by Tom Jokinen
I wander up the hill to Cypress Lawn, to a stone proscenium at the entrance of the cemetery. In front of me is San Bruno Mountain, and to my right, past a plastic orange fence, what we’d call a snow-fence in Manitoba, was a nine-hole golf course. It used to be eighteen until the cemetery, in need of more real estate, cut a deal to build more grave plots. Sunlight sparkles on the stone columbaria. On either side, as far as I can see, the land’s overrun with headstones and palm trees. Behind me is Woodlawn, SCI’s piece of the action, and to the right, the Jewish cemeteries tucked next to the huge Catholic Holy Cross. Scattered round about, according to my map, are Japanese and Chinese and Serbian and Russian cemeteries, and somewhere, the pet cemetery where Tina Turner buried her dog wrapped in a fur coat (the dog, not Tina). According to Pat, the pet cemetery is the most visited spot in Colma.
It used to be, as far back as the late 1800s, that funeral homes in San Francisco or nearby Daly City did all the prepping and casketing, and families would come to Colma by procession or on special black trolley cars, fifty cents per mourner, a dollar to transport the body, the most popular trolley being the swank El Descanso with its black leather armchairs and separate parlours for Ladies and Gents. That separation of labour, between undertaker and cemeterian, continued until Cypress Lawn put up its palazzo of a mortuary, riling their former business partners. As I walk across the parking lot the building seems to recede, getting farther away the closer I get to it, like Kafka’s unreachable castle, a trick of the eye or the climate or something weirder. The head of a red carnation and a Kleenex blow across the pavement in front of me.
I wait in the lobby, at the foot of a spiral staircase, under a cupola, while a woman at a black marble desk whispers into a telephone. Soon a gentleman in a blue suit and red hair skitters down the stairs, hand outstretched. His name is Martin, communications director for the cemetery. I had an appointment with Ken Varner, the CEO, who’s just back from a trip to China, Martin tells me, and can’t make it. I can speak to him later by phone. In the meantime, Martin offers a quick tour. He whisks me past the chapels, the Cypress Room, the Rose Room, the Laurel Room, all bright and white and palm-frondy, and introduces me to a series of smiling women with clipboards. They hold regular lecture series (next month it’s “Body Disposal Through the Ages”) and genealogy seminars and a popular antiques appraisal show-and-tell like the one on PBS. In the showroom are caskets I’ve only ever seen in catalogues: a hand-carved mahogany Marsellus President, just like the one JFK was buried in, and a bronze Promethean full-couch (meaning a single lid, without the split in the middle, so mourners can view the whole body) with mirror finish otherwise known as a “James Brown,” the same casket in which the Godfather of Soul lay in state at the Apollo Theater in New York and then, for months after, in an air-conditioned room in his home on Beech Island, South Carolina, while his family argued over the estate. Cypress Lawn also carries dzi-dzat, the miniature paper houses and paper cell phones and paper plasma TVs that Asian families use in burial rituals, which Martin calls “Chinese burning things.”
“Sixty percent of our families are Asian,” he says. “I mean, my wife is Asian!”
Ten years ago Cypress Lawn was losing a million dollars a year in operations and had at most a decade’s worth of cemetery land left. Later I talked to Ken Varner, and he said he’d had two choices: “Put up our horns, and go into maintenance mode, or expand.” So they bought half the golf course, and went hard at the Asian and Filipino consumers with “specific needs.” On the model of the Greek and Romanesque family mausolea in the old section of Cypress Lawn, where the great dead white nabobs like William Randolph Hearst are entombed, they built “cremation estates”: private sarcophagi with space for ten, twenty or thirty cremated remains, generations’ worth, plus elaborate memorials, dragons or Foo dogs, whatever a family might want to mark its one reliably permanent spot on earth (in Shanghai, he said, the cemeteries have their own staff sculptors). Feng shui masters were brought in to redesign the cemetery and iron out the chi, and they hired Asian and Filipino sales teams to work the phones. “Every day,” he said, “we go out and tell people they have a problem and that we have a solution.”
