Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  By now the sky is bruised blue and pink, with clouds like unstirred ink in water, and I hug my arms against the cold. A woman lays a crocheted caftan over an elderly man’s shoulders, which she rubs to bring them both some warmth. Even with the cold and the growing dark, watching the pile get smaller I feel strangely uplifted. Unlike at the other burials I’ve seen, no one’s in a rush to get it over with, and no one’s checking their watches or their cell phones for text messages. They have a ritual to complete, a responsibility to stay until the grave is filled. “How beau-ti-ful heaven must be, must be, / Sweet home of the happy and free,” they sing, and they mean it. Bill shakes my hand. I’m released from duty.

  On the drive back to Winnipeg, I play the scene again in my head: the singing, and the rhythm of the sand hitting the casket. It’s the same ritual that sent their grandparents and great-grandparents to the sweet home of the happy and free, and when they die, and their kids die, someone will dig a hole and bury them too. There’s a symmetry that’s also oddly liberating in its lack of choice. The rest of us get to argue over casket and urn catalogues, flipping from the La Precia to the Fredericksburg Cherry, pricing keepsakes and ash pendants and white-knuckling through a stack of CDs for music for the Celebration of Life. Randy Travis or Travis Tritt? Which one did Dad like? We can’t remember. Play “Wind Beneath My Wings.” We pay thousands for an improvised ritual, a one-off, where only the family gets the inside jokes in the eulogy about Dad’s ill-fitting dentures and the childhood dog he accidentally shot on a hunting trip, who went on to live a long three-legged life, while the rest of the mourners just scratch their heads, as if they’re watching some cryptic home movie.

  The Mennonites have it easier: same casket, same hymns, same prayers, and everyone knows the script. This is what it must be like to live in an ordered universe, where the roads meet at right angles at every mile and, if you’re good and you pray and marry the girl God wants you to marry, His plan will be revealed when you die. You just have to get through the hard part: life, with its endless string of chicken-plucking and lousy weather. Forget self-expression or personal dreams and goals, especially if you’re a woman or gay or have doubts, in which case you may be shunned and lose your place in the queue for paradise. You can’t be sort-of orthodox. You’re on the team or you’re not. But the trade-off is clarity. You will go to heaven, and your neighbours will bury your body and send you on your way.

  It’s dark by the time I get to the Factory. The lot’s empty, except for a van I don’t recognize. A light’s on in the building. I key-code the back door and find one of the trade clients inside with a late delivery. He’s wearing a hunter’s camo jacket and cap, and he’s buttering the dead woman’s face and hands with Kalon cream. “Don’t want her to dry out,” he chirps.

  Tomorrow there’ll be three more just like her, folks who are alive tonight but who won’t be by morning. The next day there’ll be three or four more, and so on. If God reveals Himself at a funeral home, it’s through His regularity: they just keep coming. Some of them will be carried to the grave and sung at or psalm’d at, but most will be cremated, their ashes sent home to their families, who, with all good intentions, will store them away until they can come up with a good idea for the last, final step.

  THE STORM

  Monday morning, and we’re heading for a ward removal at Tuxedo Villa, a seniors home on Corydon Avenue. Glenn parks the van in the back between two blue BFI recycling bins. The last time he was here, he parked in front and the staff barked at him about the optics. We roll the stretcher down a dim hallway, past residents in wheelchairs who ignore us. The drapes are drawn in the room with the body. The roommate is on the toilet, door open. In fact there is no door. The dead woman’s slippers are already in the wastebasket, her clothes in a dry-cleaning bag on the dresser. On top of the bag is the death certificate, which Glenn attaches to his clipboard. She was ninety-one. Her head is tilted back in the usual pose, mouth agape, as if she were caught mid-snore. Glenn hands me gloves and we lift her onto the stretcher; she’s very light. She spent her life as a nurse in England, one of the staffers tells us, and when she came to Tuxedo Villa “she thought she could run the place,” but that was a long time ago. The last years have been hard. Back down the hallway, we turn at the loading dock where an alarmed Purolator deliveryman holds the door open. The service is the next day, ten people, cookies, with Shirley Burton on piano. The ashes are sent back to England in a DS008, a simple wood urn that costs $395 and is made by a local craftsman.

