Now I can see the barely discernible spot in the shade of the trees where the floor of the pavilion once stood. I wouldn’t be able see even that if the materials hadn’t been sturdy and weatherproofed.
Looking at the silver-leaved trees I remember with a shock what we used to eat here.
Marja-Terttu’s favourite food.
Greek salad.
Tomatoes, cucumbers, plenty of raw onion and green peppers, with heaps of sour feta cheese crumbled over the top and a generous handful of black kalamata olives. Unpitted, of course.
Marja-Terttu would spit the stones on to her fork, and I less elegantly into my hand, but we would both lob them happily, slightly drunk on white wine, over our shoulders into the woods.
And now, here on the Other Side, in the ruins of the Hopevale boat shed, is a lush olive grove.
The certainty of it swells inside me, huge, incomprehensible and delightful.
This world has links to my own. I’ve been a part of what it is today, and so have Pupa and Eero. The bees may have chosen this world for their own reasons, but in a very tiny way it’s my world, too. And Eero’s. And Pupa’s.
Our inheritance.
Maybe the ‘now’ of this place is a couple of hundred years on from my own time. The climate could be dramatically different, making this Mediterranean flora possible. Even without people, a climate can change. Or after people. Because there are no people here.
Because I have a bond with this world, perhaps even a sort of responsibility towards it.
And the fact that I found the opening on the same day that Eero …
It hits me again with all its weight, relentless.
I used to think grief was grey and spacious and insubstantial, like a damp fog that surrounds you on every side, one that you can’t get away from because it colours the air, and you breathe it in and out, and it has its own earthy smell that seeps into your pores. I thought of grief as a fleeting thing like fog, like a damp that eventually disperses. One day the greyness is slightly lighter; after a few weeks the damp no longer collects on your skin, the musty smell diminishes, somewhere in the distance a pale sun flashes from between tatters of mist, and the grief dissolves into melancholy and then memory.
Never, not for a moment, did I think that grief could be as hard as a dagger, sharp and unrelenting. That it could strike again and again, always unexpected, hard, straight between my ribs, bright lights in my eyes, black and violet and pain so big that I gasp and stagger. I forget the dagger sometimes for a few moments, perhaps an hour, and that’s the very worst – the stroke of the blade takes me by surprise, still just as hard, cruel, painful. It’s worst at the moment of waking. I open my eyes, and for a moment the world is normal, the half-light of the room friendly, a new morning with a new beginning, the pure smell of unrealized possibilities – and then I remember. Eero. And the dagger strikes, has already struck and its serrated blade turns in the wound.
And the pain hasn’t eased, hasn’t diminished; the blade hasn’t dulled.
The date palms rustle above me, their leaves sharp-edged and crackling.
There’s another noise mixed in, low, purring, a much more familiar – in fact, beloved – sound, full of courage and power and strange hope.
Bees are working busily among the date blossoms.
I can still smile, a very little.
It’s time to go. I’ve made my inspection, now I have things to do.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
WHAT DOES COLONY COLLAPSE HAVE TO DO WITH EATING MEAT?
The disappearances of bees known as colony collapse increasingly reported in the United States – worrying and tragic as it is – has to some extent actually been helpful to ARA’s efforts, since the dairy cows across the pond are traditionally fed alfalfa or clover. The cultivation of these crops has been seriously affected. Vast feed-growing fields have started to yield alarmingly slim harvests or no harvests at all. A few states are still able to produce the feed, but they almost certainly won’t be able to meet demand. At first beef was being sold at a discount in America since so many ranches had to slaughter their animals because of the shortage of feed, especially soy. Now the shortage of both dairy products and meat has begun.
I’ve heard that to secure meat production they first tried feeding the cows corn, wheat, potatoes and rice – all species that don’t require bees to pollinate them – but in spite of the uproar, the lobbying and the demonstrations, the US Senate was forced to interfere in the free market and sanction the use of grain and potatoes as animal feed, because if they hadn’t the people simply wouldn’t have had enough food for themselves.
The Yanks, who consider daily meat a right of citizenship, are, of course, demanding that the government do something so they won’t have to change their eating habits. It is a sad paradox that vegetables have also suffered with the collapse of the bees. Although we in Finland have been spared from colony collapse, perhaps we should also start changing the wasteful habits we’re accustomed to. Reducing the amount of red meat in our diet is beneficial both to the environment and the individual.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 159)
USER NAME: Son of the North
I have northern genes. Finns didn’t come here in search of refined carbohydrates – we came for fish, venison and seal meat. Our systems can’t simply convert to vegetarianism.
USER NAME: Something must be done
Animals kill each other in nature. An animal doesn’t distinguish whether its killer is a human or another animal. Other animals are often more cruel than humans, and they don’t know anything about animal-cruelty laws. So should humans separate the pre dators and prey living in nature and lock them in zoos? What right do people have to allow the suffering in nature to continue?