“What problem is that?”
He paused, generously, to give me time to figure it out. I didn’t.
“That they’re going to die someday,” he said.
Pat told me her favourite spot in town was the children’s section of Woodlawn cemetery, where parents decorated the graves with toys and birthday cakes. There used to be a sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she said, until vandals smashed it. I drive in circles, past the bilingual sign (English, Chinese) with the familiar droopy-tree Dignity logo, and finally come upon a stone slab with what looks to be half a dwarf, possibly Sneezy, just his hands and knees and feet rooted to the slab, the rest of him gone, like he’d stepped on a landmine. Behind him is one of Snow White’s slippers. According to Pat, Woodlawn wanted to rebuild the sculpture, but Disney preferred they didn’t. “I believe it had something to do with money,” Pat said.
Before dark I stop at Molloy’s, an Irish pub near Holy Cross. Inside it’s pubby and bleak, crammed with pictures of old Colma. “Roosevelt Is Dead!” says a headline in a framed newspaper. The bar is worn smooth from decades of proper use, and behind it, a triptych of silver-backed mirrors barely remembers how to reflect what little light there is. Owen Molloy is behind the bar too. Two regular customers argue about other regular customers who aren’t here. In the early days Molloy’s was a roadhouse and hotel. Owen tells me gravediggers and monument makers used to drink here, but that the companies have all cut back, “now it’s just one guy with a backhoe.” Most of his customers are families in need of drinks or a nosh after burying their dead. He lives in Colma and likes it; he has a view of the mountain with no threat that someone will build a skyscraper in front of it.
I ask him, with seventeen cemeteries in town, most of them filled or filling with Bay Area “commuters” and come-from-aways, what happens to local people when they die.
He leans in towards me.
“I got three, four customers cremated in liquor bottles in the crawl space behind those mirrors,” he says. He looks around as if someone might be listening.
“Shirley lived up the street,” he says. “She drank gin, we put her ashes in a fifth of Tanqueray. Eddy, his ashes are in a fifth of vodka, and Knut, he was a longshoreman, he lived in the trailer park next to us here. Norwegian. He’s there too.”
One of the regulars, a tall, thin man with a knit cap, gets up from his stool. “He used to sit right over there,” he says, pointing to the bar stool next to me. “Ka-nute.” He pronounced it as two syllables.
“He was a customer here since I was a little kid,” Owen says.
“He shake,” the man continues, in a thick Italian accent. “After a few drinks, he no shake no more.”
Owen pours the man more red wine. His name is Franco.
“He say, I’m going to stop living when I’m seventy-five,” Franco says. “One day he got all dressed up, Father’s Day.”
“His favourite bartender had moved back east,” says Owen.
“When I come in, Knut is here, and he show me, he has a gun. I got shocked. I feel so bad, because the next day …” and here Franco makes a pistol gesture at his temple.
Franco is known as the Memory Artist. “I paint my village from my memory,” he tells me. He comes from Pontito, in Tuscany. When he moved to California, he was haunted by vivid dreams of his boyhood town, so real that when he woke he found he could reproduce them, in frantic detail, on canvas, even though he had no artistic training. In his mind, he could follow scenes in three dimensions, turn his head to look around buildings and church doorways, even hear sounds. Later I saw pictures of Franco’s paintings and photos of Pontito online, and his realism was chilling.
“Yeah, Knut,” the Memory Artist says. “This is a shame.”
He holds up his glass for a refill.
; “I’m seventy-three next month,” he says.
——
I walk the beach by the San Francisco Zoological Gardens looking for old headstones from the purges, but no luck. Of course, the Pacific is even more popular than Colma as a place for what some call the Mitford Method of final disposition, even with, as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote, the sea’s “irresponsibility, its hostility to memory, its impatience with ruins, and its passion for erasure.” You can’t mark the sea like you can mark the land, it won’t let you, and if it matters to know where your dead are, the sea responds with a wet salty question mark. I couldn’t think of anything more cold and terrifying.