  Thursday afternoon: arrangement conference at Aubrey with one family member, the son-in-law. His wife’s mother died last night and he’s the executor. She used to be hale, he says, a gardener. When she was eighty she shovelled a truckload of topsoil and tilled it into her garden bed herself. But in the last few years, she’s been unreachable, “probably schizophrenic.” She died at home.

  “So,” Richard says, checking the file, “cremation?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Forms are signed. Afterwards, she’ll be stored at Aubrey, and scattered in the rose garden in the spring.

  “How about April?” says Richard.

  “You decide,” the man says. “In fact I don’t care to be there, so whatever the weather permits.” His wife, he says, has three siblings, but none of them are coming home, so there’s no need for a service.

  The bill is $2,282.80 with GST. The man takes out his credit card, then pauses. He says his bank has offered to settle estate matters and funeral costs at a lower interest rate than Visa.

  “You sure you don’t want the Air Miles?”

  He pauses again. “No,” he says, “I’ll go with the bank.”

  We’re done in twenty minutes.

  We’re deep in a period of what Neil calls the “big black hole,” when the phone never rings, no matter how much he glares at it. Those who do call are looking for cheap and fast. For an industry that should be recession-proof (death and taxes, and all) the numbers are down, not just in Winnipeg but across North America. SCI’s calls fell 11 percent in the first quarter of 2009, which company president Tom Ryan described to investors as a drop “that many of us have never seen in our business careers.” Blame medical advancements against the big three (heart disease, cancer, stroke) and the fact that the current crop of those-most-likely-to-die come from a generation born in the 1920s and 1930s when birth rates were low. There are simply fewer old people and they’re living longer. But here’s the corker: modern death is preceded by an average ten years of chronic illness or dementia, according to the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics. In effect people are dying years before they’re technically dead, lost to Alzheimer’s and such. Family members who processed their grief and loss early, when the disease first took hold, are exhausted and possibly relieved by the time grandfather finally stops breathing. As he has outlived his peers, there’s no call for an elaborate funeral, so they call the crematorium. Is this the fate of the baby boomers? Will the most self-absorbed generation since the Habsburg Austrians peter out in their nineties, die at a hundred and then simply … disappear? Into Neil Bardal’s rose garden?

  The light in the tunnel, if you want to call it that, is that the boomers are getting a head start. The New York Times says middle-aged Americans represent “ballooning crises” of addiction and high-risk behaviour, including double the number of binge drinkers compared with teenagers and college students combined, and a 30-percent higher incidence of fatal accidents and suicides than people ages fifteen to nineteen, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. At the age at which their fathers retired and bought their first La-Z-Boy chairs, they’re still skydiving and competing in triathlons and running the bulls in Pamplona. Yoga and colonic irrigation won’t save them if they keep this up.

  William “B.T.” Hathaway, an independent funeral director in Fall River, Massachusetts, has been studying the numbers. The normal death rate up to age 29 is one in 10,000, but over age 60 it increases a hundre
dfold. If you define the boomers as those between ages 45 and 74, the number of what B.T. calls “prime of life” deaths will increase in the next five or ten years, up to 400,000 in the United States before the demographic hits peak mortality. These are people with jobs, living spouses, school-age children and social lives. “At the very least,” he says, “baby boomers will offset the trend seen in recent years towards limited gatherings and non-facility memorial services,” by dying early enough to warrant well-attended funerals. “Now is not the time to get out of limousines,” he says.

  Still, for the most part, the self-same boomers are engaged in a standoff with death-care. I brought this up with Neil, who’s also on the board of Riverview, one of the chronic-care hospitals. At some point, he said, simple economics will kick in.

  “Your generation has to make a decision,” he said. “When I grew up, twelve people lived in the same self-contained house, the grandparents lived upstairs, and it didn’t cost the state a cent. But a hospital is driven by tax dollars. By keeping mother alive for eight years at $300 a day we might ask: can we afford it?”

