Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  The room where they wash the bodies has a morgue table and a shower head and a Tupperware bin full of broken terra cotta pottery to place on the eyes. A candle burns on a shelf by the door. A space heater keeps the place warm. Some Chevra Kadishas, she says, use a bathtub to cleanse the body, but she rigged the shower to shut itself off after the prescribed twenty-four quarts of water has passed over the corpse. They say prayers in the prep room, prayers about the beauty of the human body as the vessel of the soul. They never cover the face or pass tools over the body. For men, they sprinkle earth from Mount Olive in Israel on the eyes, heart and genitals. Until it feels the earth the soul won’t stop wanting. Women don’t need it. “There are times,” she laughed, “when it starts to sound like a fairy tale.” They get their earth from Rose Solomon’s, a burial supply company in New York, in little plastic mustard packets. The terra cotta pots come from a gardening supply store.

  Jewellery comes off. Not long before we met, Rena had her first belly-button ring: a teenager who’d died in a car crash. Blue nail polish too, which she removed. Catheters and IVs come out, but bandages, anything with blood, go with the body. They bury amputated limbs too, even if the amputee is still alive, as long as he’s willing to buy a plot. “Usually legs go in an infant casket,” she said. Caskets cost $340, there’s no markup, but a $10,000 solid oak would still be kosher, although custom prohibits burying metal with the body, so the handles would have to come off. The linen burial clothes look like gauzy pyjamas with booty feet, meant to come apart in the grave. The faster the burial the better.

  “Someone dies,” she said, “I’m the nudnik who says, Why not have the funeral tomorrow? But people are spread out, there’s travel, there’s catering for the meal of consolation, they can’t book the synagogue. It’s like planning a party.”

  Chesed Shel Emes gets $1,265 per call including the cost of the casket, to cover heat and lights “and my extravagant salary.” But the whole nut, including the plot, the hearse, the opening and closing of the grave, an annual Yahrzeit letter to the family on the anniversary of the death, can come close to $12,000, and that goes to the synagogue, which also sells pre-needs.

  “I can’t afford to get buried,” Rena said.

  Not everyone in the community is comfortable with the rules. Winnipeg is traditional, she said, but not observant—there’s a difference. Some Jews go to Knysh, for cremation, which Rena finds abhorrent, “especially after the Holocaust. People phone me, they see it in the paper. Someone’s been cremated, they’re horrified. ‘How can a Jew do that?’ they’re yelling at me, like I’m the Jewish answer lady.” She’s trying to reinvent a religious rite for a secular world, she says, “but the truth is, the non-Jews are more fascinated by this than the Jews. Maybe people are searching for something.”

  I am, and there’s enough latent Catholic in me to feel guilty about not being Catholic enough to know what it is. But she’s right, there’s a lesson for goyim in the hard-core Jewish ritual and it has something to do with community. In my world it’s possible to lose someone, spend two days in the embrace of family and friends and then wake up alone, staring at an empty crusted scalloped potato dish, with no clue what to do next. The Jews have a schedule you can pin to the fridge, and when you go to the synagogue, people you don’t even know will sit with you and say Kaddish.

  The Catholic Church has always owned cemeteries, but just recently, like the synagogues, they’ve got into the funeral trade. In Hayward, across the bay from San Francisco, the Oakland Diocese bought an existing mortuary with a retort next to Holy Sepulchre cemetery, the first Church-owned funeral home in North America. They’d been approached by Stewart Enterprises, one of the consolidators, which ran five funeral homes for the Los Angeles Diocese under a combined brand. But Oakland wanted to strike out on its own. Stewart, they said, charged too much, and at every other funeral home the so-called “Catholic package” of a vigil and a funeral mass and a committal at the cemetery was invariably the most expensive item on the price list, $10,000 or more. So their idea was to find a way to preserve the ritual while keeping the price in reach of the flock, or more important, those who wanted to return to the flock before they died. So they set a single service charge: $2,400 for a mass at the family parish, a viewing at Holy Angels, their new funeral home, and a graveside ceremony. It didn’t matter if the body was prepped or cremated, the price was the same. Casket, grave and marker were extra. The independent funeral homes that identified themselves as Catholic called foul. The owner of the Chapel of Angels in Freemont said he felt betrayed by his own Church: “My great-grandparents helped to buy the dirt for Holy Sepulchre,” he said, accusing the diocese of using low-cost funerals as a loss leader to get people through the door to sell them high-priced cemetery property. Robert Seelig, who runs the funeral wing of the Oakland Diocese, told me it was unlikely that people would opt for burial in a cemetery they didn’t like just to get a cheaper funeral. Meanwhile, the CFO of Carriage Services, another chain, said the Church had the advantage of a “somewhat captive audience.”

