Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  I ask Neil about the dream.

  Some people, he says, are born into funeral service. They have the name. They have no choice. Others think they’ll make a whack of money, and they get into the trade for the nice suits and expensive cars, but they don’t know how hard they’ll have to work, answering calls at 3 a.m. and doing removals on weekends. Then there are those with natural talent. Natalie, he says, has it. She could tell just by looking at a body what chemical index to use in the embalming room. She set features like a sculptor. It’s too bad, he says: Natalie had this idea I favoured Shannon over her.

  “Do you?”

  “I’m grooming Shannon for bigger things. She has natural talent too. She understands families. She understands where this business is going. If Natalie had stayed I would’ve given her all the space she needed in the prep room. It was hers. But I guess you can’t have two queen bees in the same hive.”

  Or two brothers: Jon, it turns out, has left the funeral home too, to put all his efforts into becoming an electrician.

  The sandwiches are delicious. As we’re leaving, the man behind the counter says it’s a good day for a burial. In our black suits we’re either funeral directors or mobsters, and he guessed right.

  “I want it storming for mine,” he says. “Same as when I came in. I come from a farm family. So I’ve been crying from day one.”

  Back at the church, Richard fills us in on recent developments. The brother and sister are at war, he says. The sister hasn’t been home for thirty years and the brother thinks she’s only come back so she can get her piece of the dad’s estate. He’s seated them on opposite sides of the chapel. The pastor raises her hands and says, “We’ve come to hear the good news for Jim and for us. Please be seated.”

  A few hymns later the guests are sent downstairs for sandwiches and raisin buns and coffee while we load the casket into the hearse. Neil and I hustle to the cemetery in the van, and Richard follows, leading a procession of cars. Pallbearers lift the casket onto the straps of the Device and I hold my breath. The pastor makes the sign of the cross on the lid with dirt from our Gerber jar, and Richard flips the hand brake with his foot. Unlike at city cemeteries, they’re not shy here about seeing the box all the way into the hole. The casket lurches, and stops. Richard kicks the Device. Now the casket sinks slowly until it hits bottom, and I can breathe again. The brother produces an ice cream bucket filled with dirt he brought from the farm. He drops a handful into the grave and I can hear it scatter on the wood. Then he hands the bucket to his sister. She won’t take it.

  When they leave to join their friends for lunch at the church, Richard and I strike the set, folding up the greens and dismantling the miraculous, if temperamental, Device. I look into the open grave, at the dirt on the lid and the sheaf of dried wheat, and I think of what Neil said: The funeral home works very much like the family farm.

  TO KEEP THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE, WE HAVE TO CHANGE

  Summer at the Factory means the smell of freshly turned earth from Brookside cemetery, and Zep bug spray, which Shannon uses to fog the dressing room to keep flies off the customers.

  “The last thing you want is to open the casket and have a fly come out of someone’s nose,” she says. Shannon’s full of helpful hints. When threading a needle in the prep room, she says, resist the urge to put it in your mouth. Moisten the end with water from the sink: “Never lick anything in a funeral home.”

  I remember when I first came in here, how gruesome those curved needles looked, what it felt like to poke one through leathery skin. Neil told me to be patient, that my natural fear would evolve into something deeper: respect and awe for the body. We live in a caste system, where the Brahmins subcontract their problems to the unclean, the Dalit caste, the corpse-handlers. That’s us. In time I’d get used to my social role. And the people I worked with would get used to me, once they figured out I wasn’t after their jobs. This is a cutthroat business, he said, the corporates are panicked over low death rates and new competition from low-end discount cremationists. They are laying off staff. Every new face in a funeral home is a threat to someone’s groceries.

  At first my co-workers were polite but guarded, explaining and demonstrating technique while I took reams of notes, and absorbed the mantra: We do this for the families, we treat the dead like we’d treat our own fathers and aunts, each case is handled with respect and dignity—all fuzzy noble notions made fuzzier by repetition. When Glenn showed me for the eighth time how to operate secondary and primary burners on the retort he must have wondered: when is this guy going to leave? But I didn’t (or I did and came back), and soon enough they grew bored with my presence, a good sign that I was fitting in. I did my removals, and cleaned orifices and fingernails, and I wet-mopped and swept my way from suspicious novelty to the guy who could be trusted on scut jobs, like picking up Super Glue (for closing lips on difficult cases) and a curling iron at Costco. I’d joined their caste. But I still can’t sew up dead skin without feeling my own skin prickle. I’ve tried imagining it as not unlike trussing a pork roast, but these pork roasts at Neil’s have hands, and fingers, and suntan shadows where wedding rings used to be.

