Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  “You know what’s next?” he says.

  I do not.

  “Transformation economy,” he says. “You are changed and improved. Vegas is an experience, you go to Vegas to see a pyramid and eat, I don’t know, lamb. But a transformation is more like yoga. You don’t take a memory away, you become a different person.”

  This, he says, might be the future of the funeral trade: change how people understand death. Like religion used to do.

  THE SPOOKIEST TRADE SHOW IN AMERICA

  The Tropicana casino in Las Vegas has been slated for demolition, but not, the clerk assures Annie and me, while we’re staying here. This is how the Vegas strip works: at the first sign of wahí-sabí in a hotel or casino, they get out the dynamite and blow it up, then build a new one the next morning and act like nothing ever happened. Bartenders at the Mirage were suing the hotel and their union for age discrimination: they’d been fired for looking too old, they no longer fit the Vegas brand. History and tradition matter in Vegas, but not if they are more than a few weeks old.

  Our first night I dozed with the TV on, half watching Steve Lawrence in a tuxedo talking about the new Vegas. “You used to have to dress to go to the casinos,” he said, “it used to be all mom-and-pops, until Circus Circus opened up.” Now the casinos are all corporately owned, there are no more high-rollers, just families and shrimp buffets. I woke up thinking, I’ve heard this all somewhere.

  We walk the Strip, packed with the same pudgy families I’d seen on Hollywood Boulevard, golf jackets and hoodies from mid-western colleges tied around their waists, drinking glowing green Hurricanes and Slurpees. My feet stick to the sidewalk from sugar. Toddlers toddle, wee zombies buzzed on the light and colours, and the only signs of sin in Sin City are the “porn slappers” who press hooker cards into our hands as we pass. But they’re families too: mothers and grandmothers and teenage boys, migrant workers from Mexico.

  The next morning we hit the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association trade show at the Mandalay Bay casino. ICCFA: “Guardians of a Nation’s Heritage.” The hall is packed with vendors, hawking burial vaults and retorts and caskets and memorial gizmos: trippy glass tombstones and fake hollow tree stumps and rocks for cremated remains. The gift shop sells little wooden casket key chains and toy hearses. I tell Annie how to spot an American funeral director: a man with no neck, or a woman who looks like Mary Tyler Moore, only thinner and more authoritative. The vendors are desperate to make eye contact, to talk up such things as the benefits of granite. Across from Ace Caskets, with its new spring hardwood line, a man in a tie-dyed lab coat offers us a chance to win a Cherokee child’s casket: the casket, the size of a beer cooler, is the raffle box.

  “Why the lab coat?” I ask, filling out a card.

  “Because I don’t have a personality,” he says. “The coat gives me a personality.”

  Two delightful young men show us their innovation: Shiva Shades, paper blinds for Jewish families, to cover mirrors during the seven days of shiva. The paper unfurls like an accordion and sticks to the glass with an adhesive strip. “No more cumbersome bedsheets,” they tell us.

  Funeral directors and cemeterians walk the aisles, shopping. A salesman offers Annie a ride in the Body Scoop, an electric lift for moving corpses. I take pictures while he lowers Annie into a casket. She claps with joy, but I feel ill, the image now burned in my head.

  In a room off the main exhibition hall, an undertaker from Louisiana draws a red line on a dry-erase board and labels it Cremation. “This is a warning sign,” he says. People take notes. Warning sign, they write. “And death won’t bail us out.” He has a preacher’s gift for the long, telling pause. “The Centers for Disease Control keeps getting better and better, and it’s sixteen years until the baby boomers get here,” he says. “Now, what if they’re all cremations?” He taps his red line. “We are in the hole, brothers and sisters!” What he’s pitching are video terminals, like the confession-cams on reality TV shows. People sit in a booth and record their memories of the deceased. The clips are cut together and burned onto a DVD, which can be shown at the service. It’s added value, a tool to keep cremation families from taking their business to a hotel or restaurant.

  “This is what we own, ladies and gentlemen: the ceremony, the gathering,” he says. “When people are on their deathbed, what they want is to make sure they’re not forgotten.” The concept’s been focus-grouped and his pre-need sales are through the roof.

