Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  And there I think she’s nailed it. The big, fat-sucking spiritual void that a death creates used to be filled by the redemptive magic of religion, through ritual: pray over the body, sing the body into the ground, mark the casket with the sign of the cross or place a stone on the grave marker, light candles, burn the body on a riverside ghat and scatter the ashes to the water. All the sacred customs were ways to signal to one another that we’re not alone, that there’s some continuity even in death, a consensus that we could beat back the senseless, arbitrary fact of it by holding hands and chanting. Death was rendered powerless. God had a plan, even if His blueprints were impossible to read.

  Take God out of the picture. What’s left? The sucking void is still there. How do we fill it? With new sacred customs, or by picking and choosing the best from the lot and adapting them for the occasion: a bit of Zen, a touch of Zoroastrianism, yes to candles, no to Psalm 23, a clown, a puppy, show tunes, trained doves released at the graveside to symbolize the flight of the soul, or whatever else reflects the unique life lost. We’re no longer part of a community of believers, but a marginally organized tribe of individuals, where each life story is as important as the next. Each funeral or Celebration of Life is different from the last, a variation on a ritual that used to matter back when we believed in something bigger. For the modern undertaker in the arrangement room, a man is defined not by his faith but by his hobbies and quirks. Did he golf? Was she an avid gardener? Everyone is an avid something: an avid bowler, an avid water drinker, an avid sailor or avid snake charmer. Avidity is the key to unlocking the story that can be told in the chapel, through readings and eulogies and props.

  Deirdre Blair, an event planner in Florida, markets theme kits for funeral homes, Tupperware bins full of ready-made decorative items with which to dress the chapel, for added value. The avid gardener’s kit includes a watering can, gardening tools, gloves, artificial flowers, garden-themed picture frames and a plaster snail. The undertaker arranges them around the urn, and when the service is done, he packs it all up for the next time: $250 a box (her fee, the undertaker can charge what he wants). Men and women are defined by separate, gender-specific “passion lists.” Men might be artists, Audubon Society members, avid readers, car collectors, cigar connoisseurs, motorcycle/RV enthusiasts, movie buffs, musicians, outdoorsmen, pet lovers, ranchers, war veterans; women might be bridge players, cooks, antique collectors, interior designers, needleworkers, grandmothers or travellers. “I believe in ‘take-aways,’” she says. “I did an avid basketball player. Everyone signed a ball with a Sharpie. Now the family can leave the funeral home with something more than the death certificate. They’re blown away that someone’s created this environment.” Look at the wedding, she says. “We try so hard to personalize it. We talk about the bride’s lifestyle, her colours. She despises green, she loves pink. Is it going to be casual or formal? Will it be all organic food? Are you holding it outside?” These are all questions that can apply to the death ritual too.

  So, what’s your legacy? What will be your theme in death? You’ve been liberated from the one-size-fits-all casket with two nights of viewing and a church service, we all have, and herein lies my existential angst. Who am I? What’s in my Tupperware box? I’m a member of nothing, I can dribble but not with a basketball, and cigars make my tongue itch. At most I consider myself an avid procrastinator. When I die, they can dress up the chapel however they want, then tear it all down and do it again two days later when I finally show up.

  Mark Krause, who runs three funeral homes in Milwaukee, told me, “Absolutely, a funeral is all about the show. When I see a family walk in the door, I tell the staff, ‘It’s Riverdance time.’” He ditched the selection room in favour of banquet tables, got beer and wine licences, and served food and drinks at visitations. Not after, but during. “Like at any other family holiday,” he said. “We are not in the funeral business, we are in the hospitality business.” A funeral is an experience that should touch all five senses.

