by Tom Jokinen
“It’s not like it used to be,” he says.
“Things have changed,” Neil replies.
“When the girls were young they used to play here. We had to tell them not to bounce their balls upstairs during services.”
“With us, it was don’t flush the toilet.”
We follow him out to the parking lot, where he opens the door of his removal van. The tax people have told him he can no longer claim it as a business expense, that it’s a personal vehicle.
“Look at it,” he says. “Casket rollers in the back. You think I drive my friends around in this thing?”
Back on the highway, Neil says the visit was like stepping into a time capsule. Fifty calls a year, and the only reason pop survives is he hasn’t lost the casket sale, not yet. He goes to church, the curling rink, and all the service club meetings; he knows his families and life and death follow a steady, reliable course. The word cremation never comes up. Someday it will. Funeral service has always been a panicky dialogue between past and present, and the past is no place to run a business. That’s why the corporate chains only buy urban funeral homes. Out here it’s less of a business, more of a hobby.
Are Neil and pop really that different? I think of the novel The Leopard, about a family of Sicilian aristocrats riding out the last days of a class system that’s about to evaporate in the forces of modernity and Garibaldi’s revolution. Same premise as the 1982 TV sitcom Silver Spoons with Ricky Schroder, only in the book, Prince Fabrizio, resigned to his fate, is told by his nephew, who’s joined the rebels: “If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.” Neil is an innovator, but at the heart of the Garden of Memories and the Wheat Field of the Dead are the same steady, reliable undertaker values his grandfather brought to Sherbrook—the body, the viewing, the ceremony.
What matters is the physical fact of death. We need to see it to know it, touch its hair or hands, feel how cold it is. Neil hates the word closure but it’s apt. If you don’t see the body, it’s as if it was lost at sea and you can harbour dreams that your loved one is still alive on some desert island with a coconut tree sending messages in bottles like in a New Yorker cartoon. What makes an undertaker different from a casket salesman or event planner is that he understands the central role of the dead man in his own drama.
When his uncle died, Neil took care of the arrangements. When it was done, his aunt studied the bill and challenged him on one of the items: the removal of the body. It doesn’t make sense for you to charge for this, she told him. After all, I would think it’s in your interest to pick up the body. I shouldn’t have to pay for it. Her children, Neil’s cousins, rolled their eyes. Years later she attended a funeral at the Aubrey chapel. When the pianist played “The Lost Chord,” she laid her head on her sister’s shoulder, said, “That’s nice,” and quietly died. Again Neil handled the logistics, and when he presented his cousins with the bill, they pointed to the removal charge. She died in your funeral home, they said.
We pass grain fields, more grain fields, then cattle country. A billboard tells us LIFE IS SACRED FROM CONCEPTION TO NATURAL DEATH.
“This law-firm idea,” I say. “What does Eirik think of it?”
Neil looks ahead. “He doesn’t know yet.”
His cell phone rings. It’s pop. The man we just delivered is missing his wedding ring. The viewing is tonight. Neil tells me to check his briefcase, and there I find the valuables envelope from the Health Sciences Centre, the one we were supposed to have left at pop’s. I can feel the ring. We turn around on the empty highway and head back to Roblin.
RESPECT, DIGNITY AND BLACK UNDERPANTS
In Winnipeg there are two types of obituaries, the “shorts” and the “longs.” “Shorts” run in the weekday Free Press and are little more than service announcements, written by under takers according to a template: who died, who’s got the body, relevant times and dates for the viewing and funeral. “Longs” are written by families and each one can cover six column inches, with photographs, packed with trivia and detail, the best of them wandering cryptically, begging you to read between the lines. Sometimes it’s clear they were written in advance, by the soon-to-be-deceased. The man who “didn’t ask for much in life” but loved his cats Chester and Tickles and his wife Joanne left it to the reader to figure out why they were billed in that order. The “longs” are a local folk art. If you die in Winnipeg it is with some consolation that no matter how haphazard and coincidental your life is or seems to you while you are living it, it will all make narrative sense when they publish your “long.” At last, you become the hero in your own story.
