Coffin helps man confront mortality
For years, Akron author David Giffels joked with his wife, Gina, about his wishes for a cheap and no-fuss funeral. A simple cardboard box would do.
His father, Thomas, overheard one of the conversations and offered to help David build his own casket. Thus began a father-son, build-it-yourself journey that became something much more than a simple woodworking project.
As they toiled over the task in his father’s woodshop/barn in Bath Township, David lost his mother, Donna Mae, and then his best friend, both within a year.
The grief, coupled with Giffels’ turning 50 and his now-widowed father being in his 80s, turned a whimsical woodworking project in a direction the author hadn’t expected. It became a labor of love and bonding with his father, and a way for David to confront his own grief and mortality.
It also became fodder for the University of Akron associate professor’s third book, “Furnishing Eternity.”
“Tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought,” wrote Samuel G. Freedman of the New York Times Book Review. “‘Furnishing Eternity’ continues Giffels’ unlikely literary career as the bard of Akron, Ohio.”
Like writing a book, Giffels admits now that building your own casket is not a simple task, ■ particularly when your cobuilder is a retired engineer and a master woodworker.
“My dad is the true spine of the book,” Giffels said. “He starts the book as the oldest person I know and ends as the most alive person I know.”
Although the book has a heavy undertone of grief and mortality, there’s a lot of humor mixed in.
Giffels humorously recounts the uncomfortable visit he made to Akron funeral expert Paul Hummel to discuss the rules, if any, involved in making one’s own final resting box.
One of life’s questions that is answered is what does one do with a heavy casket once it is finished and waiting for its still very-much-alive future occupant? You’ll have to read the book to find that one out.
After cobbling together pieces of pine and oak purchased at Home Depot to create his casket, Giffels learned something about death: “It is fruitless to spend too much time worrying about this,” he said.