Making an Exit

by Sarah Murray

  The variety of things they can produce is remarkable, but the coffins all have one thing in common—a sort of mad, comic, pop art look that seems at odds with something as somber as death. Eric tells me that the tradition has changed the way people in Ghana feel about death and funerals. “Before, when we saw a coffin we were scared or we felt unhappy,” he says. “Now people are not afraid, because these coffins are something they know—it’s part of them, part of their life.”

  Eric’s comment brings to mind something I’m seeing in a lot of the death rites and funerary objects I’ve encountered so far—the human search for some kind of immortality. These coffins provide more than flamboyant means of making an exit. They’re also a way of continuing in death what you did while living, whether that’s spending eternity catching fish, or taking your Mercedes for a spin on heaven’s highways.

  Before I left for Ghana, I’d spent quite a while thinking what part of my life I wanted reflected in my coffin. As a writer who spends so much time in front of a laptop, a computer mouse seemed the most obvious—but there was something too depressing about the idea of leaving this world in a piece of IT equipment. A newspaper or a book might be appropriate, given my trade, but they’d be the wrong shape. A pen seemed a little anachronistic and unexciting, given Eric’s evident powers of creativity. No, I needed something that reflected my life in another way.

  * * *

  If coffin manufacturers in some parts of the world show a distinct lack of imagination compared to the Ga craftsmen, this is starting to change. These days, the traditional box is not the only option. Nor does it have to be bought from a funeral director. As consumers have balked at shelling out several thousand dollars for a casket, online retailers have started to offer basic coffins for lower prices. You can even pick one up at, appropriately enough, big-box stores such as Costco, the discount retailer, where prices start at just over nine hundred dollars, and Walmart, which sells caskets at similar prices with payment over a year at no interest.

  As environmentally conscious customers start to worry about the amount of junk humankind is shoveling into the earth along with its mortal remains, a new kind of coffin is also gaining popularity—the eco-coffin. Some have an old-fashioned, rustic look and are constructed of seagrass, bamboo, and wicker, rather like the ones in the brochures my father collected. Others are high-tech containers, such as the Ecopod, a sleek casket that looks more like a cocoon than a coffin. Produced by a British company and made from recycled newspaper, it has a smooth surface of recycled silk and mulberry leaves. Also in Britain, Hainsworth, which manufactures fabric for, among other things, the uniforms of the Royal Guard, has devised a biodegradable woolen coffin supported on a recycled fiberboard frame.

  One Dutch “green” coffin producer has taken a radically new approach to the manufacture of its products—it leaves customers to assemble them. The EveryBody Coffin arrives as six flat precut pieces of wood, with simple handles integrated into the pieces. Sections snap together without the aid of tools, screws, or glue, and the untreated wood, says the company, allows “personal decoration involvement.”

  Then there’s what you might call the adaptive-reuse coffin. When Ed Kienholz, an installation artist, died in 1994, his wife and artistic collaborator, Nancy, arranged his body in the front seat of a 1940 Packard Coupe, with a bottle of 1931 Chianti beside him, a dollar bill and a deck of cards in his pocket, and the ashes of Smack, his dog, in the trunk. “He was set for the afterlife,” wrote Robert Hughes, the art critic. “To the whine of bagpipes, the Packard, steered by his widow Nancy Reddin Kienholz, rolled like a funeral barge into the big hole. All in all, it was the most Egyptian funeral ever held in Idaho.”

  Meanwhile, the fantasy coffin is no longer a phenomenon confined to West African shores. At Michigan-based Eternal Image, sports fans can have coffins decked out in the colors and logos of the Mets, the Red Sox, and other major-league baseball teams (the Star Trek line is among the latest additions to the collection).

  From Jenks, Oklahoma, Hot Rod Caskets designs and produces models for firefighters such as the Smoke Eater, which has attachments for pike poles. For members of the military, the Uncle Sam model comes in desert sand and olive green with hex bar handles and a camouflage lining. The company also caters to Harley-Davidson fans with coffins that have plenty of tread plate trim. “Some might claim that our caskets are overbuilt,” says owner Corey Parks on the company’s Web site, “and my answer is always, ‘That’s the whole point.’”