Annie and I had a ritual. On Saturdays, if I wasn’t working, I’d make coffee and she’d spread out the weekend obits and have at them with a yellow marker, reading out the highlights.
“This one’s days consisted of walking his dog Oreo, washing his car and bargain hunting,” she tells me. “This one was a bookkeeper for the airport chaplain. She enjoyed her dinner and had a last loving phone conversation with her sister, when she became very tired and slipped quietly away.”
“During the phone conversation?”
“They don’t say.”
A “fiercely loyal” mom who loved romance novels, soft loving touches, red lipstick kisses on birthday cards and lottery tickets shares a page with a man who preferred farm implements: “The first combine he used was a pull-type Case combine with the first day of combining taking place on August 24, 1945. He continued to operate combines for the next 63 years ending with operating a Case 2388 combine this fall for a good portion of the 2007 harvest.” The “longs” were like condensed Russian novels.
Of course I recognized names. There were people here I’d met, in my own peculiar context, at the crematorium or the Silver Doors. Their backstories humanized them, gave them families and hobbies and obsessions with heavy agricultural machinery, and the more I read the more the details gnawed at me. These are people, but at work they are also logistical puzzles to solve. Each case in the prep room is assessed by age and weight and muscle mass and obvious infirmities (bedsores, knife wounds). The goal, always, is to demonstrate, through the application of Permaglo and Rectifiant, that something as chaotic as death can be displayed. My days go more smoothly if I don’t think so much about what, or rather whom, I’m doing. The work is emotionally lighter when the dead remain anonymous, former someones wrapped in white plastic who’ve already lost their someone-ness by the time they get to me. To embalm a man is one thing. To embalm a man who had a dog named Oreo is another.
“Here’s one,” Annie says. “‘The family wishes to thank those management and staff of the Charleswood Care Centre, Health Sciences Centre, Victoria General Hospital, Grace Hospital and Winnipeg Regional Health Authority that treated Donna with respect and dignity, and wishes God’s mercy on those that didn’t.’”
Monday, the Factory: Respect and dignity for Mrs. H., stored until now in the cooler, means honouring her wish not to be embalmed. Before she died she made arrangements with Neil, and she told him she wanted to go out like her late husband, in what’s called a Bodyguard. The Bodyguard is a human-sized Ziploc bag. We keep a roll of them in the prep room, bracketed to the wall like giant paper towels: the body goes in, the air is sucked out with a Shop-Vac and the free end is wound up and secured with a heavy plastic tie. The bagged body goes into the casket, and the casket goes to the funeral without any worry that the corpse will raise a gassy fuss during the service. There’s no viewing. Neil discourages open-casket services with the Bodyguard, on the same principle as with the boat accident victim: Grandma in a Baggie is not a Beautiful Memory Picture. But we’ll dress her anyway, “in case the family wants a peek,” Adina says.
“You go right ahead,” says Glenn. “I’m not touching a body that hasn’t been embalmed.”
No offence to Mrs. H., it’s not her fault she’s dead, but Glenn won’t lay hands on her unless she’s washed and Dis-Spray’d, and that’s his choice. But as far as scien
ce goes he’s on loose gravel. The idea that dead bodies, unless they’re embalmed or shrink-wrapped, pose a health risk is undertaker propaganda. Mitford debunked this forty-plus years ago, citing, among others, a pathologist from San Francisco General Hospital who put it this way: if dead bodies sneezed, we’d have something to worry about, airborne pathogens and all, but they don’t, making them less of a communicable disease risk than the living. You’d be more likely to catch something from the widow at the funeral than the body. Embalming is an aesthetic tool, and the Bodyguard keeps the corpse from ripening during the pastor’s homily, but neither should be framed, nor sold, as public-health necessities. Yet they are sold that way. Not as a ruse, but because Glenn and Shannon and Eirik were taught that the dead are health hazards and that the undertaker’s role is to protect the public. Remember the mantra. Treat every body as if it were your own father or aunt, but add the qualifier: wear rubber gloves, and keep a sensible distance until it’s embalmed or burned.
