Natural Simplicity Of A Pine Box Appeals To Coffin Maker's Clients

FORESTVILLE, Calif. - Kathleen Broderson's workshop is surrounded by redwoods, but pine is her medium. And coffins are her business.

Broderson creates handmade coffins; simple pine boxes she fashions in an old barn near Forestville. Some of her clients have immediate needs, but at least one is biding her time and using her coffin as a coffee table.

Broderson's creations, made of unvarnished pine with rope handles, have found a niche in the small but growing trend in home funerals.

"I liked the simplicity and naturalness of a pine box," said Mary Dieter of Sonoma. Dieter chose one for her husband, Richard, a teacher who died last November.

"He would have liked it," she said. "He wanted things as simple as possible. When we were younger we said how neat a pine box would be."

Broderson, who prefers the term box over casket and coffin, which are used interchangeably in the funeral industry, says plain and wooden containers seem to appeal to people for aesthetic, economic and even nostalgic reasons.

"I showed the first one I built to my parents' friends and it reminded them of the 1920s when people used to get a pine box from the hardware store so they could lay their relative out in the parlor," Broderson said.

Suzi Schaffert has one of Broderson's coffins in her Villa Grande living room, although she's 43 years old and in apparent good health. "This will get used for a long time," she said.

Right now it doubles as a coffee table and storage box. "I thought about using it as a book shelf but then decided it's good for storing blankets and fancy dishes," Schaffert said.

Still, there's no disguising the intended use.

Schaffert, who owns the Monte Rio Theater, decided to plan ahead after arranging a funeral for her mother-in-law. "We ended up buying a $1,000 coffin," she said. "And it was cremated. It was a total waste of money."

Broderson has two coffins inside her mountainside home. One stands against the wall and serves as a bookshelf and wood box. It's made for her 90-year-old father, who helped build it.

"I said, `Dad, come on. I want to build your coffin.' He's a mechanical engineer and 6 feet tall. We figured we needed it to be 6 feet, 4 inches long."

Another coffin, which Broderson has reserved for her own use, is being used as a blanket chest and coffee table.

Broderson, 55, has a glass-tinting business. The coffins are a sideline. She said, "I don't think of this as work. This is my heart."

She got inspired in 1994 after attending a home funeral for a 79-year-old friend who had a home-made coffin built by his son-in-law. Broderson asked a friend to teach her how to use a power saw and took a carpentry class at Santa Rosa Junior College.

"In class everyone else was building bookshelves but me," she said. "I'd stand my coffin in a corner when I wasn't working on it and I'd come in and find footprints in the bottom. People were intrigued by it."

She has built 12 coffins and says the clerks at the lumberyard call her the casket lady.

She has found that her work often encourages people to talk about the normally taboo subject of death.

"When I called the phone company about starting a Yellow Page ad I ended up talking to a lady about a relative who had just died. I think we want to talk about this but don't know how to start," she said.

Having her own coffin around is comforting, Broderson said. "When I get bummed out or I'm worried about something I look at this coffin, and say, `This isn't a big deal. This is where you're going to wind up.' But it doesn't depress me. It cheers me up. Puts life in perspective," she said.

Jerri Lyons of the Natural Death Care Project, which counsels people on low-cost and at-home funerals, said the idea of a wooden box "appeals to people who don't feel the need to have an expensive piece of furniture to put in the ground or burn at the crematory."

The idea of an unlined wooden box also appeals to people who like the idea of a simple "dust-to-dust ending," she said.

On a wet morning, Broderson is in her workshop, warmed by a wood stove and a compact disc playing in the background. She shows a new cutting tool she discovered at a hardware store.

"I love tools. I just didn't know it. Being a girl I never thought I could build things."

But she has fond memories of helping her father in his garage workshop and was recently convinced by a friend that she is destined for this work.

"His theory is that everyone should do what they liked doing when they were 5 years old," she said.