Her creations make an eternal impression
Denise Baxter's coffins doubleas furniture
NORTH SCITUATE, R.I. -- Denise Baxter may claim to sell coffins, but the quaint wooden structures in her store look more like country furniture than homes for the dead. In fact, some of her customers have displayed her coffins in their living rooms, bedrooms, or entryways well before taking final rest in them.
Baxter, 58, opened her store, the Blue Light Coffin Co., two years ago in this bucolic village, across the street from the post office in a faded yellow colonial-style building with an unusual oblong shape that, entirely by chance, resembles the shape of her product. Baxter, who is also a professional portrait painter, says her goal for Blue Light Coffin goes further than providing burial options -- she wants people to accept their inevitable death.
As she describes the stories behind some of her creations, she sits in one of the two rocking chairs in her store, clad in a homey printed cardigan and athletic pants, looking the opposite of gothic or morbid. To the right of the door, a white coffin that doubles as a window seat with a plush red cushion offers guests another place to sit. Light streams from the two generous windows onto the store's lavender-painted walls and the floral welcome mat, where Azumah, her ailing 13-year-old Akita, lounges. She explains that there is no particular type of person who wants to buy a coffin from her. ''But I don't appeal to people interested in something for a ghoulish effect," she says. ''I would just decline gracefully if that was the case."
Baxter points to the eye-grabber in the store, a tall lavender bookshelf with a delicate design of lilacs painted behind the single shelf. Around the sides of the recently-finished piece are tiny green willow leaves, and the strong arms of an oak tree wrap around the outside frame, as though protecting it. The only giveaway that this is an antique-style coffin, standing upright, is its hexagonal shape. The coffin lid, which Baxter says is usually stowed away while the coffin is being used as furniture, has birch tree branches painted on it. The woman who commissioned the coffin, she explains, is a perfectly healthy 61-year-old nurse named Helen Busby. ''She said she liked birches, oaks, and willows," Baxter says. ''When she's laid out it will be really beautiful."
Busby, who lives in Pittsfield, says she is enthralled by Baxter's work. As a volunteer hospice nurse and a hospital nurse, she says the specter of death has always been with her. ''I've never been frightened by death," she says. But she has been appalled when funeral parlors have put thick makeup on her deceased relatives and placed them in heavy metal caskets, she says. ''Now you even have to put coffins in cement containers when you bury people. It's like death is not a natural part of life anymore."
When it comes to her own death, Busby says she wants it done her way. ''Not everybody dies at a nice, ripe old age. I did think for a second, what am I going to do with this big coffin? But we can make a bookcase out of it," she says. Busby says she has visited Blue Light 10 times to discuss the project and has become friends with Baxter in the process.
With her unflappable personality and the New Age music playing in the store, Baxter gives off the air of a modern spiritual consultant, one whose agenda extends beyond making profits to getting to know her clients, helping them understand her take on the cycle of life and death. She says she does not subscribe to any particular religion but has a deep belief in God. The idea for the Blue Light came to her suddenly, she explains, when she went on a one-week meditation workshop. The idea for the store suddenly hit her while meditating. ''It was a revelation from one minute to the next," she says. ''It was something I knew I had to do after that, in spite of having no clue about the coffin business."
Her coffins sell for $2,000, reflecting the typical price of a wood coffin, but this price pales in comparison to the cost of more commonly used and expensive metal coffins, which run between $880 and about $6,300, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Baxter has yet to turn a profit with her sales. The store on average gets two to three visitors a day and business is increasing, she says, but she acknowledges that she is lucky enough to have the private means to keep things going.
''I'd just consider it a success if the existence of this shop makes people even move imperceptibly closer to what they think a good life consists of," she says.
Baxter's daughter, Caitlin Trainor, 30, a dancer with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, says her mother's idea did not completely convince her at first, but now she is considering getting her own coffin to display at home. As a dancer, her injuries and dependence on her body constantly remind her of her mortality, and she says she has come to view her mom's coffins as another reminder to live life fully. She has already come across a red-and-gold design on a fabric that she might like replicated on the coffin, she says.
''They really are beautiful pieces of furniture," Trainor says. ''People might come in and say, 'Wow, what a beautiful handmade bookshelf,' not 'Why do you have a coffin, you weirdo?' "
Some of Baxter's clients have been slower to embrace Baxter's philosophy, even if they like the coffins, some of which are used as tables. Soon after the store opened, Cheryl Hahn of North Scituate saw Baxter's coffins while stopping to chat on her way to the post office. She thought they were pretty, she says, but did not have a pressing need to purchase one, until her husband's brother died last August. She brought her husband, Ted, to Baxter's store, and they found a coffin that was painted in an abstract style in muted purple and gold and embellished with Baxter's stencil work, she said. ''We were a bit apprehensive about how people might receive it," she said. But at the wake, ''people came in and thought [Ted's brother] had selected it himself." 