  I still find the morning meetings brisk and confusing. Richard chairs them from Aubrey Street, while the rest of us crowd around the speakerphone in the dressing room at the crematorium. Neil’s in his office eating bran flakes and hot water, the same breakfast his grandfather ate every day. He’s on speakerphone too, even though if we punched a hole in the dressing room wall we could reach through to his office and touch him.

  “Concrete liner’s been ordered, cemetery’s been ordered,” says Janice, one of the undertakers, reporting on the case of a woman who’ll be on view at Aubrey this afternoon at one o’clock, with a service and burial to follow. “Flowers are ordered, they’ll go to the church except for a single rose to come here, and that’s for the family to put in the casket. Family’s providing the music on their own, pastor is handing out bulletins and they’re going to Robin’s Donuts after the burial.”

  “Is that open to everyone?” Richard says.

  “Yes.”

  “Good, because they’ve got the Sip to Win going on, eh?”

  “Oh. Yes, the contest.”

  “Sip to Win, yeah. Who’s next?”

  Eirik reports on the prep for a man due tomorrow at Gimli Lutheran for a service followed by cremation. His family sent an American flag to drape over the casket. He was in the U.S. Air Force, retired, and the flag is very old, an heirloom, forty-six stars. Next is the case of the woman in the casket that may or may not be too small for her, depending on whether you agree with Eirik, who thinks it is, or Shannon, who thinks it isn’t. Shannon says the woman’s only five feet tall, and Eirik says it’s not her height that matters but her width, and whips out a tailor’s tape measure and stretches it with some drama across the woman’s shoulders. She’s lying in her casket just behind us in the dressing room. She does look a bit cramped, but not uncomfortable, if that’s any way to describe a dead body. Shannon says the woman’s sister picked out the casket herself, and Eirik says we’re all wider when we’re lying down, that’s physics, and Shannon no longer appreciates the implication that oversights were made, and I look at the woman in the middle of all this. She’s holding a heart-shaped picture frame in her folded hands. Inside the frame is a photo of Elvis.

  Richard calls for order, and Neil says, “Wait a sec.”

  We all stare at the speakerphone.

  “What the hell kind of flag has forty-six stars?”

  We all stare at Eirik.

  “Forty-eight,” he says. “Sorry.”

  The working day starts in the prep room, where I meet Adina, the new apprentice, a tall young woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight she looks permanently surprised, or terrified, or both. She’s studying for her licence online, with Shannon as her sponsor, and so far she has nineteen embalmed bodies to her credit. To graduate she needs fifty. Ten years ago this would’ve
been a snap, a month’s work, but with cremation overtaking the full-fig funeral as the disposition of choice, she needs every prep she can get her hands into. Today, Number 20 is a thin man with a few days’ growth of beard, a scrubby moustache, dry cloudy eyes and a breathing tube still stuck between his teeth, which Adina pulls out with a wet pop, then drops into the garbage bin as if it were a dead mouse.

  While lathering his face I remember what Natalie told me about shaving the dead: long easy strokes, never choppy. Corpses get razor burn too. Before we go any further, Adina wants a ruling on the moustache. Shave it off or leave it on? Half-hearted as it is, that may be the way he wore it, or it may be the artifact of a long hospital stay. Either way it’s not our place to infer intention when it comes to grooming, so she calls Richard, who agrees to call the family. Families get calls like this all the time, between the arrangements and the funeral: Collar up or down? Shirt tucked in or out? Eyeglasses on or off? If a man wore his hair like Stalin in life he should not look like Dee Dee Ramone in the casket.

