âA lifetimeâs worth of workbench philosophy in a heartfelt memoir about the connection between a father and sonâ (Kirkus Reviews)âthe acclaimed author of The Hard Way on Purpose confronts mortality, survives loss, and finds resilience through an unusual woodworking projectâconstructing, with his father, his own coffin.
David Giffels grew up fascinated by his fatherâs dusty, tool-strewn workshop and the countless creations it inspired. So when he enlisted his eighty-one-year-old dad to help him build his own casket, he thought of it mostly as an opportunity to sharpen his woodworking skills and to spend time together. But the unexpected deaths of his mother and, a year later, his best friend, coupled with the dawning realization that his father wouldnât be around forever for such offbeat adventuresâand neither would heâled to a harsh confrontation with mortality and loss.
Over the course of several seasons, Giffels returned to his fatherâs barn in rural Ohio, a place cluttered with heirloom tools, exotic wood scraps, and long memory, to continue a pursuit that grew into a meditation on grief and optimism, a quest for enlightenment, and a way to cherish time with an aging parent. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with some of the hardest questions we all face as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss. Furnishing Eternity is âan entertaining memoir that moves through gentle absurdism to a poignant meditation on death and what comes before itâ (Publishers Weekly).
âTender, witty and, like the woodworking it describes, painstakingly and subtly wrought. Furnishing Eternity continues Giffelsâs unlikely literary career as the bard of Akron, OhioâŠOnly 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 dramaâ (The New York Times Book Review).