  “What’s the alternative?” I said, knowing that he always has one.

  “We need to teach people my age who’ll be in that situation fifteen years from now to be agreeable to things like a living will, but with more of a definition, giving the state some room to be proactive.” The elderly should take on a new leadership role, he said, by spearheading a social revolution and taking themselves voluntarily out of the economic loop.

  “You mean …”

  “Overdose,” he said, and his eyes brightened up for the first time that day. “You can’t put a family member in that position, you have to do it as a community. But we’re not talking about it at all. I grew up in the ass end of that era when you took care of grandfather, and now people are saying goodbye years before he actually dies. You hear people say, we quit having birthday parties eight years ago.”

  It’s an interesting concept, coming from an undertaker: socialized euthanasia, as in Christopher Buckley’s novel Boomsday, which imagines, once the boomers hit retirement age, a social security system on the edge of collapse. An influential blogger comes up with the solution: encourage senior citizens to off themselves in exchange for tax benefits.

  “That’s where I want to be if the cancer comes back,” Neil said, “on the fast track. My kids will have no problem with this.”

  The collective kids at Aubrey and the Factory, meanwhile, are taking the opportunity of a slump in business to crank up the interpersonal sniping. Richard’s peeved at Eirik for unilaterally stocking Colonial caskets in the showroom, which Richard considers his turf. A detente’s been declared on the issue of clothes-cutting, but now Shannon and Eirik are at odds over her prep room techniques, in particular her practice of “wicking” the dead. This involves cutting into the inner thighs and stuffing the holes with cotton Webril, raising the feet, and leaving the body overnight to drain, to counter act puffiness and edema. Eirik calls it a waste of time and valuable embalming chemicals (Richard suggests putting the body in the retort “on low” instead, but no one’s in the mood for gags). Shannon threatened to quit, to take the repeated offers from Chapel Lawn, but Richard, acting on Neil’s request, spent half an hour on the phone with her, talking her out of it. Just keep your head down and do your work, he said, same advice he had for Natalie. It’s like any zoo. When they’re no longer sure where the next meal’s coming from, the monkeys turn on one another.

  “I’ve seen this place like a roller coaster,” says Richard, “but now the plunges are getting deeper and that part at the top where you catch your breath is too short. Times like this you hang on for dear life.”

  The truth is, Richard has thought about moving on himself. The province runs a good disaster management program, and if Winnipeg has anything to offer it’s the potential for disaster. The Red River floods every spring. The mosquitoes all carry West Nile virus. FedEx planes are always falling out of the sky and crashing into Osborne Village (in fact it only happened once, but I sense Richard’s on a roll). Just once, he says, he’d like a family to call and ask for him by name: not for Neil, not for Eirik, but for Richard. There’s been a death. We need Richard.

  In the old days, undertakers had profile and charisma. When Tommy Cropo walked the centre aisle of the church, his arms out, palms turned down, parishioners would touch the tops of his hands, as if he were God’s second son. Cropo always gave free caskets to nuns and priests. “It was about looking good,” says Richard, “and helping the Church. He helped build Holy Ghost on Selkirk, he put in the bell at St. Vladimir’s, which was Martin Corbin’s turf. When the priest at St. Vladimir’s died and went with Corbin’s, Tommy cut off the relationship.” That was how things worked in the north end. Loyalty mattered. Richard drove coach for Cropo and his right-hand consigliere Malcolm, and they always fed him breakfast at the Lincoln: bacon and eggs for the long, ninety-minute mass, or coffee and toast for shorter services. When one of his apprentices asked for advice on where to get a mortgage, Tommy bankrolled the house himself. He treated staff and community like family. He had no children of his own, just Malcolm and a dog for whom he’d buy a separate seat on the airplane when they flew to Florida. According to Richard, after Tommy died his brand fizzled. Now owned by a small consolidator out of Brandon, Cropo’s is chasing rich south-enders for pre-needs, leaving the working-class Catholics to Corbin’s and the Knysh brothers. The joke’s on them, Richard says: rich south-enders don’t buy big funerals. They want deals. They go to Curly, Larry and Moe. Loyalty’s no longer a value in funeral service.

