For those who work with their hands, there is a moment before the raw materials come to represent the end product.

In the second before the chisel hits a green mass of soapstone, it is a metamorphic rock with the potential to take on any form, to confer any meaning.

Philip Merchant has always worked with hands, especially with wood. He's an experienced cabinet maker who lives surrounded by objects he and his family have built.

Venturing into the Yukon's forests, Merchant cuts down standing dead trees to breathe new life into old wooden flesh.

Taking pride in leaving the smallest possible ecological footprint on the planet, he reclaims old materials he finds in the bush and in the landfill rather than buying newly-made objects.

Merchant is an experienced builder. He is a man who often faces blank planks of wood in the moment before they take shape.

Recently, Merchant chose the pieces of wood he used to build the most important project of his life a coffin for his oldest son, James Merchant.

Philip faced the boards realizing they could have become anything, a kitchen cupboard, a table, a cabinet, he told the Star this week.

The wood from this tree, however, had a different fate.

'Of all the millions and millions of trees that grow in the Yukon, and of all of the millions and millions of trees that die in the Yukon, this particular tree was going to become one of the most important trees in my existence,' he said.

Transforming the pieces of fir, pine and oak, from plank to coffin, made it impossible to avoid James' death, Philip explained.

The space left inside the long wooden box, which he calls James' bed, left no room for illusion.

'As far as confronting what the reality is, and the impossibility of ducking reality, that space is about as tough as it gets,' Philip said.

The process of building the coffin became a final testament to James. It also provided a place for the family to begin healing.

'You are constantly reaffirming your love for that person,' Philip said.

James, who was raised in the Yukon, was 27 when he died suddenly this fall. He was fatally hit by a car while walking along a dark road in Quebec.

In what Philip called a strange twist of fate, he was working on the first coffin he'd ever built, for a friend of his, when he received the news about his son.

Whitehorse RCMP arrived at his MacPherson subdivision house at around 2 a.m.

When Philip returned to his workshop at about noon that same day, he was confronted with the coffin he had begun to build.

'But the world had changed,' he said.

In the process of finishing the first coffin, Philip said he had a 'glimpse of the possible,' in terms of how a life could be honoured in wood and metal and rope.

'There's not a lot of rules,' he said.

'I know how big my son is, that's how big it needs to be.'

The coffin is made of materials that Philip had on hand, that he'd been collecting for a long time.

'James would have loved the idea that they were salvaged, sort of risen from the ashes of the Whitehorse landfill,' he said.

The bottom of the coffin is made of a fir door frame with an oak panel fitted inside. The door serves as a symbol for a portal into the next world or the next life, Philip explained.

The rest of the coffin is made of pine.

The joints are hand-cut dovetails, which Philip said either work or don't work.

'(With) the focus that I had, they went together once; that was it.'

The details of the coffin then took form, piece by piece.

Philip and his two sons bore holes into the dovetails and drove in arrows that James had used as boy.

A well-worked piece of rope was strung through cast iron bases, around the sides of the coffin, to serve as handles.

The rope seemed fitting, Philip said, because James was a horseman.

'He'd become such a horseman,' said Philip, a territorial wildlife technician. 'His whole life had become horses.'

James was described as having a magical touch and real empathy for horses, Philip said. This is trait he may have inherited from Philip's father, who trained polo ponies in Argentina.

The rope around James' coffin was bound with caribou rawhide and the lid was eventually tethered down with moosehide, on toggles made from the antlers of a moose killed on his brother William's first hunt.

James loved hunting for food and had spent significant time in Old Crow, Philip said.

He remembered one sheep hunt the two of them had gone on near Rose Lake. Later, on those same trails, Philip found some horseshoes.

These horseshoes were also nailed to James' coffin. A 'J' fashioned from a small piece of copper pipe marked the head.

In keeping with the kind of values James held in his life, Philip lined the coffin with fresh wood shavings and oat bundles, and a piece of denim.

Philip suspended a birch bark canoe the two of them had made together over James' chest, as a vessel to take his spirit into the next life or the next world.

While Philip was working with wood, his wife, Lise, was stitching James a quilt of fall colours, with deep blues and greens.

'So he's all tucked in under this quilt,' Philip said. 'I can't imagine a person having a more demonstrated love for them.'

When the coffin was complete, it looked like a lifeboat, Philip said.

The wood was left unfinished. At the funeral, during one of the hymns, people who wanted to leave their mark on the coffin were asked to come sand the wood.

'I was just astounded that people kept coming row by row,' Philip said. 'They just kept coming.'

All of the fingerprints and tears and DNA that touched the coffin went into the ground with James, he said.

Being forced to face his son's death without illusion helped him begin to heal, Philip said.

'It doesn't let you off easy. It doesn't let you duck reality,' he said.

This process of hand-building, of creating a lasting testament to a loved one, helped the wound to begin healing from the deepest point out towards the surface, he said.

'It can be a tremendously healing process in terms of reaffirming your love for that person,' he said.

While Philip is a woodworker and a builder, he said it was a creation that came not from formal knowledge, but from the heart.

'It's not necessary for it to be perfect.'