  Clothes cutting is another matter. Families aren’t consulted, it comes down to undertaker taste, although there’s been a minor power struggle here vis-à-vis the practice. Eirik posted a rule on the dry-erase board in the dressing room, in four-inch black letters: ALL CLOTHES MUST BE CUT FROM NOW ON, NO EXCEPTIONS. Shannon meanwhile has made it clear she won’t do it. At best it’s lazy undertaking, and at worst it’s undignified. This puts Adina in a pickle. Shannon is her sponsor, but Eirik is the boss’s son.

  “What would you do?” she says.

  I have to think about this. I’ve yet to develop a philosophy on dead people’s clothes. Natalie never cut, she said all it took was a little extra tugging and tucking to get a decent fit, but Neil was a cutter at Trull and for all I know clothes cutting is a Bardal family tradition, like ham at Easter. At the same time, can you run a man through with a trocar and bleed him like a trout into a toilet, but refuse to cut his shirt collar on moral grounds? This has little to do with clothing and the corpse, and everything to do with Shannon and Eirik and politics, and who’s on whose team.

  Richard calls back. The family took a vote. The moustache stays.

  Neil says he’s not worried about a little dysfunction on the Factory floor: he won’t micro-manage. Glenn’s quit so many times, Neil has a thick file of his resignation letters in his desk, and if Shannon’s showing some pluck and ambition, good for her, it might light a spark under Eirik. As long as everyone remembers the mission.

  “Which is what?” I’m starting to lose track.

  “Getting the body from the bed to the grave in the most creative way possible, with the most meaning for the family,” Neil says, whether that involves a casket and grave, or cremation and scattering, or all four in some elaborate combination. And transparency too: opening the door between front stage and backstage, letting families see the machinery behind the curtain—deconstructed death-care. Unthinkable in his father’s time. Unthinkable right now in any other funeral home in Winnipeg.

  “Let them see the cremation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let them see the bones being sorted?”

  “Yes, it’s happened already.”

  “Let them into the prep room?”

  He pauses. There’s no law that bars families from watching an embalming, and if someone asked he’d consider it. It hasn’t come up yet. There was one time, a boating accident. The family wanted to see the body, but the boat’s propeller had made a mess of it. So they covered up the face but left the hands exposed, and the family was able to touch the hands. There are ways. And limits.

  On a slow day, Neil takes me along on a special delivery: a man from Roblin, a small town five hours northwest of the city, on the Saskatchewan border, has lately been autopsied at the Health Sciences Centre and is now free to go home for his burial. Instead of sending him by courier (the usual route: not inexpensive) we’ll drive him to the local funeral home ourselves. It’s a large day, the sun is bleaching the asphalt, and on the highway past Portage la Prairie there’s little to distract us but wheat, more wheat, a grain elevator, and then more wheat. We pass a collapsed farmhouse and Neil says, Imagine the family that used to live there, they thought it would last forever.

  When he bought the family business in 1968 Neil had hooked up with a business partner, but the partnership was doomed. Ten years later they couldn’t stand to be in the same chapel together, so they agreed to a shotgun divorce: the first to come up with the money to buy the other’s share could keep the place, while the other walked, albeit with a pocketful of money. This would have marked the second time Neil had to buy his own family funeral home. But this time, the partner beat him to it, and Neil lost the business, A.S. Bardal’s one-time frame shop and livery service on Sherbrook Street. He lost the family name, too: it went with the funeral home. (There’s still a Bardal Funeral Home on Sherbrook, but there has been no actual Bardal on staff since Neil was bought out in 1979. This is very confusing for local consumers.)

  Now he was on his own, both liberated and terrified. He’d followed developments in California, where the Neptune Society had launched its deep-discount cremation-only service: no pricey caskets, no embalming, no cemeteries, just a simple burning and scattering of the ashes at sea. Like Allen Ginsberg on pilgrimage to the crematory ghats of Varanasi in India, Neil flew to San Francisco to discover his inner undertaker, remembering what his father had told him: If you’re smart, you’ll show people there’s another way to do all this. Neil came back enlightened, a born-again bake-and-shaker.

  In 1983 he spoke in Toronto, at a meeting of the Ontario Funeral Services Association. The message was simple: As undertakers, he said, we have to go back to our roots. We’re trained to take care of the body, not sell product. The age of the casket is over. With cremation growing in popularity, we should replace it with a simple cardboard box.