  Holy Angels, Chapel of Angels: it’s not hard to see how the consumer could get confused, sorting out who ran what funeral home for which reason. And of course the whole secular industry uses churchiness as a carrot—you can buy a rosary or Our Lady of Guadalupe trinkets to decorate the corners of your casket at an Alderwoods showroom. Loewen used to run cemeteries in Arizona for the Church, and in 1998, SCI donated a “major gift” to the Pontifical North American College in Rome to build a new chapel and a suite for the bishop. The industry likes its Catholics. They buy caskets, and even though Vatican II declared cremation kosher in 1962, they tend to go into the ground or the mausoleum crypt whole. In the cremation era, they represent a breath of fresh capital.

  “We’re not about the ‘Our Lady’ stencil on the casket lid,” Seelig said. “Our job is not to overdo the symbolism and become some kind of amusement park. The industry is coming out with new marketing ideas because they think families want something new, but I think it’s the opposite.” Tradition is on the lip of a comeback. The mainstream industry is the religion of self-invention, where every man is defined by his preferences, and every woman gets her personalized ritual of bagpipes and bunny releases. The Church, meanwhile, provides an alternative by not providing any alternatives. A pall is placed on the casket (this must drive Batesville bananas, like putting a tarp on a Maserati) to level the playing field. There’s no eulogy. In Catholic death everyone’s equal.

  Seelig told me they’re building an even bigger mortuary in San Pablo and hope to add a second retort to Holy Angels; they’re pulling in new business from non-Catholics, including the local Sikhs. On three acres of property at the edge of Holy Sepulchre cemetery they’re planting a vineyard: Pinot Noir, Zinfandel, Chardonnay. Three acres means three hundred cases of wine. If it’s any good, he said, they’ll sell it at fundraisers, and if it isn’t they’ll use it for the sacrament.

  It all starts to sound like a fairy tale, Rena said. At least religious faith, when it comes to death, is a fairy tale that soothes. It doesn’t deny there’s a monster in the closet or a wolf in the woods, but it tames them. A study at Yale, published in the International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine, found that “bereaved individuals who relied on religion to cope generally used outpatient services less frequently,” compared to non-believers. The authors said that a greater reliance on what they called “religious coping” could add up to huge savings for the U.S. health-care system, up to $180 million a year by their numbers. While the rest of us pile on the sleeping pills and antidepressants, widows of faith tend to visit the church instead of the doctor.

  I find it oddly comforting when science ponies up evidence of the benefits of faith: if we’re hard-wired to believe, if piety is a full-on evolutionary advantage, then maybe I shouldn’t fight so hard to squelch it. If it brings comfort in the face of death, why not seek it? Neil’s happy to leave religion to the Church. Music, he says, is what brings meani
ng to the ritual. But I think the believers have a leg-up on meaning. And even as I go back and forth on my own faith (Buddha? Christ? Shiva? Who’s got the goods?), I feel better knowing the faithful are out there, as if the world is a better place as long as someone, if not me, lights candles in a church.

  The Birchwood funeral co-op in Steinbach is decorated in standard mortuary chic. Green wingbacks, dusty rose carpeting and pictures of empty benches and misty waterfalls on the walls, which are also dusty rose. I’m here on a special assignment, to drive the coach for one of their funerals. Birchwood owns one hearse, so when they get busy and need a second, they rent Neil’s, plus a driver, and today I’m it. I jumped at the chance to get out into the world, meet new corpses.