MODERATOR: E.H.
Many visitors to this blog have already defended meat eating by saying that animals eat each other in nature and thus eating meat is entirely in keeping with the ‘natural order’. Predators, however, have a carnivore’s digestive system and couldn’t change their way of life even if they wanted to. People, on the other hand, have an omnivore’s teeth and digestive system. Early humans more than likely ate plants, grubs, birds’ eggs and other gathered food, perhaps including fish. Large game was a rare indulgence. If humans had evolved to be carnivores they would have the intestines of a lion, the teeth of a baboon and the speed of a cheetah.
USER NAME: Defender of the cabbage
Why do you condone the killing of plants then? Is respect for other species limited to vertebrates? If an organism doesn’t happen to have a spinal cord, is it no longer a living entity to be respected, a mere bit of biomass to be cultivated and manipulated? If it doesn’t happen to feel pain exactly the way that conscious creatures feel it should it lose all of its rights? Vegetarianism is murder, and condoning it is based on artificial, arbitrary habits of discrimination based on experience of pain, consciousness and taxonomy.
USER NAME: Logic
A carrot is a living entity, isn’t it? What’s next, a bean liberation movement? What does the savagely butchered fennel root have to say about it?
USER NAME: Tirsu
@ Defender of the cabbage and Logic, in answer to your question about the rights of plants: if you eat meat you ‘kill’ ten times as many plants indirectly. Animals are fed enough grain to feed humans countless times over.
USER NAME: Divix
Sorry if I’m being stupid, but why aren’t they doing anything about the bee thing in America? Or is there nothing they can do?
SHOW ALL 152 COMMENTS
DAY TWELVE
I’m a good undertaker. Port of Departure is unquestionably the local leader in the field.
One of my basic insights about the funeral business was that much of what we do when a person dies is done to drown our guilt over the fact that we’re still alive.
Primitive peoples’ complex acts of ap
peasement of the dead and funeral rituals that lasted for days weren’t just down to the fear that without them the dead would return to trouble the living. Because the dead return to trouble the living in any case.
I’m quite sure that every one of them is thinking, did I do everything necessary to prevent the death? Should I have done something differently? Could a decision made earlier have prevented the illness or the accident? Or if the person has died of nothing but old age they at least wonder whether they were good enough children, relatives, members of the community.
All the bustle surrounding the deceased and the posthumous praise are a relief to a grieving soul.
It is a paradox that respectable, full-service funeral arrangements rob loved ones of almost all of these beneficial activities. So, how can you offer mourners both things – a consoling, calming ritual as well as a maximum number of billable services?
*
The answers were almost too simple. It was a field that was extremely conservative, so there was an easy opening for a new track.
Port of Departure gave the survivors (and survivors is apt; family members are like wounded, stumbling creatures still struggling to make sense of their world) completely new ways to appease the deceased in as many different, personally appropriate ways as possible.
Take obituaries, for instance.
They’re one of the services that a good funeral director’s handles for its customers. The client tells you what the content should be – the mourners’ names, for instance, and how long they want it to be – and the funeral director’s conveys the material to the local newspaper. The paper then fits the announcement into its customary format.
I’d thought at one time that once home computers and easy-to-use graphics programs became more common personalized, self-designed obituaries would start appearing in the papers. There was no longer any need to choose from depressing, one-size-fits-all formats with their dreary crosses, always in the same font (a verse in italics, the family’s names in bold), the only variations the approved insignia for veterans or the extra bar on an orthodox cross.
A lot of other changes had happened, too. There were a lot more people who weren’t church members or didn’t want a cross in the obituary for whatever reason. The papers offered these customers other standard symbols such as a ship sailing into the sunset. And then there were the members of non-Christian religions. Crescent moons or more exotic symbols were needed.
Some customers had the skill and desire to produce their own ‘signature’ obituary themselves, but that left a certain number of clients who wanted something different but didn’t know how to make it themselves.
Port of Departure came to the rescue, like the cavalry.
I have Eero to thank for that. He was among the first internet natives, part of a generation for whom blogs, social media and everything else on the web was as unremarkable as books, news papers, glue, scissors and correction fluid were to someone my age.
It was Eero who, when he was still practically knee-high, suggested that we move most of Port of Departure’s services to the internet.
Soon our customer website had an unusually broad selection of excellent graphics complete with usage rights for vignette images. The assortment of traditional religious symbols alone numbered in the hundreds. There was faith, hope and love, there were a variety of angels from chubby, dreaming cherubs to rugged archangels brandishing swords. And plenty of secular symbols, too, of course – a bird escaping from a cage, a flock of migrating cranes, a swan, an old gnarled tree, a weeping willow. Flowers, from calla lilies to black roses. A mourning-cloak butterfly, a ripened ear of wheat, a sleeping child, a variety of candles, a broken vase, a flag at half mast, the River of Tuoni, Charon’s raft, even a highly stylized Grim Reaper. Hobbies, subcultures, the image that the loved one clung to till the very last definitely had to be accommodated, too. I never would have guessed that one of the most popular symbols would be two crossed golf clubs.
