Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  Attendance is sparse for the mainstage event with Dave Norton of Stone Mantel, an “insights consultancy” that counsels business on building “meaningful branding experiences.” The crowd is attentive, if distracted by the crew in the back that’s setting up coffee urns and baskets of muffins. Dave strides onto the stage. “Yours is a highly experiential industry,” he tells us, “but you’re treating it as a service: you offer to memorialize my loved ones for me so I don’t have to.” Meanwhile what people are looking for is an experience that matters, what he calls “cultural capital,” whether it comes from art, spirituality or family life. Our lives are plastic: look around you, the city you’re in, a fantasyland, and people are tired of fantasy. They’re simplifying their lives: couples are scaling down, selling the SUV, or one of them, and living on a single income, eliminating economic premiums in favour of meaning—more time with family, more time for spiritual growth.

  “Do they go around saying, ‘I gotta have that latest casket’? They do not,” he says.

  They’re hungry for products and experiences with high cultural value. The Body Shop does it by linking a story, of human and animal rights and fair trade, to shampoo and soap. Boomers have money to create a legacy, not because they care about status but because they want their lives, in the end, to have mattered. Look at the rise in volunteerism, and geo-tourism: they’re taking their vacations in India and Guatemala, building housing and wells for clean water, reading to local kids, not sitting on the beach.

  “Take a stand,” says Dave. “What is soap?” he asks. (No one puts up his hand to hazard an answer.) “It’s a product that takes a position: it’s against dirt. People say, I’m against dirt too.”

  The man to my left is asleep, leaning on his cane, head resting on his hands. A woman at the front applauds lightly. The rest line up for coffee. I feel like I’ve seen and heard something important but cryptic, and this is the trouble with consultants. Like prophets they lead you to the edge of redemption and leave you to find God’s grace on your own. What does he mean, “take a stand?” I suppose if pressed to choose one way or the other I’d have to say I’m against death. But what he’s after is deeper fish. It’s not enough to be against death; I need to face up to its absurdity, find meaning in the mess. How? Through some mystical “premium cultural experience.” No wonder the industry crowd is ambivalent. In a way he’s telling us to strip it down and start again, that the impulse to fix grief through shopping is giving way to the hunger for substance. How do you put that on a General Price List? What’s the funeral equivalent of Body Shop shampoo? Then it comes to me: I’ve already seen it. A simple act, without the artifice of embalming or baroque funerary product. Just a direct application of body to ground where it’s left to contribute to the great cycle: ashes to ashes and all that, back to Mother Earth in a shroud and a plain wooden box. Instead of deflecting a confrontation with death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt, in fact, but in favour of it. An act with meaning.

  At day’s end I meet Annie for supper, at a real restaurant that serves food on plates delivered by waiters, with none of the wheelbarrow shrimp or deep-fried salad of the casino buffet: an authentic experience for our last night in Vegas.

  “I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

  ONE LESS UNDERTAKER

  The ground in front of the Factory has been dug up and graded. A backhoe sits perched like a vulture over what used to be the rose garden, now a hole ten feet deep and lined with concrete. The steel girders were sunk a week ago, marking the boundaries of the new reception centre. During construction, Neil says, one of the front-end loaders pierced a gas line. They could smell it in the crematorium. All they could do was evacuate the building, then hurry the bodies from the cooler into the removal van and drive them to a safe distance and wait for the fire department. Though the retorts were shut off, the two corpses inside continued to burn on their own fuel. Neil stood across the street and waited for his dream, now finally realized and halfway to being built, to blow up. But the firemen arrived in time to shut off the gas.

  The evidence is in front of me: Neil won his court battle with Chapel Lawn, and the judges awarded him costs. The rose garden, they said, is a private matter on private property. If Neil wants to let people scatter their ashes and charge them a fee, that’s his business. Cremated remains, they said, are not human remains. A scattering garden is not a cemetery. With the lawsuit out of the way, the bank fed him the cash for the building expansion, and a ribbon cutting is scheduled for next September. Chapel Lawn will not appeal, and is presumed grumpy.

