A Coffin of My Own

Finished syringe coffin.

In my last two weeks as an apprentice at the Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop, I was told I would build my own coffin.

Did you ever read that book about grammar and punctuation in elementary school where the main character is a panda? The narrator explains that a panda who eats, shoots, and leaves (with an illustration of a panda shooting a water gun at a restaurant before leaving) is very different than a panda who eats shoots and leaves (with an illustration of a panda eating bamboo shoots and leaves). Here, we have a similar dilemma.

I had been under the impression that I was building a coffin quasi-independently, i.e., building my own coffin. I was told the coffin was going to be in the shape of a syringe, which is what families typically choose for a doctor who has died. I thought this was a welcome coincidence, what with my plans to study medicine after this year. As we picked out wood on the very first day, I asked innocently if my brothers knew anything about who the doctor was, interested to hear about who I was making the coffin for. They looked at me inquisitively. I blinked back. They repeated, “You are making your coffin.” Slowly, it set in: evidently, I was the “doctor” in question, and I was building this coffin for myself.

And so I started building my own theoretical coffin. There are a couple of funny things about this picture, the obvious being that I am 23 years old, and my immediate thoughts went to 1) I’m not even a doctor yet and 2) all things considered, I hope I won’t need this coffin for a long time. Less obvious is, in my training course for death doula certification, when asked what I wanted upon dying, I immediately answered cremation. The idea of being in the ground, in a boring wooden box in a random cemetery, appealed a lot less to me than my ashes being spread somewhere with meaning to me, like the Long Island Sound where I grew up sailing with my family.

Building my coffin was strange for all these reasons, but admittedly, I couldn’t help but take extra care as we put it together. And the syringe was easily the most challenging coffin I had made thus far. The cylinder that makes up much of the shape took days to put together. Wood is more malleable than one might think, but it doesn’t magically just become round. I hand-sawed 14 x 65-inch wooden planks, 3 inches in width; this alone took hours and hours. As I sawed, I couldn’t help but notice the comfort of the saw in my hand at this point. My grip was looser, my shoulders rotating more freely to bring about the desired motion, the wood cut at my command. I was both proud and shocked to find how far I had come since the first day the saw was put awkwardly in my uncalloused hands. In seeing my progress, my brother Okoe gave me the okay to listen to music while I worked. I tossed him a headphone, and I spent the first day making the cylinder, watching him bop his head to Come On Eileen and Take on Me. He was particularly fond of the Black Eyed Peas Where is the Love. We danced and sang and laid the foundation for my final resting place as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

I spent the rest of that week shaping the cylinder. Hours of planning and sanding finally gave way to a round cylinder. Okoe and I even took a field trip to about three pharmacies in the Teshie area to see if any of them carried a syringe we could model the coffin after. On our third try, we hit the jackpot: a 10 mL syringe in clear packaging. From this miniature model, we crafted the shape of all the small pieces that are a part of the bigger picture. At the end of the first week, we lifted a crosscut saw to the finished product and cut halfway through the perfect cylinder on both sides, carefully creating a cross-section that could be lifted away. I found myself face to face with a cradle-like, body-sized space. A space for my body and not a cradle like when I was born but a place to forever sleep. We shut the coffin, and I walked away with the strange feeling of someone who has just seen the future, breathless and pondering but oddly calm.

Shaping the cylinder of the syringe using a hand plane.

I spent the rest of my time at the shop with my coffin. With the woodworking done, my brothers knew I could handle the rest on my own. I began the task of painting primer on, applying putty filler to the entire coffin to seal and smooth cracks, sanding down the coffin, and repeating the process three more times, one cycle on each day to leave time for the paint and putty to dry. While simple, this work is tiring and physical. With both the paint and filler, you must get close enough to the coffin that you are essentially one with it, filling in tiny cracks and leaving no wood showing. Sanding a coffin large enough to fit a whole human is no small task; by the end, my clothes and skin are covered in the fine powder of the white putty filler, giving me an appearance akin to if I had taken a bath in baking flour. So while I worked, I busied myself: I thought about my friends in Boston bundling up on their way to work or the Southie bars while I dripped in sweat, I imagined my childhood home all packed up as my parents began their move, I wondered about what my sisters were up to, I listened to Paddy and I’s playlist and laughed at the sappy way I missed him. I went on living as I covered myself in and breathed deep the dust of my coffin, now a part of my clothes and certainly a part of my respiratory system.

Unpainted syringe.

In the final days, we put the finishing paint on, and the syringe came to life. Despite the connotations of needles, it was shockingly beautiful, made perhaps more so by the intricate work I knew had gone into it. The side reads “for single use only” in a replica of our syringe model. A universal truth for both syringes and coffins: they can only be used once by one person.