In addition to the vignettes there had to be a good selection of quotes. Poems, aphorisms, verses. We collected hundreds and hundreds of them, carefully noting the original author of each. This was another area where we went outside the ordinary to find what was needed; in addition to traditional lyric poems and familiar phrases I listed lines from modern poetry, opera, Finnish and English-language rock lyrics and philosophers’ musings on the futility of it all. I had quotes from Shakespeare, Schiller, Goethe, existentialist literature, favourite children’s books (the Moomins, Winnie the Pooh, Astrid Lindgren) and bestsellers that dealt with love or disappearance. I didn’t do all the research myself, of course; I paid a couple of literature and philosophy students to do it over the summer and got a wonderful collection of material for a few hundred euros. And whenever some individualist came up with some new quote we’d never heard, my industrious ferrets would add it to our collection. The families were welcome to create their own epitaphs, of course, which were, in all their homespun simplicity, sacred to us and thus never added to our collection.
I also ordered a variety of obituary layouts from our graphic artists. Customers could use their Port of Departure user name to sit in front of their own computer at home and combine images, fonts and words of wisdom like a jigsaw puzzle, and when they were satisfied with the result, save the obituary on our website for us to send to the newspaper.
Personalized obituaries sent by Port of Departure soon distinguished themselves as clearly superior. It was silly not to take advantage of that. I offered customers a reduction on the obituary pricing (easy to offer because the paper gave us a substantial volume discount) if they would allow us to put our insignia on the announcement. It meant that in the upper left-hand corner of the obituary it would read Port of Departure, in tiny lettering. Advertising agencies used to do the same thing in the 1980s, placing their logo on the most visible or creative newspaper advertisements, probably in the hope of winning a competition or to garner interest from those looking to hire an advertising firm. Naturally some of our clients balked at the idea and thought it was very tasteless, and I couldn’t really blame them, but some of them were happy to get a discount, and a significant number, who overlapped with the former to a certain extent, thought the logo was a mark of quality, branding, a gesture that said that their loved one was led to their final rest with the highest level of professionalism.
Sometimes half of the obituaries in the Sunday edition would be signed by Port of Departure. It was marketing with a capital M. Once, just for fun, I counted the number of column inches of exposure for Port of Departure published in one month. I’d got the column equivalent of a couple of full-page advertisements in a section of the paper read very carefully by my principal target audience: the ageing.
With Eero’s help and advice we made it so that you could also use the website to choose your coffin, headstone, urn or flower arrangement or to plan the menu for the memorial service or listen to suggested hymns and other music. I probably don’t need to tell you that since Eero was helping me our suggested music included a lot more than the usual ‘Nearer My God to Thee’. Céline Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ was a long-time funeral hit, as was Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ and Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’. Even Black Sabbath’s ‘Electric Funeral’ was heard at many a heavy-metal memorial service.
But that was just the beginning. When I realized what a demand there was for personalized funeral services (we would drape the coffin in retro Marimekko fabric if the customer requested it) I also realized that even at this most extreme moment of equality – death – some people, or their loved ones, wanted to stand out from the crowd.
When I discreetly began offering my customers theme funerals it felt blasphemous at first, then logical and, after several decades, like the best idea I ever had. Why shouldn’t the deceased’s profession, beloved hobby or some other penchant be clearly on view at their last public appearance? The coffin, the decorations, the food, the music, even the way the mourners and invited guests dressed cou
ld be adapted to the theme. I’ve arranged a Wagner-themed Viking funeral for an opera singer, a medieval funeral for a history buff, a Star Trek funeral, a nautical funeral, an ice-hockey-themed funeral (with the deceased’s ashes placed in an urn modelled on the Canada Cup), a Peter Pan funeral for a six-year-old (on his way to Never Never Land, where he would play for all eternity with the Lost Boys and never grow up).
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It’s as if I drifted into this business for the sake of this moment.
I know that many professionals would refuse. I’m not alone in that. A surgeon can refuse to operate on his own relatives, a priest doesn’t necessarily want to ordain his own offspring, a judge isn’t even allowed to preside over a case involving relatives. But I don’t want anyone else to look after Eero.
*
The bullets hit him in the back. His face was uninjured. In the hospital there was a cloth wrapped around his face to close up his open mouth.
I’ve dressed him in the bright-red button-up shirt that he liked so much, the blue jeans with the knees almost worn through, the canvas shoes made of recycled fabric. No embroidered shroud for him.
He looks calm and serious. I’ve only added a little colour to his face. I don’t want him to look cheerful and red-cheeked, like he’s come straight from an act of protest.
The Blood of Angels Page 10