Son Builds His Dad’s Coffin in Labor of Love : Mortality: New Hampshire man crafts a pine box to comply with father’s wishes. “It can be very sad and yet very uplifting,” he says.

In his back yard workshop, Ignatius MacLellan has almost finished building the pine coffin that awaits his father’s death.

It is a strong box, 6 feet 9 inches long, 2 feet 4 inches wide, 21 inches high. As coffins go, it is a bit on the long side to accommodate his 6-foot-3 father, who is dying of prostate cancer.

The elegant box is finished like fine furniture. Made of the clearest pine, it has a cherrywood cross inlay at the head. Plugs cover countersunk screws.

Some people have told him building the casket for his 67-year-old father is morbid. But others have told him they find his devotion moving.

“It certainly makes you aware of your own mortality and it can be very sad and yet very uplifting,” the son said.

Too sick to travel from his home in Barrington, R.I., his father, S. Joseph MacLellan, probably will not see the casket over which his son literally shed tears “when the box was transformed into my dad’s coffin.”

MacLellan, 34, a lawyer for the state, likes to work with wood and write. In a first-person newspaper account of his project, he recounted that he blurted out: “I will build it!” when his father wondered where he would get a plain pine coffin.

But MacLellan found there was much more to the job than simply building a box. In his narrative, he recalled his and his family’s plodding progress by phone through cemeteries and funeral homes and Rhode Island state agencies to nail down laws governing burial.

“Since people die every day, you would think answers could easily be obtained. Not so,” he wrote. He found it frustrating dealing with reluctant funeral directors, but humorous to hear them refer to the dead as “patients.”

MacLellan said some morticians became evasive when he made his unusual request for details on burial in a homemade coffin.

The most helpful, MacLellan said, was Raymond Romano of the Wilbur-Romano Funeral Home in Warren, R.I.

“I’d never had a request about a homemade coffin,” Romano said in a telephone interview. But he gave MacLellan the information he sought.

“A lot of people say they want to be buried in a pine box,” Romano said, “but when it comes time they end up with the standard commercial casket,” usually of steel and wood.

MacLellan’s work is almost complete. “I haven’t decided about handles for the coffin,” he said.

For that decision, he will visit Horace Bailey, who also happens to live in Bow, about three miles to the south in a log house he built himself.

Bailey has been building pine caskets since 1981, but until recently MacLellan did not know that. Bailey, proprietor of Pine Tree Products, thinks he is the only full-time finished pine coffin maker in northern New England.

Bailey, who read MacLellan’s narrative in the Sunday Monitor, said he will advise MacLellan to install rope handles, the kind he puts on the 200 coffins he makes each year and sells almost exclusively to funeral homes in New England.

Bailey went into the business when he was laid off as an architectural engineer. He called upon the skill with which he had built a pine coffin for a stage play two decades earlier.

“I understand why people want to be buried in a pine box. When I croak, I plan to be buried in one of my boxes,” the 67-year-old native of Newbury, Vt., said.

Pine coffins, Bailey said, appeal to people “who want something simple and dignified, hand-crafted--and not something glitzy with satin, something that lights up and plays music.”

“Henry Cabot Lodge and his wife are in my boxes,” Bailey said.