  But with the victory came a sour trade-off. After a twenty-year battle to see a paper idea turn into concrete and steel girders, he’s lost half his staff. Adina was the first to go. After graduating from embalming school she took a job at Glen Lawn, one of the Arbor Group homes in the east end. Shannon followed soon after, to Chapel Lawn. It was their third shot at cherry-picking her and, as she told Neil, they weren’t likely to call a fourth time. So she accepted their offer. Of course there were long-standing grievances, the clashes with Eirik over technique, but as far as Neil can tell, it came down to work–life balance.

  “She got that if you give your all to a family in mourning, that it’s worth something,” he says. “The part she didn’t get is you have to have flexible time.” People die at night and on Sundays, Christmas and Easter. Bodies are cremated on Saturday so they can be scattered on Monday. Undertakers who expect to work according to a fixed schedule can’t manage for long in a place like Neil’s: there are some things for which you can only count on family. Staffers won’t get up at 4 a.m. to see a grieving widow, but family will. If you spent your childhood in a funeral home, you already know your time isn’t your own. Eirik understands this, Neil says. He’s a work in progress, but he knows what it means to “grow up funeral.”

  After Shannon left, Glenn handed in what was to be the last of his many resignation letters. He’s now the night manager at Pasta La Vista. But Eirik and Richard have smoothed over their conflicts, and in the new building they’ll share an office.

  The fate of the downtown chapel is still pending. Neil would like to see it used for other functions. Richard’s doing the research. He’s reaching out to the gay and lesbian community, pitching same-sex weddings in a funeral home. Meanwhile, Neil’s law-firm model for funeral service has been stashed away in a drawer for now. It might’ve worked with Natalie and Shannon on board, but Richard, he says, is too old and stubborn to buy into it, so the status quo will have to do.

  Six months have passed since my American junket: six months of procrastination and writing, trying to figure out what I’ve figured out, if anything. When I got back from Las Vegas I spent three weeks in Richard’s care at Aubrey Street and it was as if I’d never left: chairs needed stacking, coffee cups needed bussing, mourners had to be aimed at washrooms and parking spaces. Like an explorer bringing back exotic spices from the Orient, I tried to get Richard excited about the art urns I’d seen in Graton, but as predicted he just yawned: they’d never sell in Winnipeg. A spinning prayer wheel? Please. We have a hard-enough time getting people to pick flowers, he said. We don’t need to stock the showroom like it’s Toys “R” Us.

  Green burial was another matter. There’d been talk from the city about building a green section at municipally owned St. Vital cemetery, but with red tape still to be cut and numbers to be crunched, no one at Neil Bardal Inc. expected it would happen in their lifetimes. Still, Richard has his eye on new products: biodegradable caskets made of wicker and shaped like sarcophagi, the same caskets Neil’s grandfather used to carry at Sherbrook Street before anyone had dreamed of saving the planet through better dying.

  The last service I worked with Richard was a sparsely attended affai
r. Sunlight marked the church floor purple and red where it shone through the stained glass windows. The organist played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

  “I think it’s the only one she knows,” said Richard.

  The dead woman’s pre-teen great-grandson gave the eulogy. “She seemed to be proud of me,” he told the small crowd. “She said, ‘You’re a good boy, Keenan, and you have a good speaking voice.’ She used to knit sweaters. I wish she’d knitted more of them. Goodbye, Grammsie.”

  Richard and I sat at the back of the church. He put his feet up on the empty pew in front of us, and I did the same.

  “You got to admit,” he whispered, “it’s a good way to kill an afternoon.”

  Now, months later, the crematorium is a construction site.

  “Where are all the people?” I say to Neil, staring down into the empty hole that used to be the rose garden.

  He leads me to the back of the building. There, under a pair of blue and orange tarps secured with rope and cinder blocks, is a pile of dirt. It will all go back into the Garden of Memories once the building is done. Someone’s left a flower on one of the tarps.

