... a book that is tender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought ... For better or worse, Furnishing Eternity is very much a guys’ book. The emotional center rests on Giffels’s relationships with his father, a retired civil engineer whose life force exerts itself in the workshop, and with his best friend ... With a writer as talented as Giffels, though, this reader could accept the bromances and the gender essentialism as the prices of an emotionally satisfying narrative ...Giffels lovingly but never worshipfully traces the craft of coffin-making, and in so doing lets the essence of himself and his father be revealed through action. Only a very skilled engineer of a writer can transform the fits and starts, the fitted corners and sudden gouges of the assembly process into a kind of page-turning drama. And only a wise writer can resist the temptation to deliver a formulaic epiphany at book’s end.
Death comes slowly. Death comes swiftly. It comes with varying degrees of pain. It awaits us with certainty yet leaves us struggling to comprehend the point of what came before it and what will follow ... The memoir, his [Giffels's] third, began as an attempt to settle the great casket debate once and for all ... Giffels recounts working on it [a casket] with his father, a man whose arms are now loose and scaly - arms that Giffels remembers as once being muscular, back when he would watch him in that workshop as child ... Nail by nail and plank by plank a story started taking shape. Yes, about a son and a father and also a coffin, but also about tthe next stage - in life and in Giffels' literary career ... Furnishing Eternity bears witness to the second half of the life cycle: Here the adult son ponders the time he has left with his parents before he enters the role of family elder.
As he nears his 50th birthday, Giffels, a professor of creative writing at the University of Akron and a native of that city, sketches an enigmatic project: the building of his own coffin with his octogenarian father, Thomas ... As father and son embark on the project, Giffels’ longtime best friend, John, an artist, is diagnosed with fatal esophageal cancer; his rapid decline imbues Furnishing Eternity with elegiac power ... The memoir is strongest when it’s focused on Giffels and his father in the workshop, tactile and immediate, as Giffels evokes the lush grains of wood, the tools’ allure, the 'mealy' spray of sawdust. Occasionally the narrative goes slack, marred by gratuitous asides and editorializing... A varnished, carefully crafted box, a spark of life within: Here’s an obvious yet affecting metaphor for the book itself.
...a father-son, build-it-yourself journey that became something much more than a simple woodworking project... The project became a labor of love. David was able to bond with his father while confronting his own grief and mortality. It also became the fodder for his third book, Furnishing Eternity... In the five years or so it took to write the book and build the casket, Giffels said, his dad’s health declined. Although the book has a heavy undertone of grief and mortality, there’s a lot of humor mixed in, too ... After cobbling together pieces of pine and oak purchased at Home Depot to create his casket and countless words to fill a book, Giffels is still at a loss to explain the mysteries of death — other than it is inevitable and often unexpected.
So he and his father decided to build a coffin together—but not one for the father, an 81-year-old widower whose own life had been threatened by cancer. They built one for the author, who was in no immediate need of one, except perhaps for literary purposes and for the need to finish the project before his father died ... Intimations of mortality intensified as the author lost his best friend to cancer, shortly following the death of the author’s mother, which had blindsided him ...in addition to providing a bonding opportunity with his father, the coffin became a way of dealing with grief and with mortality ... A lifetime’s worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and son.
Father and son bond over a lugubrious building project in this sweetly mordant saga of death and carpentry ... The process unfolds as a quirky ode to the art of woodworking, as the duo savor odd bits of wood, pore over blueprints, and merge into the flow of routing and planing in the sacred space of the workshop ... Giffels treats these heavy themes with a light touch and deadpan humor, drawing vivid, affectionate portraits of loved ones in the richly textured setting of Akron, Ohio. The result is an entertaining memoir that moves through gentle absurdism to a poignant meditation on death and what comes before it.