The woman’s belly and sides are deep green and her arms and legs are limp. The rigor mortis has already faded, and she’s starting to bloat, so Adina opts for a quick one-two with the trocar to vent the gases, handing me the wand so I can try. Mostly I’m an orifice and nail boy in the prep room, but I take a stab at it, literally, trying to remember what Natalie told me: long easy thrusts in a radial pattern (it didn’t sound so pornographic when she said it). I mark the spot above and to the left of the navel, and punch the tip of the trocar through the skin. The rubber vacuum hose does its frothy work, emptying the cavity of gas and fluid, in and out, in and out: her belly drops. I get the tip stuck once in her spine, but I pull hard and it comes out. I rinse and wipe the trocar, hang it on its hook, and try not to replay in my head the violent act I’ve just performed. What I still lack of course is the undertaker’s skill at deconstructing death into smaller, manageable Cartesian problems, getting hung up instead on some nebulous big picture that says it’s wrong, somehow, to run people through with a spear until you hit bone, even if they’re already dead. The woman wants a funeral but she doesn’t want to be embalmed; therefore, the remains must be secured in some other way, by venting and then packaging them in a plastic bag (no one mentioned putting her on ice, but at this point I’m not going to backseat undertake). It’s a rational response to a physical problem. I need to remember that. Gentle, caring violence is just part of the job.
We dress her in pink panties and nylons, a blue skirt and white blouse.
“It’s come to this for you,” Adina says. “Putting pantyhose on dead ladies.”
That and impaling them. Once the woman is bagged and the air is drawn out with the Shop-Vac, Glenn picks her up and sets her in the casket. She’s tiny and light. The family sent a teddy bear with her and Adina lays it at the lady’s feet. She now looks like a freezer-wrapped salmon, her nose squashed against the plastic, her mouth open as if struggling for breath. As transgressive as it looks and feels, packaging this birdlike little lady, we’ve arguably performed a cultural duty here, like shamans of any other tribe. According to the anthropologist Nigel Barley, the Toraja of Sulawesi wrap their dead tightly in absorbent cloth to preserve them until the next stage of the ritual, which may not come for years. He met a man who kept his dead grandmother in his house as a storage shelf for his collection of alphabetically organized cassette tapes.
All I can do is watch and learn from the undertakers. In the prep room, Shannon carefully cradles a man’s head, rubbing his earlobe, before punching a needle through his palate to secure the mouth. During a cremation, Glenn shows me how to open up the skull with an iron hook to expose the soft tissue to the open flame, thereby getting a cleaner burn. The bone is fragile from the heat, and the hook is heavy, so all it takes is a light tap. Reg, the trade client from the LeClaire Brothers (the one who likes extra-purple lips on his corpses) is a master at arranging the body for viewing, with a knack for problem cases. Last week, we loaded a body into his rental casket only to discover the man was too tall for the box. Adina tried bending his legs at the knees but the embalming had stiffened the joints, and they wouldn’t stay bent. Pushing him up in the other direction just forced his head deep into the tufted fabric: no good for viewing. When Reg showed up he studied the problem as if he were building a bridge.
“Have you got a piece of wood about yay big?” he said. “A broomstick or a piece off a pallet.”
Adina disappeared to the tool shed and came back with a length of two-by-two. Reg bent the man’s legs again and used the wood to wedge the knees against the sides of the casket, then pushed the lower lid closed until it locked.
“Now he’s stargazing,” he said, referring to the position of the head: tilted back, not forward in the viewing position. “I need something under the pillow.”
“Do you want a phone book?” Adina said. We keep a stack of old phone books in the dressing room closet for these occasions.
