It was a warm breezy morning in the late 1990s when I walked downstairs and dropped into the living room. The house was quiet except for the noises of an outdoor Cape Cod summer— our pilot dad was away on a trip and my littlest sibling John was upstairs and still snoozing— destined as usual to sleep in as our Hatchville home was in full vacation mode.

I knew that my little brother and his friends had been up late doing God knows what that 15 year old boys are wont to do.  My eyes swept over the discards from the night before: a TV set and video game console in disarray, shoes and drinks scattered about the floor.  It seemed to have been deserted, but suddenly my ears recorded a disturbance in the hum of morning calm. It was the steady inhale and exhale coming from a place that was beyond my field of vision. Then my eye caught the barely ajar cover of our coffee table. There was clearly something inside.

Our coffee table at that time just so happened to have been my father’s casket.  With tensed fingers, I leaned over and carefully picked up the entire cover in order to get a better look inside. Sure enough, nestled comfortably in a blanket was my brother’s neighborhood friend, Sean O’Connor. Clearly he spent the night, and had selected the coffin over the couch. So as not to disturb him, I carefully replaced the cover and made my way back upstairs to get ready for my shift at the local seafood restaurant.

So before you start to wonder what the fuck goes on in my house, I will reassure you that my father is still alive and continuing to raise general Hell in his own Hallinan way. He is not a big fan of big government or even the Death Business, and years ago he took it upon himself to consult an undertaker while constructing his own (free) pine eternal resting box. Dad has always been a builder, and amongst all of the stuff that he has built, I never once considered that the coffin might be weird.

I think that all of us, to a certain extent, have a sort of preoccupation with death. Dad certainly has, and even now at the spry age of 78 I am sure that the idea crosses his mind with increased frequency. But like all of us, he has already experienced loss at more stages of his life than I am even aware.  Just yesterday I was reminded of one of these instances.

On my way home from visiting an old friend in Mashpee, I stopped at the newly-rebuilt town library.  When it was a much smaller building, I was aware that it housed a grandfather clock that was built by my dad many years ago. I wanted to see for myself that the new building still held the clock.

I’m one of five thriving children, but as a very young girl I remember faintly how my mother suffered a miscarriage in the final stages of her pregnancy. I was going to have another sister, but instead, when she was born she had already left us. When she was born she looked “asleep”—by the account of my father. An unimaginably sad event for both of my parents. As a remembrance, the Chief Pilot at Air New England gave my parents a pink dogwood tree that was planted in our front yard. As children we never did much more to mention Emily’s brief presence in our life, but we knew that this beautiful tree was hers.

To thank the hospital for all that they did for my family (and perhaps as a way to deal with his own grief), my dad the pilot-builder-rabble rouser constructed a grandfather clock and donated it to the maternity ward of Falmouth Hospital. At some stage, the clock made its way to the Mashpee Library and the last I saw it— at least two decades ago— that is where it stood.

As I entered the main doors I was directed to the children’s section of the multi-story library, and immediately I rested my eyes on Dad’s handiwork. Not only did he build the house where we grew up, but he also cut, sanded and stained much of the furniture that filled our home. He always inscribed each piece with scraps of his thoughts on the day he finished each project.

Rather than walking straight toward the clock, I stopped at the main desk and spoke to the older receptionist manning the desk.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman with a name tag that said Mrs. Burke, “I know this is a strange request, but do you mind if I take a look at your grandfather clock?”  She looked at me for a moment before I continued: “My dad built the clock and I just…“

Mrs. Burke cut me off. As it turned out, I didn’t need to explain. She informed me of her great love for the clock, and that she has worked alongside it for years. She not only knew the story, but she once met the man who made it. Mashpee is not a huge town, so I did not find this altogether surprising. Together we wove around little kids having books read to them by their parents and we stood in front of the white pine timepiece. I smiled and felt grateful that the town decided to put it in this particular room.

Mrs. Burke opened the clock’s door and allowed me to reread Dad’s inscription. As usual, there was the standard report of current and historical world events— but it wasn’t until you got to the very bottom that you understood why the clock was made in the first place. Before signing off, he mentioned the maternity ward, as well as our family’s great thanks for their support in our time of unexpected loss of a baby girl.

The librarian asked me more about my family now, and also about the other things that my father built. I started to tell her about how he made a piece of furniture for each of us five kids— and how this little sister, the one that we would never know— perhaps this clock qualified as her piece of furniture too. I started to explain that Dad finished each of our pieces by carving a single rose on the surface, and as I did this she smiled and shut the door to the clock.

It had escaped my memory that Dad had indeed included a single rose on the clock as well— just below the place where he etched in gold the name of “Emily”.  For a reason that I still don’t quite understand, tears came to my eyes as Mrs. Burke looked at me examining my dad’s handiwork.  For a split second I felt overwhelmed by a connection with a stranger who very well could have been my fourth sister.

Back to the coffin. To this day Dad lives on the second floor of the barn located on our property.  For as long as we have lived here, this has always been the standard arrangement.  I don’t think twice about how I grew up, or the creative ways in which we were raised by our parents. Our Mashpee neighborhood already provided a heavy dose of unconventional, so we always seemed to fit right in with our neighbors…but I digress.  These days, Dad’s coffin also resides on the second floor of the barn just on the other side of his bedroom. I gather that it will stay there up until the moment that it will be of permanent need in some greener pasture on Cape Cod.

All of these thoughts might seem morbid, but I honestly don’t dwell upon any of it at all. The presence of the coffin only cropped up again last night when I went out to the barn to turn on the heat in my father’s bedroom. My eye caught the upright box as I made my way to the landing of the barn’s winding stairs.

 

I don’t have the craftsman’s hands that were bestowed upon my father (John got those). So at no point in the future do I envision myself etching a rose in pine wood in such a way that will pay tribute to my mother, father, or some other person of import in my life. Nor do I see myself commandeering my dad’s table saw in the name of creating my own modestly priced receptacle (I will opt for the Folgers can, thank you very much).

But still, I think there is something to be said for respecting and shedding light on a moment that is traditionally an occurrence of dark finality in our lives. Coffee tables, grandfather clocks, and yes, even St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Falmouth where I frequently wave at my departed grandmother—each one retains their rightful place in our twisted and beautifully carpented lives.

These people, the ones who are still here and those who have long since left us, they make our lives more colorful and storied. For me, stumbling across these artifacts made me more cognizant of the impact that each of them have had on my own family’s particular webwork. We may be pretty freaking weird, but goddamnit we sure know a thing or two about marking the passage of time.