  In Nottingham, England, Vic Fearn & Company, coffin makers since the 1860s, has taken a leaf out of Ghana’s book. In recent years, the company has been making personalized coffins to the specifications of families, or their eventual users. Its craftsmen have created, among other things, a river barge, a vintage Rolls-Royce, a yacht, a giant guitar, and a huge egg for a woman who wanted to be buried in the fetal position.

  For building contractor John Gratton-Fisher, the firm built a Dumpster into which his “organic remains” will eventually be deposited. And for Pat Cox, a nurse and music teacher with a passion for the ballet, a giant dance shoe covered in pink silk will be what lowers her into the ground, with the aid of reinforced satin laces. “It doesn’t daunt me, the thoughts of lying in there afterward,” Pat told a reporter. “But it would in a box. I think an ordinary standard coffin is just so morbid, so scary.” My coffin maker Eric would no doubt agree.

  * * *

  Shortly before leaving for Ghana, I decided on a shape for my coffin. It’s something with great meaning for me. For a start, I live close to it, and if I stick my head far enough out of my apartment window, I can just see the top of it. More than a decade ago, it served as a kind of lucky charm for me when I was wondering how on earth I was going to move to New York (my lifelong dream). I kept a miniature version of it with me wherever I went and I’d put it next to my bed, whether at home in London or in a hotel on assignment overseas. It now sits proudly on a chest of drawers in my New York apartment. “It’s the nearest thing we have to heaven in New York,” Deborah Kerr tells Cary Grant in the 1957 movie An Affair to Remember. It’s my favorite piece of modern architecture. It’s the Empire State Building.

  And now I’m sitting next to Eric, showing him a tourist souvenir model of the building I picked up before heading to Ghana. Eric has never seen the building before, nor has he heard of it, so I’ve given him a postcard, which I also brought with me to show him what it looks like as it soars skyward through the forest of skyscrapers that is my Manhattan home.

  On the flight over, I’d been slightly worried that the Empire State Building might be too difficult for a coffin maker to replicate. After all, its surface is extremely detailed, with hundreds of windows, vertical Art Deco lines, and a delicate spire. But as I sit here admiring a giant crab to my left and a jumbo jet in front of me, I realize my commission will be easy. “Yes, I can do this,” Eric says confidently. I believe him. Eric suggests making the lid as a hinged double door on the front of the building. It seems a good idea. I ask whether, to save money on shipping, the spire could be detachable and could travel inside the main structure. No problem, says Eric.

  Then he gets out the tape measure. It’s the moment I’ve been dreading. I stand up and try to look as if getting measured up for a coffin is something I do every day. But I can feel my heart racing, and the smile on my face is quickly turning to a rictus (one I feel must resemble the ghoulish grimaces of those mummies in Sicily). In an attempt to distract myself, I gaze out at the waves crashing onto the beach opposite, but it doesn’t help—being measured for one’s own coffin is, let’s face it, extremely unsettling. Eric does the job cheerfully and efficiently, like a tailor measuring someone for a suit. But unlike a new suit, it’s not something I’ll necessarily look all that good in.

  * * *

  A few months later, back in New York, I receive by e-mail the first of a set of photographs taken by Kawther at eShopAfrica. She’s helping me arrange the shipment of my coffin and
sweetly promised to send me pictures of the various stages of construction. First to arrive is a shot of a simple wooden tower. A few weeks later, Art Deco details have been added to the façade and the spire is complete. Next comes a photo of the whole structure, painted with an undercoat. One of the pictures—my favorite—shows Eric inside it, peering out through the doors at the front.

  By January the coffin is ready, bar the final painting. At this point, Kawther e-mails me to say that Eric wants to know what colors I’d like it decorated in. We’d discussed this in Accra. Eric agreed with me that replicating the gray-pewter color of the original souvenir model would make the thing dull and rather depressing when enlarged to coffin size. We’d decided to make it more colorful.

