By Adrienne Perron
From our May 2022 issue
Chuck Lakin hosted his first workshop on DIY coffins in 2013, and nobody showed up. “Americans are good at avoiding reality,” the 73-year-old retired librarian says. When he lost his father to cancer, in 1979, a mortician took the body away, and Lakin’s family got the ashes in the mail a few days later. It was all very impersonal and disappointing, he thought. Years later, when he learned about home funerals — in which families, not funeral homes, are involved in prepping the dead for burial — it inspired him to learn more about what happens to a body after it gives up the ghost.
Before long, Lakin was building coffins — along with a website, Last Things, all about funerals and burials in Maine. This month, he leads a group lesson for the first time since 2013’s flop, at the annual Maine Crafts Association Weekend Workshop retreat, at Deer Isle’s Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Up to 10 students will spend three days learning how to make a traditionally shaped “toe pincher,” a bookcase coffin (you can fit it with shelves until it’s needed for occupancy), or a green coffin, which uses no screws or metal components.
Students need no woodworking experience and pay their own materials costs, which top out at $340 — thousands of dollars less than caskets sold by funeral homes. Lakin brings paper, magic markers, and paint, so participants can deck their palls, which he thinks is therapeutic. “I applaud people willing to try this,” Lakin says. “It’s a gift to your survivors if you think about what you want them to do with your body after you die.”
$350–$600 for registration, meals, and lodging, plus materials. May 12–15.