  Next door, John Earle, of the Arbor Group Earles (father of Andrew, the manager at Chapel Lawn in Winnipeg), hosts a bull-session on food as a “revenue replacement program” for funeral homes. Clear out your casket showrooms, he says, and build reception halls. People eat after funerals. Why watch them drive to the mall when you can feed them on site, and not just with snacks and carrot sticks but with hot meals? Chapel Lawn, he says, has a full-time cook (“Thirty hours a week, her name is Barbara and she’s a college graduate”), and a patio for barbecues. “This little gal has personality,” he says, flashing a picture of his hostess on the PowerPoint screen. “She’s comfortable around deceased human remains. That’s important.

  “And don’t be afraid to put in bright yellow umbrellas. It says patio, it says food, it says entertainment.”

  At $1,220 for a catered event for fifty people, your profit margin is $795, a better markup than on caskets. Chapel Lawn does eight, eight and a half receptions a week. “If you don’t have a fool managing your business and you love your families, you cannot go wrong, folks,” he says. “But you need to value-add, and you need to revenue and cash-flow replace.” The group applauds.

  John Earle made me hungry. Back in the trade show hall, I line up at the lunch buffet for nachos and fajitas. Annie’s gone to look for the Liberace museum, so I take my food and sit at a table by myself near the Matthews booth. Matthews has dolled up its set like a cremation garden and columbarium. Laid out like graves are brass markers, all of which bear the name Matthews, as if there’d been a bus crash on the way to the show and the whole family was wiped out and buried in the floor of the expo hall, among red wood chips and a bird bath filled with hard candies.

  A couple sits down with me. They’re husband and wife, from the Gardens of Gethsemani, a Catholic cemetery in British Columbia.

  “Deals deals deals,” says the woman, breathless. She’s just bought a set of rubber tracks to keep the tractors from digging up the cemetery grass, and has her eye on a stone eagle statue. “If you wait till the end,” she says, “you’ll get a good deal on statues. The dealers don’t want to have to carry them all the way home again.” She yoo-hoos across the hall to another woman, who joins us with news of a discount on religious statuary.

  “What’s so special about it?”

  “I don’t know, blessed by the Pope or something.”

  Off they go, leaving me and the husband behind. He stares at his empty paper plate.

  A big crowd gathers in one of the session halls for the two men who run Eternal Hills, a cemetery–funeral combo in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Eternal Hills is famous for having no salaried staff: everyone works on commission and bonuses. They sell package deals on the following model: If you offer a man a balloon release, he’ll tell you he doesn’t want one. If however he needs a graveside service with forty chairs, and the forty-chair package includes both a balloon release and a Thumbie, a gold pendant with the impression of the deceased’s fingerprint, he’ll take the package. The arranging directors have a credo:

  We know the family has shut down mentally.

  We know they are still at the hospital in their mind holding the deceased’s hand.

  We know we need to move them from anger to love.

  We know with enough repetition they will see value in one of the items in the packages—Funeral … Cemetery … Crematory—three times to say no.

  Who says “no” three times?

  They drill their staff on arrangement techniques like a football team, until, in th
eir words, not only do they get it right, but they can’t get it wrong.

  Eternal Hills may have solved a modern puzzle in death-care: what to do about RTFs, or return-to-familys, the cremated remains that walk off the cemetery property before they have a chance to contribute to the revenue stream. For this crowd, with their love– hate relationship with cremation, it was like solving the Fermat’s Last Theorem.

  “Are your families saying ‘We just want cremation,’ and do they really know what that means?” they ask. Eternal Hills offers a guarantee: they sell glass-front niches with a two-year cooling-off period. If, during the two years, the family decides to take the ashes home or scatter them somewhere special, the cemetery refunds the money for the niche. A bit like negative-option billing for cable television: we keep the ashes unless you decide otherwise. In effect they’re gambling on human behavioural inertia, that most people will leave well enough alone. It works. In eight years they’ve had only one customer take them up on the offer and remove the remains.

