This Funeral Boxes.com deal is just one guy. Me, John Teisberg.

I’ve been making funeral boxes off and on for about thirty years now and it’s a oddly delightful thing to do.

Every box is made carefully by hand and one at a time. It’s not a fast process and I enjoy moving through each step. Sometimes it almost seems like a kind of meditation. Very satisfying.

How I got started, funeral boxes for my parents.

More than 30 years ago my mother died and we had her cremated. Her ashes arrived in a plastic bag inside of a very unappealing dark brown plastic box. This was the first time I’d ever been involved with a death close to me and I decided to try to make a box for her ashes.

The box was a simple design, but the pine came from a place that was very special to her, Madeline Island in Wisconsin. She and dad would bring all of us kids up there for the long summers and those were very good days for us.

She loved to paint pictures and she was crazy about daisies. After a lot of thought I carefully carved eight daisy’s into the top of the box, one for each of her kids. The box was simple and the light color of the raw pine reminded me of butter.

That spring we had a service for her at the little church and she was buried on the island she loved.

A few year later my father died and he gave his body to science. After a few months his ashes arrived in a similar brown plastic box.

We had some time before burying him and I decided to get a little creative with his container. I got more pine from Madeline Island and made a cylinder with rounded ends for him. When it was on it’s side it looked like a medicine capsule. I mounted it to a special base that had eight small doors in it, one for each kid. Behind each door was a space to put something in, a final gift for dad.

Before going up to the church we had a small private gathering in his room. Every one of us had something to say to dad as each of us put our little gift into the chamber. That is one of the sweetest times of my life and still brings tears.