Once Upon a Time...
Hi there, my name is Frances Potter, and I make caskets out of pallets and recycled wood. This is the story of how it all began.
I made my first casket for my Mum, who died at age 95 in a rest home. Her death was expected, and she had outlived everyone she knew apart from me and my sister, so there was really no point in having a funeral. We could make plans well in advance. I came across this website one day, and that inspired us with the confidence to arrange everything ourselves and showed us how to do it. I built Mum a casket out of pallets and my sister made a beautiful lining for it in mauve, Mum's favourite colour.
When Mum died I stayed up until 3am painting a cross and inscription from Psalm 23 on the lid. Doing this for her felt like an incredible honour and privilege, and started me on my grief process. There are a lot of tears mixed in with that paint!
Mum died in 2021, during the second Covid lockdown. Government regulations decreed that only a "licensed funeral director" could deliver a body to a crematorium, so we could not take Mum ourselves in my van, as we had planned. I found that all the "budget" options I'd seen previously on the internet had mysteriously disappeared, and when I started ringing the funeral homes they wanted $3,500 to $4,400 for their "cheapest plan" even though we had done absolutely everything ourselves - the casket, the paperwork and dressing Mum's body. All we actually needed was transport to the crematorium.
Eventually we found our way to George O'Donnell of Private Cremations, who chose to help us rather than exploiting us. While he delivered Mum to the crematorium we headed to Eastbourne to have an icecream in her honour (an icecream had always been one of Mum's favourite treats). A little fox terrier dog wandered around our car as we were eating our icecreams and we felt that was a sign, as Mum adored dogs and our family dog had always been a fox terrier. God bless you Mum!
I became friends with George and started doing all I could to support him. I persuaded another good friend who died in 2022 to employ George instead of using a funeral home. For less than $10,000 he arranged a massive church funeral with live streaming and catering, and I got to make a beautiful personalised casket for my dear friend which many people helped to decorate. Another family someone knew had paid a funeral home nearly $20,000 for exactly the same thing the week before.
After that I started making caskets for other people. One day I came upon this website again and discovered that Robert, who ran it at that time, was planning to retire. I decided to ring him for a chat about caskets and the funeral industry, and to cut a very long story short, I ended up taking this website over. On the day I went up to sign the papers and pick up his last casket, this is what the two of us I looked like. This was absolutely not staged! Needless to say, I took it as a very clear sign that I had made the right decision.
I look forward to continuing to inspire and empower people for many years to come. Taking care of a loved one's funeral arrangements yourself is something you can look back on with pride for the rest of your life, as I do with the things we did for Mum.
I wish you all the best in your DIY funeral adventures. And I thank Robert for running this website for 16 years and helping who knows how many New Zealanders to carry out their own DIY funerals. What a champion you are, my friend.