  In fact, the manager of Eternal Hills tells us, his best friend and fishing partner, a teacher, who died suddenly of a heart attack while on a school trip, came close to being scattered in the North Umpqua River in Oregon, which, according to his son, was what he’d always wanted. It was a favourite fishing spot. But the family agreed to leave him in a niche at Eternal Hills until they could sort out the logistics. “That was in 1999,” the manager tells us. “My best friend is still in the glass-front niche.” The Eternal Hills guarantee had saved a soul from the oblivion of scattering.

  The big product companies, Matthews and Batesville, hold the prime spots on the floor. Steve, the Batesville rep, gives me a crushing handshake and shows me a cremation hybrid casket that looks like a Shaker blanket box. I ask him about Chinese knock-offs, what they’re doing to Batesville’s market share, and he tells me a story about a two-hundred-pound woman who fell through the bottom of a Chinese casket in front of her family at a funeral. He tells me too about a badly embalmed body that dripped as it was carried down the aisle (and here he makes the sound of a dripping body: pup, pup, pup) through a poorly welded knock-off. “Twenty-eight percent of your business is gone in a lawsuit,” he says. “Now, will you pay the $400 premium for a Batesville?”

  Next booth over, David, from House of International Inc., sells Chinese caskets: cherrywoods with stained glass tops. His brochure says, “We provide much styles and sizes and looking forward to service you.” I ask David how it feels, working so close to Steve all day. “Pressure, pressure, pressure,” he says with a sigh. Then he tells me he’s heard tell of a woman who fell through the bottom of a Batesville casket in front of her family at a funeral (the saga of the two-hundred-pound woman is an apocryphal industry fairy tale—it never happened, but this is a competitive racket and fear sells).

  Ed sells clocks, and Toni sells greeting cards. Toni has choppy blonde power hair and sad, ebony eyes that follow me, like those in a painting, so I stop at her booth. They’ve exiled her to the back of the hall with the other indie entrepreneurs and the John Deere lawn mower enthusiasts who drink iced tea and talk loudly about sod. Her company, called A Touch From Beyond, sells Hallmark-style cards. I pick one off the table and open it.

  “You meant a lot to me and I appreciated knowing you,” it says.

  I read it again, noting the past tense. The idea, she says, is you sign and stamp the cards before you die. Then, after you’re gone, someone mails them out to friends, co-workers, caregivers and family. Posthumous thank-you cards. She got the idea when her husband died, just three years after she lost her father.

  “Are you married?” she says.

  I tell her I am, but not really. We just live together. Well, not “just,” we’ve been together for years, and now she’s somewhere out on the Strip looking for the Liberace museum, but anyway, I say, I suppose I’m missing the point because I think I’d probably say goodbye to her, you know, in person, rather than send a card.

  The cards are for people who “don’t have the words,” she says.

  She hands me a few more samples.

  Our shared lives were

  comprehensive

  and fulfilling

  and you gave more than

  I ever requested

  or required.

  Thank you for all you did.

  They have a certain businesslike charm, like a well-crafted memo (“comprehensive and fulfilling”). After all, we buy cards to mark other life transitions: birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduation, Secretary’s Day. But I think about people I know in Newfoundland, who aren’t so much superstitious as practical about omens, who would spend a day and a night at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist with a rosary if they ever got a greeting card from beyond the grave. “Stay in Their Memories Forever,” the pamphlet says. Who could forget such a card? I thank Toni, but I know she knows I don’t get it.

  “Until you go through it,” she says, “you don’t understand.”

  The words, and her eyes, give me a chill.

  Ed’s clocks are urns, or his urns are clocks. Some clocks are set into pen-holder desk sets which are also urns. They are, I would say, conceptually busy. Am I supposed to reflect on the tyranny of time or the transience of human communion through the written word, or is it just a clock and a pen holder? The desk set with the clock set into a golf ball is even more work. I’m growing tired of everything being packed with cryptic meaning.

  “Is this working?” says Ed.

  I don’t know what he means. I’m not wearing a watch, so I can’t tell him if his clocks are running on time.

  “Do people want this?” he clarifies. “I mean, you probably know about these things.”