  Krause’s role models are the Ritz-Carlton and Disney (“Look at their attention to detail. They know how many steps between each wastebasket at Disneyland. Twenty-six!”). At his wife’s and daughter’s urging he bought a therapy dog (different breed but same concept as Zoey in Michigan). “I said he can’t be a little foo-foo dog,” he said. “I need to be able to walk around the neighbourhood with dignity.” The dog’s name is Oliver and he’s trained not to jump up or eat off the floor. In the arrangement room, every family gets the same pitch: directors are drilled on presentation, they have lines to memorize. They talk food, they talk music. Their “Signature Service” includes a produced DVD of family photos, a video of the service itself, a memorial candle with the person’s picture on it, use of the therapy dog, and for $195 extra they stream it all live on the Web (“We put up a sign in the chapel: this service will be broadcast”). The payoff? Eighty percent of his cremation families have funerals, with the body present, an amazing number. Neil is lucky to hit 20 percent. And Mark never mentioned the word casket, but even I could figure it out: if they were buying wine-and-quiche services with live webcasting, they weren’t putting the body in a hockey bag.

  Richard says that this is Winnipeg—we don’t hang tiki lanterns at funerals. But if a family wants to “personalize,” we’ll work with them. We have top-end urns in the showroom: an autumn-yellow blown-glass inverted bell-shaped sculpture-thingy that weighs as much as a ten-pin bowling ball, $725. A picture of an empty canoe at sunset is in fact a keepsake urn: in the back is a clear plastic ant-farm chamber for the remains. “It’s supposed to sell for $400, which is nuts. But there are desk clocks that are really nice.” Jewellery too—he carries a C-shaped bracelet with two small channels at the ends for cremated remains, capped with your choice of birthstones. “Wickedly expensive,” says Richard.

  “There’re some really neat keepsakes from Quebec that hold hair. You cut off a lock before the cremation. We might sell one every four years,” he says. “Video collages, memorial pamphlets, silkscreen posters, stained glass pictures that double as keepsake urns, these ideas keep flying around. You don’t want to take up people’s time with all this crap. You don’t want to be cynical, but, balloons at the cemetery, dove releases: you look like a pot and pan salesman. Doves. I mean every funeral director, if he’s honest, says, dear God, what are the doves supposed to mean?”

  An elderly woman and her two middle-aged sons are seated in the arrangement room. The woman’s husband, father of the two men, died just this morning. They want him buried. The man bought a plot in Brookside in 1954 for $50, so now all they’ll need is $750 to open and close the grave, plus a casket and some kind of service, maybe a small gathering at the graveside. There are grand-kids in Europe. Richard suggests they bury right away, then hold a memorial service later in the summer so the grandkids will have time to get home.

  “You don’t want to deny the grandchildren,” he says.

  “That’s very true,” says the widow.

  “The death certificate,” says the first son. “Do we get that now?”

  “No, there’s a backlog, two and a half months.”

  “Too many people dying?”

  “Passports.”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake,” says the widow.

  “Our role in all this,” says Richard, “is going to be the permit for the cemetery, the paperwork, removal from the Health Sciences Centre, and we’ll do the embalming.”

  “He loved his shoes,” says the widow. “Put them in with him. He said just the other day, God, I love these shoes.”

  The second son reaches out to hold his mother’s hand, and she lets him, but then pulls it away.

  “We can talk about flowers for the cemetery,” says Richard.

  “Oh, and Pringles chips. He loved Pringles. He ate them all the time with root beer.”

  “So the clothing,” says the first son. “Can we bring it tomorrow?”

  “And his shoes,” says the widow, “’ca
use he loved them.”

  He loved wood too, and was very particular about finish and grain, which becomes an issue in the casket showroom. The ash “hybrid” cremation casket, suitable for earth burial too, matches the trees on their property. There’s an oak with a deeper grain but it’s a lady’s casket. They like the ash, but if they could get a men’s oak, they might like the oak better. They can’t decide. The son wants a bell to ring at the graveside service. His father loved trains, they had a recording of whistles and train sounds that he and his father would listen to, at top volume, when the mother was out of the house. Mother looks at her son. She’s hearing about this for the first time.

  “I can get you a bell,” says Richard.