“No, that’s too much. Do you have a couple of empty Dodge bottles?”
Adina rushed out and returned with two spent bottles of Permaglo, which Reg tucked under the casket pillow to prop up the man’s head. By now Reg was on his knees, eyeing the lines of casket and corpse. “Let’s pull him down juuuust a rabbit hair. That’s it.”
Reg stood back, arms out as if the whole thing might collapse like a tower of toothpicks if any of us breathed. The man in the casket looked puzzled but peaceful, and no one but us would know about the wood brace, unless the family opened the bottom lid, but they never do. Reg called for more colour on the lips and a dusting of powder. Women’s lips are shiny, but men’s lips are not. By now he and the body were haloed in makeup powder, and before closing the top lid, Reg laid a sheet of paper towel over the face, so it wouldn’t smudge the fabric on the underside of the lid if Reg hit a bump on the way to the church. Shroud of Turin, he called it.
After he left, I swept the powder dunes off the floor.
“Cast a cold eye / On life, on death.” Yeats wrote that, and then he died and they put it on his tombstone.
This morning the retorts are quiet. There are two removals pending on the board, and Glenn’s on the phone with the Grace Hospital trying to shake a recent decedent out of a bureaucratic leg-hold trap. A man, eighty-eight, died in the emergency room at the Grace last night. The family wants a service in two days. The hospital is holding the body, awaiting the medical examiner’s review, not sure yet whether they’ll perform an autopsy, so we’re stuck. The whole health-care–death-care complex is a jurisdictional chain, each link dependent on the idiosyncratic rules of the last. The hospital’s position is simple: what’s the rush? He won’t be any less dead tomorrow. Our position is: there’s grave-digging to order, people flying in from out of town for the service, catering to be booked, and the pastor has two funerals and a wedding Tuesday and Friday. While Glenn sits on musical hold with the Grace, Adina and I head out for the second removal at Deer Lodge, the chronic care hospital for “adults with complex needs” in St. James.
Adina used to work as an aide at the Lion’s Club seniors home on Portage Avenue. She dressed people, put on their makeup and nail polish, sound training for a career in funeral service. She held hands with them as they died. The worst part of losing someone, she says, isn’t always the grief: sometimes it’s dealing with the funeral home, with the bureaucracy and the tyranny of choices. She heard this more than once from families of her old charges. People need as much care when they’re dead as they do when they’re alive, she says, maybe more so, and that’s why she quit, to be of use on the other side. She likes that Neil doesn’t push product, the caskets and urns and vaults. Her family is German Mennonite, “not the crazy religious kind, more the good-works missionary kind,” and when we drive together on removals, she announces traffic patterns as if I might be blind.
“There’s a car parked in the right lane,” she says, and indeed there is.
We leave the van at the loading dock at Deer Lodge. In the lobby, strings of paper butterflie
s hang low from the ceiling. We pass a harpist playing a soapy Irish tune for an audience of one, a man in a wheelchair, his head strapped to a neck-rest, a long straw in his mouth, one hand tapping his tray. It’s not clear if he’s enjoying himself or signalling for help. A security guard leads us downstairs into the mechanical heart of the hospital, past orange boilers, green and red overhead pipes, the corpse of a busted front-load washing machine. We snake the stretcher through a hall of old recliner chairs to the main elevator, which takes us to the fourth floor. This is a ward removal. Ward removals are unlike Silver Doors removals in that you’re getting the body right out of the bed in which it died. You’re mixing with other patients and visitors and maybe even the family of the deceased. The goal is to act smartly and efficiently without traumatizing civilians by waving the dead body under their noses: get in, get out.
The nurse points out the room. Inside, two tiny ladies sit at the ends of their beds eating their lunches, each watching her own television set. The bed with the body is in the corner, behind closed drapes. To get there we have to negotiate the narrow space between the TVs.
“Good morning, ladies,” Adina says, but they go on watching their pingy game shows.