Hand-painted coffins

On a recent Weekend Edition (NPR), a quite interesting story about a woman who makes hand-painted coffins. (Coffin is "der Sarg" in German. It looks like the English word "sarge," as in short for "sargeant." My linguistical mind whirls.)

At first I thought this was quite a stupid idea. But I started to warm to the idea, very slightly. The artist said many of her clients use the coffins as furniture before they die. And, one particular customer will use it for furniture and will only be displayed in it briefly before being cremated. The coffin will go back to her family to be used as a bookcase. (Photos and story.) Most aren't too creepy, unlike the one at left.

I find the whole coffin topic extra creepy right now. In The Great Influenza, the author talks about how there were coffin shortages during the Spanish influenza epidemic. From Wikipedia:

A letter from a physician at one U.S. Army camp in the 1918 pandemic said:

It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes [...]. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies [...]. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day [...]. Pneumonia means in about all cases death [...]. We have lost an outrageous number of Nurses and Drs. It takes special trains to carry away the dead. For several days there were no coffins and the bodies piled up something fierce [...].