  Richard calls them pot-and-pan salesmen and Neil calls them carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs aiming to elbow their way into the funeral market with gadgets that have no inherent meaning except as vessels for ashes. Take an object, a paperweight or a model boat, carve out a space big enough for a capsule: whammo, a $675 memorial keepsake. But I feel bad for Ed. He’s in a near panic. He seems to sense that his clocks lack something, a necessary gravity. All I can think to tell him is what I’ve learned today: that if you don’t have a fool running your business and you love your families, you cannot go wrong by value-adding, and revenue-and cash-flow replacing. Instead I tell him to hang in, that the marketplace is a rich tapestry.

  The casino beckons. I sit down at an I Dream of Jeannie slot machine and feed it a dollar, but it can’t even muster the energy to play me like a fish, so pathetic is my bet. It just eats the dollar and chirps, beckoning someone who knows how to play. I’m lost in here, like I was in the exhibition hall. I remember what Sean Dockray said, that Vegas is a managed experience: playtime for families who seek the fantasy of living in a pyramid or medieval castle for a weekend, to escape the chaos and discord of their real lives. They don’t come to win, they come to experience the possibility of winning, on the next turn of the slot machine barrels, which never happens but that’s not the point. The target customer in Vegas does not lose his shirt nor does he win the jackpot. He’s simply delivered through time, distracted. For this he and his family will pay, and buy the T-shirt and eat shrimp in buckets. This, in a way, is the goal of the funeral trade too: to divert your attention long enough to get the body into the ground or the retort. Every funeral is a gamble that through some combination of product and ceremony, greeting cards and clocks and barbecues, you’ll feel better, not transformed or changed but carried, dazed, over the hump. Is that enough? Is it better than nothing? I don’t know, but neither does the industry, and it occurs to me as a dreamy revelation that death-care is playing the Vegas game too: blowing itself up and rebuilding in a panic, hoping their invented traditions will stick this time and draw a crowd.

  I pass a craps table and a twenty-ish man in a porkpie hat and plaid shorts, with a beer in one hand and the dice in the other, calls out, “Who’s feelin’ it, because I’m not feelin’ it.” He looks at me. “Is anyone fee
lin’ it?” Vaguely depressed I go back to the expo.

  A small group has gathered across from the Shiva Shade boys. Perhaps, I think, a knife fight has broken out between Batesville and House of International Inc. But I look closer and see that the crowd is huddled around a dog, a golden Lab. Undertakers are patting him behind the ears and making clucky tongue noises at him. The dog’s name is Derek, and he’s a canine therapist. He wears a vest. Derek belongs to Tom Flynn, who owns a cemetery in Hermitage, Pennsylvania. His son, John, runs the family funeral home. Tom’s philosophy on death-care is elegant: adapt or perish.

  “For me,” he says, cupping my elbow, “it came down to pets or vets. We got a lot of Catholics where we are, but Catholic cemeteries get them all. With veterans, Catholic or Presbyterian or what-have-you, they still identify as vets.”

  “But people will spend more money on pets,” says John.

  So pets it was.

  They cremate pets, bury pets, host 150 pet funerals a year (“We had one family spend $800 on a guinea pig!” John says, as if he can’t believe it himself), and once they got the okay from the city of Hermitage, they branched into burying pets and people together, Dad and Spot in the same grave. “We pre-need like crazy,” Tom says.

  “At first I was terrified,” John says. “I thought we’d have people dragging their dead dogs in the front door of the funeral home.”

  Tom puts it this way: His cemetery has 25 percent of the local market (human, that is) and the funeral home gets 20 percent. But two-thirds of all homes have pets, and as the only pet death-care provider in town, that gives him a 66 percent share, plus most people own seven or eight pets in a lifetime. And satisfied pet owners buy pre-needs for themselves and their families too: for most people, burying a pet is their introduction to the death-care industry. Meanwhile, thanks to cremation, other, less diversified funeral homes are down to twenty funerals a year. How do you make a living on twenty funerals a year? By jacking the unit price, which only drives people to find cheaper cremation elsewhere, and the wheel keeps turning. “The whole world’s changing,” he says.