Curtains

by Tom Jokinen

  But my impulse, inspired by Neil’s bed-to-garden philosophy, is to keep it simple and modest. The Tahara brand could be hooked to the development of small, rural cemeteries, like the burial ground in Starbuck: no-embalming zones that are left to grow wild. Invest in property now, register it with Joe’s Green Burial Council. I smell the equivalent of the condo boom.

  Having stood at enough open graves by now to feel the seductive pull, I can understand why my grandparents wanted the piece of real estate above all else: the body belongs in the ground, in whatever form—ashes or whole, marked with a stick or a bronze plaque or nothing at all. Robert Pogue Harrison says that “to be human means above all to bury.”

  Which leaves us with the ceremony. I see no difference between the Celebration of Life and the rite of Christian burial. Both use storytelling to take the sting out of death. One praises the life that was, the other the life that follows. Death is simply the trigger for a crafted narrative, where the bad bits are edited out. The dead man may have been a dick or a sinner, but for one day (one day!) we can forget all that and commit his soul either to memory or to an everlasting communion with God: our choice, it’s a ritual of deliverance either way. But it doesn’t have to happen in a funeral home or a church. Gather more than two people in a room with a photo album and a bottle of wine and it’s a wake. The advantage of the funeral home is that it’s bookable on short notice, and provides access to parking and potable water. The disadvantage is that, for the most part, the funeral home is still stuck in a decades-old Home Shopping Channel aesthetic, with its porcelain-figurine and airbrushed-pony-painting kitsch-charm. A graduate student I met did her thesis on funeral home design and concluded that the modern ritual is best served by a blank canvas, a space without emotional expectations and predigested signifiers: in other words, a white room.

  I saw this white room by accident one night, walking on Queen Street West in Toronto. I came across a store that hadn’t been dressed yet with product, whatever it was the vendors intended to sell. The walls were lined with white bunting and beautifully lit. The space was deeper than it was wide, and my eye was drawn to a focal point at the back, where I imagined the shrouded corpse or an unglazed pottery urn or the ashes loose and sprinkled in a ring with a candle or stone pot of burning sweetgrass in the middle. Instead of pews the mourners would be issued yoga mats. A bald Asian man in an orange sarong would ring a tiny brass bell. The guests would be encouraged to reflect on time and decay in some private manner. They could nap if they wanted to, or hold hands with a stranger, or murmur the Kaddish, which could be projected on the wall like surtitles at the opera. For a line of Tahara outlets in suburban power centres, next to the LensCrafters, all I’d need is a bazillion dollars in start-up. But with 75 million souls hungry for transformative experiences, name me a safer investment. The industry has appropriated Christian imagery long enough: it’s time to steal grapes from another great religion.

  The fantasy evaporated when a sales clerk hustled out to tell me to stop taking pictures, that I was presenting a security risk. I carried on down Queen Street, stopped into The Body Shop and bought a bottle of ginger shampoo in order to save the planet and untold cosmetic-lab bunnies. Body Shop would be a good name for a funeral chain too, but it’s taken.

  Still, I was left with the image, a space stripped of commerce, and in my head Neil’s mantra: the simpler the act the better. Fantasy aside, how do you find simplicity in an industry so committed to baroque product and ceremony? The same way you find the right dentist or hairstylist: by shopping around. There are undertakers like Neil who believe that their job is to deal with the body, and to deliver a ritual with meaning. It takes work to tease them out of the Yellow Pages herd, but two questions might do it. Can I visit the body without having it embalmed? Can I sit with it at the crematorium while it’s in the retort? Even if you intend to do neither, the answers will tell you what kind of funeral director you’re dealing with.

  I started this trip, my head full of Mitford, thinking funeral directors were, at best, well-meaning crackerjack salesmen whose answer to the madness of loss was to dress it up, package it and perform a kind of ad lib voodoo, leaving the real work of grief to the families after the cheque had cleared. Instead I found a community trying hard, if not always succeeding, to carry their customers from confusion to clarity, and at times helping them to confront real death in a genuine way. They have more to offer than product: they listen, and they don’t treat grief as a communicable disease. Neil and his family bury and burn the dead, and although it’s not their job to deliver the souls to a better place, they can and do deliver the living to a better place: to the comfort of a meaningful rite, religious or secular or invented on the spot.