  “I got booed off the stage,” he told me. Colleagues called him a heretic. At a meeting in Penticton the next year, where he pitched the same message, he was described as the gum disease of modern funeral service. As far as Neil was concerned, his audience missed the point: he wasn’t preaching the end of the funeral but calling for a creative response to its evolution. His colleagues wouldn’t hear of it. The fact was, cremation terrified them.

  He made plans to adapt the Neptune model to Manitoba. He acquired the crematorium near Brookside, although scattering-at-sea was ruled out on account of logistics, the nearest ocean being the Pacific, or the Atlantic, depending on whether you turned left or right on the highway at Steinbach. What the Prairies had were oceans of grain and oceans of trees, however, so Neil studied a parcel of land near Kenora on the Ontario border as a site for a scattering forest. Families could scatter remains and enjoy a picnic: no graves, no markers, just acres of woods. He commissioned a pithy radio jingle:

  Not to change what was meant to be,

  But provide a means for it to happen naturally.

  But he never bought the land.

  Next, in consultation with a plant scientist at the university who said cremated remains made for a potent fertilizer, Neil thought of buying farmland to grow wheat—magically, disturbingly tall wheat—until it became clear consumers might be disinclined to buy, much less eat, bread made indirectly from dead human beings. In the end he dug a kidney-shaped rose garden in the front lawn of the crematorium and pitched it as a third way, between the cemetery and what the industry called “wildcat” scattering: private disposal in parks, the river, the lake at the cottage, golf courses, places with personal meaning but without the tangibility of a permanent memorial.

  Now Neil wants to expand. He wants to build a reception hall and an indoor atrium for the garden, so families can scatter in winter, enjoy a little garden-side ceremony with coffee and dainties even as it’s minus-35 Celsius outside with the wind-chill factor. Instead of roses there’d be rubber plants. He wants to call it the Garden of Memories. If it works, he’ll franchise the idea. />
  In the meantime, he wants to change the structure of his business, design it like a law firm. The family would hold the business in a central trust, but the undertakers, Richard and Janice and Shannon, would all work as associates, earning their way on billable hours, developing their own clients, until they achieved full partnerships. They’d have incentive to stay, invest in the place. In fact they’d be working for themselves, under the umbrella of the Bardal trust.

  The corporates, he said, were stuck with their fusty, Kafkaesque infrastructure dictated from Toronto or Houston by the bier barons. “Me? I’m not stuck with anything,” he says. “I’m not even stuck with family.”

  Roblin is little more than a main street with angle parking, a railroad station that hasn’t seen a train since the route was cut (the station is now a restaurant) and a lot full of rusted school buses that says most people under sixty have already moved to Winnipeg or Regina. The funeral home is faux church with a gabled roof and heavy wood doors. This is a mom-and-pop shop, what Neil calls a typical rural funeral-a-week (if that) operation. Pop meets us in the parking lot. He’s Neil’s age, wearing suspenders, work pants and a plaid shirt. They exchange greetings and ask after each other’s children and grandchildren. We unload the body and wheel it through the garage, past rolls of pink insulation and open boxes of brass cemetery vases, some crowded onto a kitchen counter like empty beer bottles after a party.

  The prep room has two tables, one already occupied by a man in a blue suit and blue fuzzy slippers. In the corner is a red auto-mechanic’s Snap-on tool chest, where pop keeps his embalming gear, and on top of the chest a few pink eye-caps are scattered like potato chips. A half-empty bottle of Plasdopake sits in the sink. He and Neil lift the body, still wrapped in hospital plastic, to the empty table (old-school, no latex gloves), then pop shows us around. He apologizes for his distracted state, but he has the flu, so does mom, and Canada Revenue Agency is on his back, again. The casket showroom is tiny and cramped (mostly hardwoods) but the chapel is huge, with wooden pews, baby-blue walls and dusty-rose curtains, a giant Jesus-ready cross on the wall over the pulpit. Where does one buy such a thing? The chapel is also where pop stores extra caskets that won’t fit in the showroom. It’s cold here. He keeps the heat off between services to save money.