  They settle on the ash with an eggshell interior, based on its grain, which the dead father would’ve admired. The sons want to decorate the casket with racing stripes, like dad did all his cars.

  “Can we do that?” the first son asks.

  “It’s your casket,” says Richard. “You can do whatever you like.”

  The next morning, minutes after Richard unlocks the door, the widow arrives with a bag of clothes, shoes and a can of Pringles chips. Her husband will be buried like a pharaoh, with his most valued earthly possessions.

  For families who want a secular service without a preacher, Neil uses Lee Barringer, a celebrant and freelance undertaker from nearby Stonewall. By “freelance undertaker” I mean that he has no bricks-and-mortar funeral home, just a cell phone and a Toyota and a listing in the Yellow Pages. He subcontracts all the technical work: for removals, he calls Winnipeg Funeral Transfer Services (two men with a grey van and a stretcher), and for preparation or cremation, he has the body sent to Neil’s. He rents space for services, including the chapel at Aubrey Street, and does arrangements at the family’s home or a coffee shop. This way (and it took me a while to get my head around this), he can offer a direct cremation for less money than Neil charges, even though it’s the same cremation, in the same retort, with the same hand-sort. Without overhead, he can afford a lower markup. Once Neil’s friends figured out that they could get a cremation at Neil’s for a cheaper price than a cremation at Neil’s (still with me?) they took their business to Barringer. Neil had to drop his price to compete with himself through a third party. But there are no hard feelings: Lee did his apprenticeship here years ago, and Neil likes him. And he’d like to see Lee as part of his law-firm model of associates, to bring some fresh, as it were, blood to the business. So when families want a celebrant, he calls Lee.

  A small crowd, mostly women, is gathered in the chapel at Aubrey. Shirley opens with a stringy “My Heart Will Go On” and moves to a jaunty barrelhouse “Spirit in the Sky” before Lee brings the event to order. “This is a chance to come together,” he says, “and we want this to be a celebration of life.” Again, no body, no ashes are present, but next to Lee is a picture of the deceased, named M., a smiling woman with white hair and glasses.

  “Khalil Gibran said, what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the ground? When you have reached the mountaintop, then it is time to climb. Pictures of heaven come from whatever your faith is, but perhaps death is nothing but a doorway, an exit as well as an entrance. Sir Edward Arnold said death may give more than birth, colours we don’t now see, sounds we don’t now hear …”

  Aphorism after aphorism, Lee is lobbing them into the air and smacking them out of the ballpark.

  “Edward Arnold,” I whisper to Richard. “Wasn’t he the husband on Green Acres?”

  “I think so.”

  “We celebrate life,” Lee continues. The crowd is attentive. “One day we too shall have to die. It’s important to live each day as if it’s your last because one day you will be right. Death brings down our walls and our comfort zones, but perhaps, like M., we need to go on more walks or visit Hawaii.”

  Then the daughter takes the podium.

  “I’m going to try to do this,” she says.

  She read in a magazine that there are three details on every headstone: the name, and two moments in time, the date of birth and the date of death. But between those moments in time is a dash, and that, she tells us, is the most important part of the headstone.

  “It represents the moment my mother first smiled, or her first step, or her first time on a horse, or when she stepped off the train in Winnipeg, the moment she retired from Eaton’s, the terrible moment she got the call that Dad was gone, the moment when her friends came to the hospice, that dash is Mom, an energetic, sweet, loving person. Now think what that dash means to you.”

  Shirley plays “Circle of Life,” and the guests rise and gather in the reception room for coffee. My own default setting, the cynical hard-shelled bastard I’ve nurtured since college, knows that this business about the tombstone dash is at the heart of another sub-industry, based on a poem by Linda Ellis, of hardcover gift books, a DVD movie, a music CD, and “Dash” daily-planners that funeral directors can sell as add-ons or as part of some casket-urn-celebration-of-“Dash” package.