  ——

  The churchyard in Dacotah is all yard and no church. The building was moved years ago, leaving a bald patch on the grass next to the cemetery. The Scandinavian Lutherans who used to worship here now go to the church in nearby Starbuck. But the cemetery is still active: the stones, some old enough to be covered in orange lichen, bear names with more consonants than vowels. A few people have gathered for the burial, overdressed for the summer heat. Two men in wraparound sunglasses stand over one of the old graves. The headstone has toppled off its pedestal and they push it back into place, promising to come back later with contact cement to fix it properly.

  “That’s his sister there,” one of the men says, wiping his hands on his trousers. “She died in ’53, in that train accident.”

  “I thought it was suicide,” the other says.

  “It was, but everyone says it was an accident.”

  The pastor calls us to a spot under a tree for today’s interment. In one hand I’m holding the late Mrs. Q. in an urn that looks like a Russian peasant’s jewel box: folk-arty flowers on black lacquer. Uncommonly pretty for a commercial urn. In the other I’m holding the urn vault, a small plastic tub with a lid, like a hotel ice bucket. After the pastor’s blessing I place the urn in the vault and secure the lid with Testors model-airplane glue. Strands of glue blow in the breeze, and a woman beside me picks some out of her hair. Neil hands out single roses to the guests, who then place them, one at a time, in the grave.

  Hands are shaken, and the small crowd is released to their cars. Service will be in Starbuck, at the same Lutheran church where Neil and Richard and I once buried the farmer with a sheaf of dried wheat on his casket. The gravedigger arrives in his pickup. He is in fact the backup gravedigger (filling in for someone named Mitch), a hobby farmer from “exactly three miles east,” he says.

  “I’m amazed how dry the hole is,” he says as he fills it. “I expected the earth to be clumpy but it’s bone dry.” He picks up a handful as proof.

  Leaving him to his work, I join Neil in the van. On the way out of the cemetery, I can see the backup gravedigger sticking each rose stem-first into the earth over the grave, like a birthday candle. They keep falling over and he keeps standing them up. It’s hopeless of course, but all the more moving in its futility and the fact that he doesn’t know I’m watching. That’s all it takes, I think: a simple, private human gesture.

  After a quick lunch at the Starbuck Hotel, at which the same man behind the counter offers us the same ham sandwiches on defrosted hamburger buns (end of the week: no bread), Neil and I attend to the guests at the church. Men whose pants still have creases from the clothes hangers where they’ve hung since the last funeral let their wives sign the guest book for them. Their necks and ears are sunburned, their bald spots white. They wipe their feet on the way into church. The pianist plays a plunky “Ode to Joy.”

  During the service, Neil and I stand outside in the sun. It occurs to me I never did have Richard’s dream about the dead man who sits up in the prep room, which I take to be a reverse omen, a sign from the undertaker gods that it’s time to move on. When I think back on what I’ve learned—how to find a man’s femoral artery by touch, how to put a blouse on an old woman whose elbows are locked, how to bake and sor
t a human skeleton, how to jam 300 cubic inches’ worth of meat packer into a 200-cubic-inch container—I see that I’m left with a very peculiar new skill set, but also, I hope, some new instinct for knowing what to do in the face of death. It calls for a gesture, that’s all, as simple as jamming roses into the earth. But I won’t know for sure until it happens. You can’t pre-need the struggle.

  “I’ve been studying Buddhism,” Neil says.

  Perfect, I think, for a man who wants to shake his material attachment to caskets and other funeral-ware in an industry where permanence is just an illusion anyway. He has also looked into the new technologies. Resomation sounds interesting, he says. He can imagine some kind of fountain arrangement in the Garden of Memories where the liquid remains are channelled back into Mother Earth. Until someone comes up with 100 percent cremation, there’ll always be a remainder. Our mission is to do something interesting with it.

