The Coffin No One Keeps: Teaching Death Through Curiosity

Death Education Through Willow Coffins: Teaching Mortality With Curiosity

I keep a small inventory. Very small.

When they learn I weave coffins, they assume I have a workshop lined with finished vessels, waiting like patient sentinels for their purpose. But each coffin takes weeks to create—the willow must be harvested, sorted, soaked, woven with attention and care. I cannot possibly have a coffin ready for everyone at all times. And that isn't the purpose anyway. I don't make coffins primarily to store or retail them. I make them to start conversations. To invite questions. To give people something tangible to touch when talking about death feels impossible.

The coffins I weave are not products. They are pedagogy.

The Object That Opens the Door

We are living in a culture of death avoidance so profound that most people will plan a vacation with more intention than they'll ever give to their own mortality. We outsource. We medicalize. We turn away. And in doing so, we lose something essential—the ability to care for our dead, to participate in rituals that allow grief to move through our bodies instead of lodging in our minds.

But put a willow coffin in a room, and something shifts.

People approach slowly at first, tentative. They circle it. They reach out to touch the woven willow, tracing the patterns with their fingertips. They ask: "How long does it take to make?" "Where does the willow come from?" "Can you personalize it?" And then, almost without realizing it, they're asking the harder questions: "Would this work for my father?" "What happens during a green burial?" "How do I talk to my family about this?"

The coffin becomes a threshold. Not the thing itself, but the doorway into a conversation we desperately need to have.

I've watched it happen again and again—at exhibitions, community gatherings, educational events. The coffin doesn't demand that people confront their mortality head-on. It offers them an entry point through curiosity, through beauty, through craft. It says: You don't have to be ready to talk about death. But you can be ready to ask questions about willow.

Teaching Without Speaking

There's a type of learning that happens through the hands, through proximity, through witnessing process. When I weave or invite someone to sit with me while I work, the coffin becomes a living lesson in impermanence, in material intelligence, in the rhythms of making something that will not last.

The willow teaches patience. It must be soaked, coaxed, bent with attention. You cannot force it. You cannot rush. This is the first lesson: that death care, like the craft itself, requires us to slow down, to be present, to surrender our need for control.

The form teaches honesty. A coffin is unmistakably what it is—a vessel shaped to support a human body. There's no euphemism here, no "casket" or "eternal rest container." It's a coffin. And in that naming, in that clear acknowledgment of purpose, people find permission to be direct about what they fear and what they hope for.

The material teaches return. Willow comes from the earth and goes back to it. Nothing sealed. Nothing preserved. Nothing fighting against the fundamental truth that we are meant to decompose, to feed the soil, to become part of the cycle again. For many people, seeing a woven coffin is the first time they've considered that conventional burial practices—the caskets with metal and plastics, the concrete vaults, the embalming chemicals—are working against nature rather than with it.

The Grief That Moves Through Hands

Perhaps the most profound teaching happens when individuals choose to participate in the weaving itself.

Most coffins I make alone, in the solitude and meditation of my studio. But when someone asks to join the process—to weave alongside me, to add their own hands to the vessel that will carry themselves or their loved one—something sacred unfolds.

This is grief work that happens through the body, not the mind. We are so conditioned to intellectualize loss, to talk it through, to "process" it cognitively. But the body knows things the mind doesn't. The hands remember what words cannot hold.

When you weave the coffin that will carry your mother, your partner, your child, you are doing ancient work. You are reclaiming care. You are saying: I will not delegate this. I will not outsource my love. I will build the vessel myself.

The rhythm of the weaving—over, under, push, tighten—becomes a container for everything you cannot say. The silhouette taking shape beneath your hands makes the loss real in a way that allows you to begin to meet it. You are not thinking your way through grief. You are working it through your heart, your hands, your whole self.

This is what we've lost in our modern death practices—the embodied rituals that allow communities to gather, to share the labor of care, to create something meaningful together. The coffin invites that back. It says: You can participate. You are not powerless here.

Congruence as Resistance

I make these coffins because they align with my values, and I've learned that congruence is its own form of advocacy.

For years, I created art that would sit on shelves, objects designed to last, to be kept, to accumulate. There was something fundamentally at odds with my deepening understanding of sustainability, of impermanence, of what it means to live—and die—gently on this earth.

These woven vessels resolved that dissonance. They allow me to express myself creatively while causing no harm to the environment. They feed my need to make while serving a purpose that extends far beyond aesthetic pleasure. They are useful, beautiful, and temporary. They exist in perfect alignment with what I believe about how we should move through the world.

And in that congruence, they become radical.

We live in a death industry built on preservation, on permanence, on the fantasy that we can somehow keep our dead with us forever if we just seal them away properly. The willow coffin refuses that fantasy. It says: We are meant to return. This is not a failure. This is the design.

Choosing a woven coffin—or even just learning about one, asking questions, considering alternatives—is an act of resistance against a system that profits from our fear and our denial. It's a way of saying: I want my death to align with my values. I want to leave gently.

The Coffin You'll Never Own

Most people who come to learn about these coffins are not shopping. They're not planning an imminent burial. They're simply curious. And that's exactly the point.

The coffins exist to plant seeds, to shift perspectives, to make death a little less foreign and a little more approachable. They exist to normalize conversations about sustainable after-death care, about family-led rituals, about the right to choose something different.

I weave them knowing they are temporary in every sense—not just in their material decomposition, but in their role as educational tools, as conversation starters, as objects that will hopefully make themselves obsolete by creating a culture where we don't need props to talk about death.

Until then, I'll keep weaving. Not to fill a warehouse. Not to build an inventory. But to keep opening doors, one curious question at a time.

Guest Post on the Death & Dying Network International