  And there’s an uneasy imperative in that little granite notch: the opportunity it provides to be as competitive in death as you were in life. Fill up that dash! What you achieve from now on will be fodder for your eulogy. Why are you wasting your time watching Everybody Loves Raymond or raising a family when you could be getting a tattoo or dining at La Chevre d’Or or skydiving or seeing Stonehenge or driving a Shelby Mustang, all items on the bucket list from the movie of the same name, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men whipping through a list of last-minute goals before they kick the bucket. Taj Mahal, check. Serengeti, check. Great Wall of China, check. Why leave your life up to chance? Choreograph it, script it, as if it were the film you always felt like you were starring in anyway. Lives don’t just happen. They are projects. This is what gives them meaning, in lieu of some modest, mundane story about love, community and family. It’s old-fashioned boot-strapism: you are responsible for the contents of your own celebration of life, and if you don’t have the tools to build your own project, there are books: 1,000 Places To See Before You Die, 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 1,001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die. Get cracking.

  “Now think what that dash means to you,” the daughter had said, which to chronic underachievers like me could mean: acquire, conquer, move on, time’s galloping. In the end they may not embalm your body, but if you’ve hammered away at your bucket list, filled your dash to the limit, they’ll embalm your life story, make it look even better than it was when you lived it.

  Still, I’m either tired or I’m entering a post-ironic stage in my life, because I am actually choked up by a stranger’s eulogy for her mother, and I didn’t see it coming. It’s hard to admit to unearned emotions. They’re not quite real, are they? I don’t have to bear the impossible weight of actual grief here, just a featherlight spinoff. Same effect as being moved by a cheese-ball pop song that you would never, even under threat of water-boarding, admit you liked. I know that there’s more truth about the human condition in Verdi, but “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, I’ll confess, makes me soft and mopey. It’s just less work than unpacking Il Trovatore.

  Maybe this is what the celebration of life has to offer, a kind of pop ritual. The heavens don’t open up, you can’t touch the face of God, but with the right minor-key music and aphorism you can be moved to something approaching an actual human emotion. Yet there’s something else here too, something deeper. Even framed by a popular feel-good Oprah-ready ditty, I feel like I’ve encountered something rare: a life that mattered not despite of but because of its simplicity.

  CONTRIBUTING TO SHAREHOLDER VALUE, ONE CORPSE AT A TIME

  Sunday, and I’m booked to work. There’s no traffic biking in, just the bottle-collectors pushing grocery carts, working weekends like me. When I pass Brookside I see a couple laying a bouquet in the cremation section, a treeless stretch of densely packed bronze markers, each with i
ts own vase for fake flowers: purple, yellow, red, blue. In winter the colours poke through the snow. Last time I walked through there I saw the other offerings people leave: plastic racing cars, Mylar balloons, a full cup of Tim Hortons coffee. The cemetery prefers its visitors to stick to the fake flowers.

  At the Factory, two new arrivals are posted on the cooler door’s dry-erase board, an M-1 and an F-2, which means a skinny male and a not-so-skinny female. These are codes for the cremationist: they’re both candidates for Retort Two, svelte enough not to smoke. The big boys and girls, the M-3s and F-4s, are saved for Retort One. A Moore’s suit bag hangs on the hook in the dressing room, marked for The Late Mr. H.

  Neil’s in the arrangement room, flipping through the latest call sheets. As usual he knows some of the dead.

  “Is that Peter B.’s brother?” he says to Shannon. “I did a service at Riverview, we asked Peter to provide music and he did all Scottish songs. The minister said, those aren’t hymns, and Peter said, they are to the Scots.”

  “They wanted scattering in the rose garden in late fall,” says Shannon. “What’s great is I got storage fees out of them as well.”

  Neil has big hopes for Shannon, as he once had for Natalie. One time, on a drive through Brookside, he told me they were both ambitious young women who scared him pantless, but on the other hand, they fit the future of funeral service, which was no longer a business for old men. The problem with Shannon, he said, is that when she opens her mouth, she sounds like she’s trying to sell you something. The corporate chains would love her. In fact, Chapel Lawn’s called twice, offering her a job.