  Now, here’s my dilemma—the adventurer in me says I should let Eric come up with some wild, crazy colors of his choosing. That would make it more authentically Ghanaian, after all. But my adventurer’s spirit is in constant battle with the control freak in me. I know which one will win out—and in the end, the control freak decides that, because this coffin is going to sit in my apartment for a while, it should really go with the décor. I look around for something to photograph and send to Eric so that he can match the colors. I know almost immediately what that should be—Kit’s painting.

  Kit Barker was a British painter and a great family friend. In the 1950s and 1960s, he produced bold abstracts based on landscapes. He lived in New York for a few years, joining the bohemian set in the Bowery in the 1950s with his wife, Ilse, a German-born poet who wrote under the name of Kathrine Talbot. Kit died many years ago, but when I was a child, he was one of my favorite adults. He always said I was his favorite person—something I loved, chiefly because he called me a “person” rather than a little girl, which made me feel very grown up.

  His Stone Falling into Water—a large abstract in cobalt blues, turquoises, and blacks with flashes of white and dashes of brick red—hung on loan for many years in the sitting room at our old house, Pear Tree Farm. It was my father’s favorite artwork. I was always fascinated by it, too. I would spend hours gazing into its deep shadows and ambiguous forms, imagining all kinds of far-off places.

  When Kit died in 1988, Ilse asked for the painting back again, since her only assets were by then her late husband’s works, some of which she hoped to sell. Yet for years, Stone Falling into Water sat in her garage. I dreamed of buying it and bringing it back into our family’s possession. But I was living in London at the time, and my small flat had no space for a painting on such an ambitious scale. Then I moved to New York. After renovating my apartment, I decided it needed a piece of art—and I immediately thought of Kit’s painting. One wall seemed to be asking for it to be hung there. I rang up Ilse and arranged to see it again.

  On my next trip back to England, I had lunch at Ilse’s house. She told me stories of New York and the heady days when she and Kit had partied with famous abstract expressionist painters. By the time I left, I’d written her a check and the painting was in the back of my car. A couple of months later, it was in New York, hanging on the wall at my apartment, looking as if it had been commissioned for that very space. Even the colors seemed to match exactly the spines of the books on my shelves and the Chinese ceramics dotted about the place.

  Now, as I contemplate the painting of my coffin, there’s no question about it—Kit’s colors must decorate it. I e-mail a photograph of the painting to Kawther and wonder which hues Eric will pick out for the windows, doors, Art Deco lines, and spire of my own Empire State Building.

  About a month later, Kawther tells me the coffin is finished. She’s attached a final photograph of it standing in Eric’s workshop, ready for shipment. Opening up the attachment, I can’t believe what I see—instead of simply picking red, blue, and black for the different architectural features of the building, Eric has actually re-created the painting itself across its surface. It’s astonishing—he hasn’t copied it exactly, but he’s captured perfectly the spirit of the work, the deep blues, the shadows and the splashes of red, the mysterious far-off places. My coffin is a work of art.

  What’s more, so many people are bound up in it. Some of them are alive—me, for one, and Kawther, who helped me arrange all this, and of course Eric. But the dead are in there too—Gregory Johnson, the architect who designed the Empire State Building, for instance, and the hundreds of workers who bolted the beams together. Then there’s my father, who loved Kit’s painting so much, and most of all, Kit himself, the first grown-up to treat me as an adult and perhaps the first to guide me into the afterlife. His art has found new expression at the hand of a coffin painter from the distant shores of West Africa—people certainly live on in the most unexpected ways.

  * * *

  My coffin has arrived in New York. On the airway bill under the section for “Nature and quantity of goods” is typed: “State Empire Coffin. DIMS: 83x55x184cms x 1.” (I’m wondering what the customs officials made of it.) With the packing case removed, the spire restored to its rightful place on top of the main shaft, and the smell of fresh paint lingering about it, my Ghanaian Empire State Building is now standing in my apartment. It looks nothing short of fantastic. On the opposite wall is Kit’s painting. The two versions are looking at each other, perhaps a little suspiciously at first, but, yes, I think there’s mutual approval.