  Bill Dyck is the funeral director on duty. He points me to a water cooler and invites me to sit while he tends to a family in the casket showroom. I pull a brochure out of the rack. Birchwood, it says, was formed as a response to the growth of corporate chains. By buying shares (a minimum of two hundred at a dollar apiece) members get discounts on services, voting rights at Board of Directors meetings and a stake in the company, like at co-op gas bars and lumberyards. It’s odd that Steinbach, a Mennonite community, was ground zero for one of the biggest funeral chains in North America; down the street from Birchwood is the original Loewen family funeral home, now owned by Alderwoods since the Loewen Group went bankrupt.

  Bill returns and invites me into the chapel. I peg him at Neil’s age, maybe a few years younger. Sturdy and stiff-backed, he speaks with a clipped, hoarse voice due to what he describes as a partially paralyzed larynx. He says he asked his doctor if it mightn’t have been caused by a mini-stroke, and his doctor told him that sounded like as good a reason as any other. He used to work for Ray Loewen, then Alderwoods, but quit when the prices got too high to defend.

  “Have you ever seen a man with no septum in his nose?” he asks me.

  I admit that I haven’t. He shows me to the chapel. Up front is a simple grey-chintz cloth-covered casket (the Mennonite Special) surrounded by flowers, and sure enough, the man in the box has a single big nostril instead of the usual two. Not knowing what else to say, I commend Bill on the embalming. You can judge a community, I think, by the colour of its dead: the more traditional the clientele the brighter the corpse, and this man’s been juiced to the eyeballs, as pink as a crayon. Bill smiles. This one’s staying here, he says. Ours is in the back. I follow him down a bright corridor where we find another cloth casket, which he wheels into the garage where I’ve parked the hearse. He opens the box to reveal a gnomish man wearing glasses and a plain suit: no lapels on the jacket, no collar on the shirt, the uniform of the ultra-conservative Mennonite. I count nostrils. There are two. We’re taking him to Reinland Mennonite Church, near Grunthal, southeast of the city. The crowd will be mostly “white caps,” Bill says, women in bonnets and men in plain suits like the one worn by the body in the box. They work hard and pray hard, and when one of them dies, the routine is the same: they gather at the church, pray and sing, and then after a meal of cold cuts and raisin buns, they bury the body themselves. Not much for us to do but deliver the box. This will not be a Celebration of Life, but a celebration of death: for the hardcore Mennonites death is not tragic, but a deliverance. It’s like being called up to the Majors.

  We load the casket into the coach, and then Bill gives the vehicle a quick rinse with the hose, wiping the doors with a chamois to get rid of the road dust acquired on the drive from Winnipeg. I take off my coat to help. The breeze from the open garage door feels chilly, and I realize I’m not wearing my suit jacket. I look in the front seat of the hearse. It’s not there. In my head I can see it, hanging on my dining room chair at home, where I put it so I wouldn’t forget it. It would take me two hours, there and back, to get it. Maybe there’s a spare in the prep room, some dead man’s jacket I can borrow for the afternoon, but I’m likely to forget that too, and wind up wearing it home to Winnipeg. All that’s left is to admit I’m a moron.

  “Sorry,” I say, holding up my arms in shirt sleeves. “I forgot my suit jacket.”

  “That’s fine,” he says, buffing the door handle on the back of the coach, and I think to myself: here’s a species I’ve never encountered, the mellow funeral director.

  On the road to Grunthal I stick close to Bill’s Cadillac so I don’t get lost, but in fact, this is the Prairies: it would take days for me to lose sight of him. We pass factory hog farms and chicken barracks and a few bored dairy cattle, and at every mile, according to the grid system that creates order out of acres and acres of nothing, another crossroad. I turn on the radio, browsing the pre-sets from classic rock to country to Winnipeg’s BOB-FM (“Hits of the 80s, 90s, Whatever”), but then check myself. The man in the back is off to his eternal rest. He needs hymns and prayers to get him there, not “Mr. Roboto” by Styx. I shut off the tunes and drive in silence.