  There have been visitors, Neil says, though the physical remains are long gone, leached into the deep soil and groundwater, dissolved and cycled through nature. But the place, the spot on the earth where the last act took place, has meaning. It’s still charged with the families’ memories of the people who’ve been scattered.

  I had always had trouble figuring out the appeal of the rose garden. Why here? Why would I scatter my loved ones by the airport, two doors down from Two Amigos Moving and Storage, when I can scatter anywhere, create my own meaningful last act? But now I see it’s the act that counts and not the place. Neil’s just providing an option, somewhere with washrooms and plenty of parking, free of the oppressive (and expensive) baroque theatrics of the cemetery. Scatter where you want, bury where you wish, but do something with intent, don’t be passive and follow what commissioned pre-need salesmen consider the norm. Use your imagination, balance your own spiritual beliefs with guesswork, but do the work: accept that we know nothing about death, take a leap of faith, and have the courage to act anyway.

  I once asked Neil the question directly: What’s the right thing to do when someone dies? He thought about it, then said, “I don’t know.” Not the answer I wanted, but after a moment he added, “I think you have to struggle with it.”

  When his father first showed signs of what Neil calls “emotional trouble,” he asked Neil to move him to Deer Lodge Centre, where his friends, the other Hong Kong vets, enjoyed a certain institutional clout. He had learned from the Japanese prison camp how to live in a restricted space, and he wanted to stay in Deer Lodge until he died. Promise me you’ll let me do this, he said, and Neil promised. The rest of the family, his aunts in particular, popped a collective gasket, and overruled the decision.

  “As we were leaving the hospital, my dad said to me, ‘You know, boy, I really thought I could trust you this time.’”

  Sometime later, Njall Sr., after spending a few hours writing letters, announced to his son that he was dying, that in fact he’d be dead by six that night. He asked to be taken back to Deer Lodge, and Neil drove him there, expecting the same outcome as last time: his father would stay for a while and then Neil would take him home. But by six Neil’s father was dead. He’d suffered an aortic aneurysm. The doctors said he’d been filling up with blood for hours, and he must’ve known it. As Neil had already told me, his father had asked to be cremated, but Neil had other plans.

  The casket was oak, the vault donated by the manufacturer. Viewing was at the Sherbrook Street funeral home, and the service followed at St. Stephen’s. Neil said it was a $15,000 funeral by today’s market, and the stone cost ten grand.

  “I knew we’d keep 30 percent,” he said. “But if we cremated him like he wanted, that’s $3,500 all in, and we’d keep 20 percent. I had to ask, what am I doing to my own profession?

  “Everything told me I was doing the right thing as a businessman, but none of it was meeting my needs as a son. I’d betrayed him twice,” he said—first by taking him out of Deer Lodge, then by burying him against his wishes. “But I decided if we’re going to show what we do, let’s show it in its fullest form, let’s have the casket and the viewing, the whole ball. Now I walk past his grave and say, ‘Sorry, Dad.’ It never left me. When I started to think about it I came to the conclusion: the simpler the act the better.”

  His father’s death forced him to go back to first principles. What is an undertaker? Is he a product salesman? No, he deals first with the body and then helps the family work out a ritual with meaning. It’s hard, maybe impossible, to know what has meaning, and the impulse may be to seek the comfort of the casket showroom or the customs of the Church. But if you struggle with it, Neil said, you’ll come up with an idea. For him, getting the body from bed to retort to ground with no sold product in between, except for the cardboard container, is an act with meaning.

  But then so is burying a man with his favourite shoes and a can of Pringles chips. If modern living means there’s no code of conduct except for what you devise yourself from shreds of religion, a few of the more hard-core Commandments, common law, taste and the basic rules of collaborative society (don’t jump the queue at the ATM), then deciding what has meaning is a matter of personal choice. Oh boy. I have a hard-enough time choosing toothpaste: wintergreen, peppermint, cinnamon, apricot, anise, ginger or tea-tree oil. Please, someone, tell me what I want; advertise me into a decision.

