HOME |
RSS | 
Burial in the United States is increasingly expensive, so some people have made their final plans with thrift in mind. That’s where Minnesota woodworker Randy Schnobrich steps in. He teaches traditional coffin building over a three-day, $700 course. Many of the participants are building coffins for themselves:
“A lot of people cringe at the idea of building their own casket,” Schnobrich says. “They see it as morbid. They think, ‘Boy, that must be kind of weird.’ But for some folks, they want to have a hand in, an intimate connection with the end of their life. Instead of just being a bystander, you can be involved in at least this aspect of your death.”
Marilyn Bader’s friends have seen her casket in her bedroom and said, “Isn’t that a little weird, having your casket in your bedroom?” But Bader, a widow who makes her living as a health care researcher, shrugs off such talk. “It’s something I made,” she says. “I’m proud of it.”
What I find fascinating about this story is that some of Schnobrich’s students begin the project when they’re dying. The act of building their coffins helps them emotionally process their mortality:
A retired teacher in her mid-60s named Carla made her coffin shortly before she died of cancer. Carla was undergoing chemotherapy before the coffin-making class. Schnobrich said she was so fatigued that he set up a futon in the workshop so Carla could nap when she needed to. At times, she had so little strength that Schnobrich had to help her push screws into the casket with a cordless drill.
“She was extremely motivated and wanted to do as much as she could,” Schnobrich recalls.
Link | Photo: Jon Kalish
Larry Marten wanted to build a coffin for his father as one last gift. Making the finely-crafted coffin, complete with parts saved from his father’s life, was easy compared to negotiating the bureaucracy involved in burying the dead.
He was required to get a permit from the county to transport his father. The woman at the county office said that they don’t issue permits to individuals but to businesses licensed to do this work. She refused to issue the permit but Larry refused to leave without one. He thinks that he just finally wore her down and he got the permit.
At every point, he met resistance as though it was the craziest thing they’d ever heard of. Only professionals are allowed to do it, he was told, and there are all kinds of regulations. He was determined, however, and in the end, everyone at the hospital and county turned around and became helpful and came to respect his decision.
But that was not the end of the red tape Larry had to cut through. Read the rest of the story at Make magazine. Link -via Boing Boing
An unnamed man broke into a funeral parlor in Vienna, Austria, found a bottle of wine, drank it, and fell asleep in a coffin where the undertaker found him in the morning!
The man, whose identity was withheld by police in Vienna, broke into an undertakers in Penzing district on Tuesday night. Undertaker Heinrich Altbart discovered the man fast asleep in one of the coffins the next morning. The 25-year-old intruder reportedly nodded off after having emptied a bottle of red wine he discovered in a wardrobe.
Altbart, who took a picture of the napping would-be robber, said today (Thurs) the man caused “substantial damage” by smashing the front door of his office.
No word on what the intruder was actually looking for. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Heinrich Altbart)
Comments Off
Doctors in Ipatinga, Brazil declared 88-year-old Maria das Dores dead when they found no vital signs. She was transferred from the hospital to a funeral home, where an official looked into her coffin and found her moving! Ms. Dores was immediately sent back to the hospital.
Custodia Amancio, daughter of the resuscitated Brazilian woman, said: “We are happy to know my mother is alive and unhappy with the lack of respect due her. We are still not sure if we will sue the municipality and hospital.
“She continues in the intensive ward treatment ward and we are praying that she will improve quickly.”
Ms. Dores suffers from blocked arteries and Alzheimer’s disease. Link -via Fark
The coffin that Lee Harvey Oswald was buried in back in 1963 is up for sale at an auction house in California.
The pine coffin is partially water-damaged by the 18 years it spent in the ground before Oswald’s body was exhumed in 1981 to lay to rest rumors that a lookalike Soviet agent was buried in his place.
The body — confirmed as genuinely his — was reburied in another casket, and the original is only now being offered for sale at auction.
Bids will be taken until December 18th. Link
Dean Booth of Dean’s Comic Booth was challenged to create this animation to illustrate this story at J-Walk Blog.
Buried is an upcoming horror film about a man who wakes up to find himself buried alive in a coffin. Alamo Drafthouse held a contest in which four winners were kidnapped and buried in coffins underground where they were able to watch the film on small screens inside their coffins:
Four lucky (or not so lucky, depending on how you look at it) people were picked to be blindfolded, have a burlap sack put over their head, then silently driven 30 miles outside of the city. There, they were put in coffins and only then were they allowed to remove the blindfolds, where they’d see an LCD screen that would show Buried.
Link via Super Punch | Photo: Alamo Drafthouse
A patent has been issued for this device, which would conserve space in burial grounds. The inventor even envisions a transparent variety:
“A clear plastic Easy Inter Burial Container, where the body is additionally encased in clear resin and is standing erect for all to view during installation, creates a very impressive image.”
The screwing-into-the-ground would be performed either by humans or by an adaptation on a tractor backhoe.
Hidden in a Chicago suburb is a funeral home with a 9-hole mini golf course in the basement! Fred Abercrombie made a stop in Palatine, Illinois to visit Ahlgrim Acres, a community room hidden underneath Ahlgrim Funeral Home and took quite a few pictures of the infamous golf course with a haunted theme.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
There’s a good reason that William Warren named his creation "Shelves for Life":
The shelves are CNC cut in oak veneered plywood to the customers measurements. They are intended to be used throughout life as storage for personal belongings. On death, the shelves are dismantled and rebuilt as a coffin.
Who says you can’t take it with you when you die? Link – via core77