Karen Leonard, who lives in Willits, deep in Northern California’s granola and redwood belt, wrote me to say, “Out here, we have the Russian River meeting the ocean, at a place called Jenner-by-the-Sea. It’s beautiful, and the park rangers swear that the building up of the sandbar near the mouth of the inlet is due to cremated remains.” Willits was farther than I wanted to go on this trip, but Karen and her husband Steve invited me to come up and stay the night, camp on the futon. It made sense for my twisted pilgrimage: Karen was, after all, a link to death-care history. She’d been researcher and right hand to Jessica Mitford, helped her write The American Way of Death Revisited in the late ’90s, just before Mitford died and was herself scattered at sea.
Willits is a toy-train village in the mountains. Lumber trucks roar through it, and proto-hippie kids with canvas backpacks hitchhike into it, then stand in the mist outside Burrito Exquisito looking authentic. It takes three tries and an act of faith to get my rental van up Karen’s steep driveway, just before it starts to snow. She welcomes me, puts on a fire. On the wall above her desk in the living room is a poster-sized black-and-white framed picture of Jessica Mitford playing Scrabble.
Karen tells me her parents were Southern Baptist. “They talked about sex before they talked about death. With them there was a right way to die and a wrong way to die. I’m sorry,” she laughs, “I’ve always found that hysterical.” As a young activist she toured funeral homes, undercover, as a fake mourner. Some undertakers made their living on one customer a week, she says, and she wanted to figure out how they did it.
At the time she met Mitford, “my icon,” in the ’90s, Karen wanted to join a memorial society, the consumer groups that fight high industry prices and monopolies, but Mitford shook her head: eggheads and Quakers and old farts, she said, you don’t want anything to do with them. So she hired Karen to help with the book. For Decca, as Karen calls her, you waged war against the enemy directly, you didn’t sit in a church basement and chat about it.
“It’s a show,” she says of the American funeral, “and the undertakers, I used to refer to them as ‘godshead waiters,’ as if you have to book passage through these guys to get into heaven.” In Willits they prefer a Home Depot approach: gather the materials yourself, build your own box, wake the body in its own bed, and then, once the ritual’s done, call the undertaker to take care of the cremation. There is nothing illegal about tending to your own dead. You keep the body cool by packing pillowcases with dry ice (the fabric keeps the ice from sticking to the body), wash it, chant, pray, let the kids decorate the box with Magic Markers. Some people drive the body to the crematorium themselves, in a station wagon or pickup. “But you’re talking about people that bake their own bread,” she says. “One of the wealthiest places in America, and I hear people say they don’t use hot water. This is the land of the fruits and the nuts and the flakes. But absolutely every cultural trend starts here first.”
Just like do-it-yourself home renovation. Turn on Slice channel, you see half the schedule given over to people covered in their own drywall dust. It sounds empowering and meaningful and I could practically smell the incense—but did people really know what it meant to handle a dead body?
Pros: it’s a very intimate, tactile way to say goodbye.
Cons: the dead will shit, piss, purge gastric muck from the nose and mouth, clench up with rigor mortis, and tumble off tables. Their tongues dry out and their eyes sink like bad grapes.
“It’s not for everybody,” she says. “You need a community or a strong family.” And the same people who take care of their own while they are alive, feed them and clean them and change their adult diapers and wash their soiled clothes, will tolerate a bit of purge when they are dead.
I ask her about Jessica Mitford’s memorial. I’d read there were horse-drawn carriages, and that some critics, and she had plenty, found it curious that the queen of the quick disposal had what sounded like a big fancy funeral.