  “But that’s for the future,” Neil says. “What matters most now is family, and those old dears at St. Stephen’s who take care of me …”

  He turns his head. From the church I can hear the closing hymn, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the last in the order of service.

  When my life is almost gone,

  Hear my cry, hear my call,

  Hold my hand lest I fall.

  “I’ll take family over everlasting life,” he says, and before I can respond, he’s gone.

  The hymn is our cue to lead the congregation from the church. There’ll be plenty of time for shop talk and theology later—a lifetime, whatever that may be. For now we have work to do. I follow him into the chapel.

  Except for the parts you didn’t like, for which I take full responsibility, this book was a collaborative effort. Thanks to my friends and narrative counsellors at the CALC round table at the Artful Dodger for their advice, and for enduring my cockeyed obsessions with death and ritual. Thanks to Christine who loves a good Catholic funeral like a kid loves funnel cakes, and to Cheyenne who was the first to ask: why death, when you could just as well write about chocolate and puppies? Next time.

  My friend Paul Wilson and John Pearce, my agent at Westwood Creative Artists, were the twin godfathers of this project. I’m grateful for their guidance and patience. Without them this would still be a pile of notes scribbled in a mortuary bathroom. Thanks to Jim Brown and Sharon Cavanagh for reading the first formless draft of the manuscript and making it better, and to my mom, my role model, for transcribing interviews and for teaching me how to listen.

  Thanks to all those in the business, and their critics too, who cared enough about the subject to answer my naive questions: Karen Leonard, Joe Sehee, Ron Hast, Thomas Lynch, Gary Laderman, Paul Ayers, Gary McRae, Mark Krause, B.T. Hathaway Josh Slocum of the underfunded but invaluable Funeral Consumers Association in the U.S., to members of the Winnipeg death-care community and especially the families who, through the machinery of fate, wound up doing business at Neil Bardal Incorporated in the months I was there. To protect their privacy, I’ve used only initials or pseudonyms in recounting their stories.

  Thanks to Lisa Burks who pokes around troubled cemeteries not for the gruesome kicks, but to remind us that we are who we bury, and to Katherine Isaac for imagining a funeral home without the signs, symbols or cheesy post-colonial furniture of the standard North American mortuary. Funeral directors: read her thesis at the University of Manitoba, and if you can drop the addiction to embalming too, we’ll all join you come the revolution.

  Thanks to the Manitoba Arts Council. They paid for the ramen noodles and black funeral socks consumed and worn during the writing of this book. Thanks to Ray Fennelly and Beth Oberholtzer for further feeding, watering and spiritual care while I was on the road.

  Big heartfelt shout-outs to my editors Kendall Anderson and Anne Collins, and everyone at Random House of Canada, for giving shape and architecture to my scatter-brained notes. Anne Collins is a gift to all writers lucky enough to work with her.

  To Eirik Bardal, Jon Bardal, Jean Bardal, Annette Bardal, Richard Rosin, Janice Dryden, Adina Vogt, Shannon Jackson, Natalie Ricard and Glenn Menge, who let me into their workplace and lives, and to Neil Bardal, my friend and mentor, I’m grateful for your honesty and trust.

  Finally, with love and apologies for the years I disappeared to find my own inner undertaker, and to live inside a Joy Division song, this book is for Anne Gregory.

  TOM JOKINEN is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. He has also worked as a railroad operator and an editorial cartoonist, and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers.

  Copyright © 2010 Tom Jokinen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2010 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Author’s note: For narrative purposes, I have played with chronology. Some events are described out of the order in which they happened, but all are true. A few small identifying details have been changed, though, to protect people’s privacy.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Jokinen, Tom R.

  Curtains : adventures of an undertaker-in-training / Tom R. Jokinen.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37415-8

  1. Jokinen, Tom R. 2. Undertakers and undertaking—Canada—Anecdotes.

  3. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Canada—Anecdotes. 4. Undertakers and

  undertaking—Manitoba—Biography. I. Title.

  RA622J65 2010 363.7′5092 C2009-905015-3

  v3.0