  But now the unpacking is over, that moment has come—the moment when I have to try it for size. In fact, the prospect of stepping into my own coffin reminds me of an Associated Press story about a South Korean craze whereby, as part of “well-being” courses, participants write then read their wills, dress up in shrouds, and get into coffins. The lids are nailed down and there they lie for about fifteen minutes, supposedly contemplating how better to value their lives. My favorite quote in the article is from Chung Jae-hyun, a board director at the Korea Association of Thanatology, a group of academics who study death-related issues: “Real death is totally different than this,” he sniffed. (Really, Mr. Chung, you think so?)

  The prospect of being buried alive has long been a source of terror. In its most extreme form, it’s known as taphephobia (from the Greek taphos or “grave”), and several famous people have suffered from it. Frédéric Chopin’s dying wish, for his heart to be removed before his burial, stemmed from this fear (the heart of the Polish composer now sits in a jar of alcohol in Warsaw’s Church of the Holy Cross). On his deathbed in 1799, George Washington insisted that he should not be buried for three days after his death, just to make sure he’d really gone.

  Edgar Allan Poe captured these fears in The Premature Burial, a horror story in which an unnamed narrator describes his terror of being buried alive. Poe’s narrator, whose fear regularly sends him into an unconscious state, provides horrifying details of the moment he wakes up in a confined space. He tries to scream “but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs, which oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration.” Attempting to move, his arms strike “a solid wooden substance, which extended above my person at an elevation of not more than six inches from my face. I could no longer doubt that I reposed within a coffin at last.”

  Poe’s narrator, as we discover, turns out simply to have been unconscious in a boat. But such stories no doubt contributed to the Victorian practice of burying people in a grave with a bell hanging on the tombstone above. The bell was linked to the coffin beneath by means of a rope or chain, which could be pulled so that, in the event of an overly hasty burial, the occupant could be saved by the bell.

  In 1852, George Bateson, a British inventor, patented a device under the name Bateson’s Belfry that incorporated a miniature campanile on top of the casket equipped with an iron bell (the inventor’s own terror was such that eventually he committed suicide by dousing his body in linseed oil and setting himself alight in what was a premature cremation). These days, of course, one could take a contemporary approach by requesting to be buried wi
th a mobile phone—with its battery well charged, of course.

  With such thoughts in mind, I’ve decided to get into my coffin only in the presence of someone else. My friend Lisa Waltuch has kindly offered to indulge me before we head out for dinner together. I’m glad she’s standing there as I close the doors, shutting myself in. Once inside, it’s a tight fit. Eric certainly got his measurements just right—the top of the main section, just below the spire, is almost brushing my head. Strangely enough, being inside is not as bad as I’d expected (although I’m quite pleased to get out).

  As the days and weeks go by, I get quite used to my coffin. It’s part of the furniture now. Full of curiosity, friends have all been trooping around to have a look. I even get to pass on news of its arrival to Tony Malkin of the Empire State Building Company. By chance, soon after taking delivery of my coffin, I’m commissioned to write a feature about the building’s ambitious energy efficiency program, part of a plan to make it a green building. Near the end of a phone interview with Tony, I can’t resist telling him why my own version of the building is sitting in my apartment. After I finish the call, I e-mail him a picture. A few minutes later, I get the reply. “I hope you correctly licensed the use of our image!” he deadpans. “If not, we will hunt you down to your grave!”

  5

  Packing for Eternity

  GIFTS FOR THE AFTERLIFE IN HONG KONG

  In a small shop in Hong Kong, I’m looking at a large plasma television set in a matte silver finish. On its screen is an image of a Chinese water-lily pond on which delicate pink blooms hover above layers of waxy green leaves. The TV comes in three sizes, each with a natty little remote. But I’m finding it hard to operate and when I do manage to hit the channel-down button, the lily pond shot remains stubbornly on the screen. This is partly because the remote has no batteries in it. Oh, and it’s made of cardboard. What’s more, it’ll be tough getting a different picture (or any sound, for that matter) as the TV is also made of cardboard. The lily-pond view is a color photocopy, enlarged to fit the screen and stuck on with glue. Its surface has bubbled slightly in one corner. This won’t bother the set’s eventual owners, however. They’re dead.