In fact there were five memorials, Karen says, including one in London and the family event in San Francisco. And a memorial, unlike a funeral, is not the property of an undertaker. The industry’s end of it was less than $500 for cremation and sea scattering at Pacific Interment. On Decca’s request they sent the bill to Robert Waltrip at SCI in Houston, in exchange for all the ink she’d given him in her lifetime (they never got a reply). It’s true, six black plumed horses pulled a hearse, followed by a twelve-piece marching band: they couldn’t resist. It was a standing Mitford family joke to give her a ridiculously overproduced send-off (Decca had also said she wanted to be embalmed, “since it would make her look twenty years younger.” She wasn’t). The hall was packed. Maya Angelou spoke. Everyone was welcome. It was held at Delancey Street, the halfway house for addicts and ex-cons that Decca and her husband Bob Treuhaft had founded. Delancey Street is across the parkette from my friend Peter’s condo, where I’m staying while in San Francisco. I go to the coffee shop every morning. I wondered why the baristas had so many jailhouse tattoos. Now I know: they’re Decca’s people.
“What would she have made of the teddy bear urn?” I say.
“Oh my God,” Karen says, “she would’ve just loved it. I’m sorry she never lived long enough to see one.”
Most states have loose and untested laws about DIY; almost all of them require a licensed funeral director to at least sign a form (for a fee) when the body is picked up or buried. In Manitoba, when the medical examiner releases a body, he releases it to the family. In theory it’s the family’s choice whether to use an undertaker. All the province cares about is that someone with legible handwriting fills out the paperwork at Vital Stats. Then, if you want, you can back up the station wagon to the hospital for pickup. “My bet,” Neil told me, “is anyone who does it will call us next time.”
I’d once helped Adina with a body, one of Reg LeClaire’s frail little French ladies. We washed and dressed her but did not embalm her: she belonged to a small, clubby Christian sect and they wanted her at home, for prayers, before they buried her. When Neil found out, it was as if he’d swallowed a wasp. It’s visceral, for an undertaker, the idea of civilians handling the dead: you may as well take out your own appendix with a butter knife. B.T. Hathaway, the Massachusetts undertaker who’d crunched the numbers on boomer mortality, told me it was fine, the home funeral, for the 5 percent who have money, time, resources, education, and political and emotional will. “But the average consumer is not so well equipped,” he said. “It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families. And it’s as much a question of time as anything else—people are on the clock. They call on other people to take care of them.” This of course is the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle: why make it hard on yourself?
Most don’t. But what worries the industry is how easy cremation has made it for other hospitality providers—restaurants and hotels and banquet halls—to rip off their trade: if there’s no body to drag around and all you need is space for a party, what makes a funeral home any better than a Best Western or a Casa Bonita?
While I was in California, I had the chance to attend a funeral at the Cocoanut Grove Ballroom on the beach in Santa Cruz for Robert Anton Wilson, the writer and conspiracist and friend of Timothy Leary. I didn’t know Robert Anto
n Wilson, except that he’d written thick paperbacks with pictures of pyramids and cats on them, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (co-authored with Robert Shea) and other head-scratchers that were big with math majors and stoners and the depressive dystopians I used to drink with in university. You didn’t have to know Robert Anton Wilson to go to his funeral: the family sold tickets online, $15 each including parking. So I went. I got there early and sat in the van outside Cocoanut Grove, eating ice cream and watching the swinging pirate ship on the midway, waiting for the box office to open.
The man’s fans were loyal. They followed a kind of arch religion called Discordianism, also called “Zen for round-eyes,” that said chaos was just as important as, and more interesting than, order, if you could teach yourself not to be afraid of it. They were happy he’d lived to his seventies, that he’d got a good ride from his “vessel.”
The crowd was split into two camps: hippies in fringe vests and pinched straw cowboy hats and feathered white hair; and young hippie wannabes in The Residents “eyeball” T-shirts, striped red and black stockings, squid tendril dreadlocks and stick-on face jewellery. There were top hats in both camps. Inside, I found a table under the mirror ball and ate a quesadilla wedge, while a girl dressed as a Renaissance maiden played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on a harp. A woman on stage said, “I’d like us to be on the same wavelength a moment.” She had a message from Robert Anton Wilson, who’d written his own brief eulogy before he died: “‘I no longer claim to know anything,’” she read, “‘but I still have some persistent suspicions. Do not dare mourn me.’” The crowd roared. The party had begun.