We treated the coffin with poison to make the wood last longer. As my brothers insinuated, it had to survive until I did not. On my last day of work, my coffin claimed its rightful place in the showroom, next to my red couch and pocket of peace. For years to come, perhaps, my coffin will be shown to tourists who make their way to the shop. I’ve memorized the spiel my brothers give about the shop’s history and the tradition of fantasy coffins, Now, I find myself imagining how they may include my story amongst their own, the one about the girl from America with no previous carpentry experience but a strange interest in death who lived with them, learned from them, and eventually built her own coffin. With a certain degree of melancholy, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my coffin will outlive my physical time in Ghana, that I may be leaving, but it will stay behind until, as my brothers hope, I come back for it.

Over the past two weeks, as I filled in my friends and family on the discovery that I was indeed making my own coffin, I was met with incredulous exclamations. The task was often described as insane or crazy, and I can understand why, after all, that was my initial gut reaction. My mom’s one rule of the entire Watson for me as she begged me not to get inside a coffin during my time in Ghana; maybe she thought I would be accidentally shut in, but most likely, it was the spiritual taboo of existing where only the death is meant to exist. I imagine that building my own coffin never crossed her mind, but in these last few weeks, I’ve been quite intimate with my mortality, a strange and special task to have completed at the ripe age of 23. So when my brothers told me to give my coffin a try, the same way a mattress salesman might entice you to lay down in the shop, I hoped in without further consideration. As I lay surprisingly still and comfortable among the satin stapled into my coffin, it dawned on me that this would be the only time I ever have this view. My head near the plunger, my feet extended towards the needle, my eyes getting their first peak at the inside of the cylinder I had labored over. The inside of my coffin is not a taboo or forbidden space but a privilege.

If I truly reflect on this year so far and what I have learned, it is that it is never too early to begin having conversations about your own mortality, and as the Black Eyed Peas say in their hit song “Can we practice what we preach?” So, no, I don’t find the concept of building my own coffin to be strange or wrong. I find it to be an extreme example of getting comfortable with my ending. There is a calm that came over me once I settled on this, a peace that comes from knowing my hands helped craft where I might one day lay. In being an active participant in the creation of my final resting place, I have even grown fond of the idea of being buried. I'm not entirely convinced, but a syringe coffin that I built sounds a lot more unique and personal than the obsidian-colored wooden box of my nightmares. 

As always, I am in awe of the insistence of life to be present in moments concerning death. I am amazed at the power of my mind to wander and not be crazed by images of my own corpse in the coffin, instead choosing to hum Paolo Nutini songs or reviewing flight itineraries in my head, deciding whether I should look into sailing or surfing lessons for my time in New Zealand. Over the past months, but especially during my time in Ghana, I have come to know this balancing act the universe performs on a personal level, the loudness of life in Teshie permeating through a shop whose purpose is to serve the dead. Still though, I was shocked and reaffirmed to find that this balance had burrowed its way into my being. I built my own coffin, and life continued.

I built my own coffin, and life now springs up around it from its stand in the showroom in Teshie, Ghana; it’s a monument not only to my time here but the ultimate manifestation of my hopeful future as a physician and of this year as I continue to explore end of life care. As I sit in the airport, awaiting my flight to South Africa and my last stop on the continent, I am envisioning a not-so-far future where the skin on my knuckles that were shaved off from sanding heals, the heat rash disappears, my clothes are more thoroughly washed of plaster and paint, and my hair loses some of its lion-volume contributed by the Ghanaian heat (although this might be wishful thinking with South Africa and India rivaling even Ghana’s temperatures). Ghana will slowly leave me physically, but my coffin will stay. I will not leave Ghana, and in spirit, Ghana will not leave me. For now, the coffin can represent the very real end of my time in Ghana, but it also represents all that I will take as I travel away from here. In my most poetic of daydreams, I can see myself coming back for the coffin, returning perhaps when my brothers have had children and baby Walter is older, and life is the same in Teshie but also entirely different. Realistically, I’m not sure if I’ll ever come back for it if the syringe will ever find its way to America, and not only because I’m not sure where a life-sized syringe coffin is supposed to be stored. But there is peace in this daydream and the idea of my coffin waiting for me in a place I so recently called home and that, in some, will always be. More and more, I’m starting to see death in this way, as a patient friend of life. The two seem to walk constantly in parallel. My time in Ghana has shown me that the “insane” or “crazy” thing is not building your own coffin at the age of 23 but instead, the idea that we still believe death to be this terrifying thing that screams “gotcha!” randomly as if it wasn’t present right alongside life the entire time.

My coffin overlooks busy Beach Rd in Ghana, where I took my morning porridge, where my host family became just family, and where the breeze from the Ghanaian coast reached over the heat to cool off my skin. All these things are not yet memories; they are things I did just yesterday and the day before. But one day, they will feel less tangible, more distant, but my coffin will remain where I cannot. My brother, Okoe, and I spent the last evening together in the showroom. His girlfriend sits beside him, her wrist wrapped in a strange bracelet I was told keeps spirits away from her. She likes to take walks in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the night, depending on how you see it, and that is when a person finds themselves walking amongst spirits. Okoe says he is happy to have the coffin to look at and remember the nights we all spent together here, and I can’t help but hope that whatever piece of my spirit is kept here by my coffin is not warded off by Deborah’s bracelet. How special that at 23, my coffin is already keeping my memory alive.