Friends help terminally ill woman weave her own burial tray in Massachusetts

Friends gathered in a Montague workshop and spent two days turning a burial tray into a final act of companionship, helping MaddyChristine Hope Brokopp build the container that will one day hold her body.

Brokopp, who is in her 50s and undergoing treatment for terminal cancer, had begun looking for a way to make her own casket last fall. Her search led her to Mary Lauren Fraser, a casket weaver in Massachusetts’ Pioneer Valley, and over Valentine’s Day Brokopp and her closest friends drove from Pennsylvania to Fraser’s studio in Montague.

Fraser, who has been weaving caskets for 11 years, makes both lidded caskets and burial trays. Brokopp chose the tray. Fraser said it would be about two inches longer than Brokopp’s 5-foot-5 frame, making it roughly 5-foot-7 or 5-foot-8. Before the group arrived, Fraser had already built the tray’s frame with five long pine rods.

Over two days, friends took turns weaving willow through the pine frame, working side by side in a project that felt as ordinary as a household craft and as intimate as a funeral rite. They drank peppermint tea, talked about children and spring plans, and joked as they worked. Among them was Cynthia Siegers, one of Brokopp’s oldest friends, who flew in from the Netherlands for the gathering. Siegers’ birthday fell on Valentine’s Day.

Brokopp wanted the process to be more than sorrowful. She hoped it would be a fun experience, even while recognizing how surreal it was to make the tray that will someday carry her remains. That mix of humor, labor and tenderness reflects a broader shift in how some families are approaching death, with more attention to personalized funerals, home death care and green burial practices.

Fraser’s woven caskets and trays are made of willow and pine and are designed to biodegrade. Her work is tied to the green burial and home funeral movements in New England, where some families are looking for alternatives that bring the dying process closer to home and make room for ritual shaped by the people who knew the person best.

For Brokopp, the tray was not only a burial container. It became a way to reclaim some measure of control at the end of life, with friends helping transform a private confrontation with mortality into a shared act of care.