The HIgh Cost of Dying

I had the privelege of making the acquaintance of Steve Saint a few years ago. Steve is the son of missionary pilot Nate Saint who was martyred with four others including Jim Elliot in Ecuador in the 1950's shortly before I was born. Steve's mom died last November and as a result of making the funeral arrangements, he did some long and hard thinking about our contemporary traditions regarding death. The costs involved are appalling. Steve calculated that Christians bury billions of dollars in the ground in the form of expensive caskets that do nobody any good. What if we could start a new tradition that would reroute some of that waste? Read all about it in the I-TEC website archives, then you might take a look at my extention of the idea below.
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I started reading through some of the archives of the newsletters on the I-TEC web site. I had some thoughts about the Coffin Fund idea. I too have been appalled by the high cost of dying in this country. It has seemed to me a ripe area for rebellion against the status quo! Cremation would seem an obvious option but they make sure that has high cost as well.

You have probably already thought down the direction my mind went to and I would imagine there are laws and regulations on the books to make sure this doesn’t happen, but maybe they could be changed. This is my thought: in order to really make a statement with this concept, why even hide behind the rental casket? That’s another $300-400 wasted. Why not actually have an inexpensive wooden box? That would be better than the cardboard you ended up having to deal with. If one doesn’t run into the assumed legal roadblock, it would seem that what could be actually physically and financially possible would be to put indigenous people into the coffin building business. From raw material of plywood or locally cut plank wood using a portable sawmill like the ones I saw in P.N.G. a small crew of tribesmen could probably build several simple boxes in a day. Transporting them would likely be the most difficult and costly part of the operation, but possibly they could be moved a few at a time to a location where a shipping container could be filled, then shipped by sea. If these could ultimately be sold for $200-300 with a profit of $50-100 to the tribe, it would seem like a really worthwhile venture. And it would be an ongoing thing. The demand for the product is constant and unending. One could still opt for the rental casket, but the visual of the plain wooden box in our civilized funerals would make a dramatic statement and would propel this idea quickly.

I’m assuming there is protective regulation against this kind of thing as I’ve never heard of an imported casket. I’ve yet to check.

Got to thinking about this whole thing with regard to I-TEC’s involvement. It hit me that the central dynamic that has made the “Beyond the Gates” story so compelling is death. Death is something westerners don’t want to think about but all of us know we cannot avoid it. The thought of risking, facing, and enduring death by conscious choice forces the issue of each of us to consider life on both sides of death, what is truly important, and ultimately how we live each day in light of the inevitable. So I’m thinking that dealing with death is entirely related to everything I-TEC is about and what the Palm Beach story is about and indeed what the very Gospel is about.

Perhaps the gates of splendor should be made of plywood.