot to gather the materials to build his mother’s coffin.  He said he knew he would need to get everything he could possibly need, as heavy rain was moving into the area and the creek would be up.

Oh, the creek.  It’s the same creek that Barney said had kept his sister Ellen’s guests from getting to her wedding reception many years ago.  The creek that had flooded just a few years ago, when his mother was still well, and almost swelled to her little cabin, cutting her phone out for days.  The creek that Suzanne’s grandchildren, more than 125 of them, have played in, nearly since birth. The creek that has to be driven through to get to and from the family’s home.  The creek that is sometimes impassable.

But Barney and Peter made it through the creek in time to set up shop in the living room of the “big house”, as Barney refers to it.  There, in the middle of the living room, were the sawhorses; the tools; the wood; the sawdust covering the white and burgundy ceramic tile floor.  

And there was Peter, lying across the long family table – the table long enough to seat a family of 13.  Barney needed to measure Peter lying down.  No one tells you how tall a coffin needs to be.  No one told you when you were seated at the table as a child that someday you would be using it as an instrument to calculate measurements for your mother’s coffin.

And no one told Barney that his brother would change his mind about the measurements after the material had been bought, after the creek was already impassible.  No one told Barney he would have a shortage of materials because his brother wanted the coffin to be taller.  With the creek up, Barney did what he does best:  he began to think about material around the property he could reuse.  The plywood wheelchair ramp he built just a year ago, leading from the home’s long entryway and into the kitchen, became the bottom of his mother’s coffin.  It was perfect, Barney said.  It was strong and the ramp was no longer needed.

“Just make sure she doesn’t fall out of the bottom,” was the funeral home’s only advice to Barney.

Also repurposed were the corner reinforcements made from copper.  But not just any copper:  it was copper Barney said had been lying around the property for 15 years or more.  Lying outside for “years and years” had allowed the copper gussets to age to a beautiful patina, he said.  

The copper was also perfect for reinforcements around the handles that Barney had planned to make from rope – the seven handles perfectly placed so all seven brothers could carry their mother up the hill to the family’s cemetery on the property.  

But the creek was still up and Barney’s brother John had the rope.  The rope was the last crucial component of the coffin-building process.  As the rain let up early Friday morning, Barney  began to have hope that he would not need to use rope lying around the property – perfectly aged copper, was one thing; dingy used rope, was another.  Though he prepared to make-do with what he had, John was finally able to make it through the creek, just in time to fasten the rope handles to the coffin and get it to the funeral home.

The funeral home needed the coffin by Friday morning, in time to prepare for the funeral services Saturday morning.  So together the three brothers chose the blanket Barney had used to sleep with the night before to place in the bottom of the coffin; they chose Suzanne’s favorite pillow on which to lay her head; and her favorite creamy white, knitted throw to cover the lower half of their mother’s body for the viewing.

But first the creek.  They still had to get Barney’s little white pickup truck, with his mother’s coffin lying in the back, across the creek.  As he makes a run for it, his adrenaline kicks in; his determination to make his mother proud one last time carries him across the creek – the back-end of his truck swishing to the side with the force of the water from the creek.

The creek, still high on Saturday morning, is no challenge for the hearse as it eases down the old rock road and crosses the creek with ease.  Barney’s mother is once again in her home.  This time in the coffin her youngest son made for her.  This time her sons will carry her up the hill, as she did them so many times as children.

~

Your boyfriend is still getting dressed as they wheel his mother into the sunroom of the “big house” where hundreds of friends and relatives will visit her one last time.  You are the first visitor to the room as they lift the lid from your boyfriend’s handmade coffin.  The sunlight reflecting in her long white hair, she looks beautiful.  You’re proud of him and know she would be, too.  But you try not to let him see you cry.

He will bury her today.  In the coffin he built for his mother.