  Maybe this is why the corporates will never lose by pitching the full-fig package, with a balloon release, a gold Thumbie and a two-year guarantee on a columbarium niche. Predigested meaning is oddly liberating: it frees me of the responsibility to decide among a sea of choices I have neither the skill nor the experience to navigate. Doing nothing is an option too.

  But somewhere in between everything and nothing I’m left with my own unreliable instincts. In the past these instincts have led me to bad choices, to buying T-shirts with ironic sayings that I no longer understand. How can I trust them in the face of death? Maybe by following Neil’s example, and the examples of the families I’ve met on this weird journey: by interrogating my beliefs. If your belief is that the Canadian walleye is superior to the American walleye, then have the Canadian fish etched on the urn. This is not a trivial detail. It’s a human response to an absurd event.

  As Neil did after his father died, let’s break it down to first principles. Here’s the body. You have to do something with it. The hospital wants it out of the morgue, fast, to make room for fresh ones. What are your options? Until promession and resomation find the right investment and branding opportunities, they’re off the list, as is Tibetan sky burial, in which the corpse is left in the treetops to be devoured by carrion birds. Basically you have two choices: burn or bury (or both).

  Too simple? Of course. The choices are fraught with a powerful need to find meaning in what otherwise is an act of disposal. Maybe you believe in the myth of permanence, the need to control the wild and absurd through human ingenuity. So the body is skilfully embalmed, made to look serene, and buried in a “sealer” casket and vault. Or, it’s cremated and inurned, placed on a shelf, an heirloom-to-be for future generations to match furniture and drapes against. The cemetery promises perpetual care: six hundred years from now a college student will still be cutting the grass over the grave, with some laser doodad. The myth of permanence is seductive. In a way it’s no different from religious faith, with its promise of immortality. It’s a reasonable, socially sanctioned reply to an unreasonable demand, and gives you the tools to deflect a confrontation with real, putrid, worm-crawling death. Zygmunt Bauman and Ernest Becker and Sheldon Solomon all agree that this is the supreme human accomplishment: the ability to deny that death will someday happen to you. By controlling it you rob it of its power. It’s a war, and we fight it one managed corpse at a time.

  Maybe you
believe the opposite, that the answer to death is to embrace the chaos, to see the body dispersed rather than managed and packaged. So you cremate and scatter, or bury the ashes loose in the soil, or if you can find a cemetery that doesn’t insist on a vault or concrete liner (good luck) you can bury the body as is, in a shroud or a simple wooden box. The green burial fits a desire for a different kind of immortality: the perpetuation of the carbon cycle, rebirth through the organic efforts of Mother Earth. Yes, it’s a secular variation on the Jewish rites, which I’m convinced can be pitched to baby boomers as an experience with high cultural value: brand it as tahara, the Hebrew term for purification of the corpse through washing and prayer. It has enough of a Japanese ring that it speaks of the value of decay, of wabi-sabi. We used to fear decay, and the industry played on that fear, using it as a sales lever to pitch embalming and protective caskets, but now rot is a value. We compost our carrot tops. I have friends who keep earthworms in Tupperware containers and feed them coffee grounds and eggshells as if they were pets. The modern tahara, an ancient, meaningful ritual (stripped of its emphasis on the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the sake of marketability) where the body is washed, wrapped in linen and buried at once, might appeal to the same crowd that recycles its cat food tins and buys twirly light bulbs: current practices are unsustainable. It’s a sin against nature to bury veneer hardwoods and steel. Go pre-modern, like your dreadlocked neighbours who wear only hemp. Joe Sehee’s grand, ambitious green burial grounds, where the goal is to preserve and conserve, call for a near-religious faith in political action even after death: you can take up space in a cemetery or you can contribute to sustainable land management. It’s a meaningful act.