  Reinland church is a white clapboard box that looks less like a house of God than a hockey rink or community centre. I back the hearse against the concrete apron at the front door, and Bill and I dolly the casket inside. According to custom, it will be left in the foyer, open, so that parishioners can see the dead man before they take their seats. The chapel is lit with fluorescents that buzz, and the walls are bare: no cross, no pictures. Up front is a bank of chairs with microphones, like in a courthouse or at a Senate hearing, and the pews are straight-backed and worn. The building smells of old, sour wood. Off to the side of the foyer is a “crying room” with an iron crib, painted white. Bill says it’s where women bring their babies if they start wailing during the service. The place is stripped down to basics. Leave the art and architecture to the Roman Catholics: in Grunthal, Jesus is a minimalist.

  Two shy men and a handful of big-eyed children approach the casket. The girls wear their hair in long double braids, and the boys are in white shirts buttoned to the top. They stare silently at the body. Bill briefs the men on how to bear pall, which way to turn the casket so it’ll open to face the congregation when they’re ready to start the ceremony. One of the girls plays with the dead man’s hair. When the briefing is done, we leave. Protocol prevents us from staying for the service, but we’re invited back for sandwiches and snacks before the burial, which will be at the churchyard in Roseau River, forty minutes south, near the Minnesota border.

  “Come on,” Bill says, “I’ll show you my horses,” and we head out in the Caddy to his farm west of town, passing a ranch for miniature ponies (“those things are tough as nails”), and Freebird Auto Body, the sign for which is a Confederate flag. Bill tells me his father and mother sold caskets in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, near Saskatoon, simple wood flat-tops that his dad made himself. He and his mother would dress and casket the bodies after they’d been embalmed at the local funeral home, then families would come to their house to pick up the finished package and take it to church themselves. He spent time in a lumber camp in British Columbia, and shows me the stub where his left index finger used to be. He also worked at Penner Dodge in Steinbach where he once sold a pickup truck to the man we left in the casket at Reinland church.

  Birchwood has three thousand members, many in Winnipeg. There was talk of opening a satellite shop in the city, but then Walter Klassen, an undertaker with deep Mennonite roots, opened Friends Funeral Home on Main Street across from the golf course, thereby scooping them on the demographic. Birchwood’s business is mostly traditional burial. “Around here the orthodox do not tolerate cremation,” he says. At the farm he lowers my window and calls out to a horse named Jazz, a spring foal, and two other colts on awkward legs come over for a look. They snort through the window. I wipe horse snot from my face with my tie.

  By the time we get back to the church, the congregation is filing out, singing “Shall We Gather at the River?” Those who are going to the cemetery get first crack at the food, with a second sitting for the rest. I follow Bill into the lunch hall where teenage girls in white caps work the room, serving coffee and
water from jugs. The tables are laid with raisin buns, orange cheddar, ham and lunch loaf, butter, brownies and lemon curd squares. The woman to my right asks where I’m from and if I speak Low German and why I’m still wearing my coat. I take it off. People stab at buns with their forks, and an elderly man scoops a cut-glass decanter of Coffee-mate with his knife to slide it closer. The children sit still and don’t make a noise. Two old men giggle and whisper into each other’s hearing aids. The mood is festive.

  The second sitting is called and we move to the foyer, to ready the casket for transport. “See that woman?” Bill says, pointing to a lady with a tumbleweed pile of red hair. “She never misses a funeral.”

  “A Birchwood groupie,” I say, and he nods.

  A man in a western-cut rodeo shirt and a dinner-plate belt buckle looks down at the body as we shut the lid. “I worked with him the summer he cut off his fingers with the baler,” he says. It occurs to me that I might be the only one here who still has all ten.

  On the highway, Bill leads and I follow, with a few dozen cars in a long line of headlights behind me. At Roseau River I pull the coach into a dirt lot behind a white church, as plain as the last one but much smaller. I park nose-first against a pile of hay next to a wooden swing set. Behind me, in a bare spot that could be confused with additional parking, is the graveyard, with a half dozen or so flat stone markers. The hole’s been dug, the Device installed (Bill was here earlier today), and next to the grave is a pile of sandy dirt with half a dozen shovels stuck into it. Six men carry the box from the hearse onto the straps of the Device, and as it’s lowered, the crowd around the grave sings “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” from photocopied sheets. Children make faces at one another over the open grave. The men shovel dirt in by hand. It hits the box with a startling thump that I feel in my chest.