  “I had the dream again,” he tells me. This time, all he could see was the face of the corpse, like a marble sculpture surrounded by black. It was Neil. Annette was there, but the boys, Jon and Eirik, were not. He reached out to touch the body, but then he woke up. What will happen to this place, he says, when Neil’s gone? He’s built up a brand based on cremation, ever since his own father died, but when Eirik takes over, what then? Eirik is more like his great-uncle Karl, a casket and burial man.

  I’ve thought about this too, since the day a few weeks ago when Eirik lumbered into the office at Aubrey with a roll of blueprints under his arm. He’d been at the bank with his dad, pitching them on the renovations, which are still up in the air pending the court case with Chapel Lawn.

  “We had to hear about the Garden of Memories for the first half hour. The accountant was falling asleep, he’s heard about it so many times. Dad wants to fire him.”

  He showed us the plans: valet parking, a wash bay for the vehicles, a change room for clergy, an office for his mom, and a huge reception hall with a circle in the middle representing the indoor garden.

  “He’s focusing too much on the scattering garden,” Eirik said. “People are going to cemeteries. They want that stone.”

  Soon enough, as if he wants to keep his hand in the game, Death throws us a gift to occupy our time, but it’s wrapped in sad irony. Shannon’s uncle has died. At the morning meeting, Richard runs through the details: private interment, reception at the community hall in Dominion City. Cremation is done, opening and closing of the grave is confirmed. Shannon sits at the table in the office at Aubrey in jeans, her feet tucked under her, her hair wet but combed. On the table is a silver-framed picture of her uncle in a white sweater, wearing a boutonniere and a stiff smile. The funeral is Saturday, but she’s booked to work at the crematorium on the weekend. Eirik volunteers to cover her shift.

  “There’ll be an honour guard at the church from the local Legion,” says Richard. “The urn is the one with the fish. Did we get a deposit from the family?”

  The room is silent. We all look at Shannon, who finally laughs and throws a pencil at Richard.

  “I’ve buried one, two, three, four, five? Six aunts and uncles,” he says. “Come Saturday, you’ll have to decide: are you the niece or the funeral director?”

  Shannon says when her great-uncle passed last year, she did th
e embalming. Her great-aunt didn’t want a stranger to see him naked. She found it therapeutic.

  “Even with my uncle yesterday,” she says, “my auntie said it gave her comfort that someone he knew was with him at the crematorium. I closed his eyes, set his features, closed his mouth.” She asked her aunt if she wanted prayers, and her aunt said no, but called back later and had changed her mind. Shannon went back to the crematorium at six o’clock, pulled the container out of the cooler, said the twenty-third psalm and put him back.

  “Do I have to make a purchase order for the urn?” she says.

  “If you use toilet paper in this place, you have to put in a request,” Richard says. “If you go over the allotted number of sheets you have to give a vivid description of why. Just order it, and send in the paperwork later.”

  “On the bulletins, can you put a fish?”

  “Like a big jumping fish or a fish on a fly-hook?”

  “The big dispute last night was over the fish. The American walleye or the Canadian walleye. In the Batesville catalogue the fin is flat on the top, and this is the only acceptable fish, apparently. This one,” she says, pointing to a picture in the catalogue, “the coloured fish with the pointy fin? That’s American. My family spent half the day on this yesterday.”

  The day before the service in Dominion City, I set up the chapel for a memorial that Eirik booked weeks ago. Neil’s gone to the Factory to change into a suit and Richard’s in the office sorting pre-need files (the “not dead yet” files), arranging them alphabetically, because, he says, they die faster that way. Eirik is AWOL. The first family members arrive and I lead them to the arrangement room so they can chill before the service. They ask about cake, there’s supposed to be cake. I tell them I’ll look into it. They ask about photos, there are supposed to be photo boards, and I tell them I’ll look into it. More people arrive so I take my place at the front door, handing out memorial cards. Meanwhile Richard won’t budge. This is not my service, he says, this is Eirik’s service, and I won’t cover for anyone anymore.