In November we remember the dead. I'm remembering my mother. She died two years after this piece was written for Celebration. We waked her in the dining room, just as she had requested. Late that night, as the wake was ending, we gathered by her coffin and sang the Litany of the Saints. Then Geoffrey, who had made the final bed on which her body lay, closed the lid. He took a mallet and hammered in the wooden pegs securing the seal. People went to their beds. I went to the couch in the living room and lay there, feet from my mother, the last night watch.
In my basement, just west of the washer and the dryer and the folding table, a coffin sits atop wooden blocks. It is covered with a bright quilt my grandmother pieced and sewed and, over that, a white blanket to catch the dust. The coffin looks more like a cradle than I expected it would, and somehow that comforts me. It was built for my mother, now ninety-one and frail, and, though she might outlive my husband and me, I expect we will be the ones to tuck her in and touch her hands for the last time as she makes her way home.
My son-in-law, Geoffrey, a fine furniture maker, spent the last year crafting the coffin out of walnut. He chose the wood, measuring the boards, cutting and planing them, matching grains and colors. There are no metal nails or screws to mar the surfaces; every joint is hand cut and fitted, wood against wood. He sanded and oiled the walnut; it glows softly and feels smooth to the touch. In the sides he carved long handrails for the grandsons who, I hope, will bear my mother’s body from her home to the church and to the graveyard. Geoffrey tells me he prayed for my mother as he worked.
All the surfaces are plain, except for a single inlaid cross of cherry wood in the coffin lid. “The cross,” Geoffrey told me, “will go with her, all the way.” That seems right to me, as I consider Christ keeping his baptismal promise to my mother as he keeps the promise to all the baptized, to be with her, wherever she goes, even down into the grave. Saint Paul asks the first century Roman church, “Then what can separate us from the love of Christ?” And he answers,
For I am convinced that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe, in heights or depths — nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Geoffrey has built something beautiful, and I know there will be those who find it odd that we consign such beauty — so skillfully wrought, so long in the making — to the earth. The fine walnut coffin will be covered in dirt and left to decay.
But so, too, will my mother’s body — so skillfully wrought, so wonderfully made — be sent down into the earth and left there, to return to the earth, as she awaits the resurrection of the dead. Geoffrey’s work on the coffin is both an imitation of, and homage to, the work God does in and for and with each one of us.
By taking on human flesh, becoming one like us in all things but sin, Christ redeems and makes holy all human flesh, however frail, however broken and worn. My mother receives Christ in the Eucharist each Sunday. She is a God-bearer. It is fitting that she should be borne to her grave in a worthy vessel, strong and well made.
Christ chose Mary as the cradle in which he would be carried, as the ark in which he would be borne. And then Christ chose us to be vessels as well, carrying his body and blood into all the world. In him we are made holy.
I carry my soiled sheets and towels down to the laundry and put them in the washing machine. Then I stop and uncover the coffin and run my hands along its sides. I remember how, in the months before each baby was born, we would go down to the basement and look for the bassinet and the crib, stored away, waiting for the coming day. It was good to know they were there, and would be ready when our new son or daughter arrived. As my due date drew nearer we dusted and cleaned the wicker bassinet and oiled the wooden crib. We found the box of sheets and receiving blankets and laundered them in sweet smelling baby soap. We were preparing for the hard and wondrous time of birth.
I promised my mother we would wake her at home. I needed the coffin here, at home, to keep my promise. So now I am preparing for the hard wondrous time when Christ, who called my mother, will call her to the new and eternal Jerusalem. And there, where Lazarus is poor no longer, may she find eternal rest.
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