Curtains (12 page)

Adina used to work as an aide at the Lion’s Club seniors home on Portage Avenue. She dressed people, put on their makeup and nail polish, sound training for a career in funeral service. She held hands with them as they died. The worst part of losing someone, she says, isn’t always the grief: sometimes it’s dealing with the funeral home, with the bureaucracy and the tyranny of choices. She heard this more than once from families of her old charges. People need as much care when they’re dead as they do when they’re alive, she says, maybe more so, and that’s why she quit, to be of use on the other side. She likes that Neil doesn’t push product, the caskets and urns and vaults. Her family is German Mennonite, “not the crazy religious kind, more the good-works missionary kind,” and when we drive together on removals, she announces traffic patterns as if I might be blind.

“There’s a car parked in the right lane,” she says, and indeed there is.

We leave the van at the loading dock at Deer Lodge. In the lobby, strings of paper butterflies hang low from the ceiling. We pass a harpist playing a soapy Irish tune for an audience of one, a man in a wheelchair, his head strapped to a neck-rest, a long straw in his mouth, one hand tapping his tray. It’s not clear if he’s enjoying himself or signalling for help. A security guard leads us downstairs into the mechanical heart of the hospital, past orange boilers, green and red overhead pipes, the corpse of a busted front-load washing machine. We snake the stretcher through a hall of old recliner chairs to the main elevator, which takes us to the fourth floor. This is a ward removal. Ward removals are unlike Silver Doors removals in that you’re getting the body right out of the bed in which it died. You’re mixing with other patients and visitors and maybe even the family of the deceased. The goal is to act smartly and efficiently without traumatizing civilians by waving the dead body under their noses: get in, get out.

The nurse points out the room. Inside, two tiny ladies sit at the ends of their beds eating their lunches, each watching her own television set. The bed with the body is in the corner, behind closed drapes. To get there we have to negotiate the narrow space between the TVs.

“Good morning, ladies,” Adina says, but they go on watching their pingy game shows.

The dead woman is younger than I had expected, maybe in her late fifties, pale and heavy with a look of calm repose, as if her features had already been set. She’s wearing a nightie. Our options for getting her from a bed that’s too low to a stretcher that’s too high are limited. We whisper so as not to disturb the two ladies, but in fact we could holler and they’d never hear us
over
The Price Is Right
, and besides, they don’t seem interested in what we’re doing.

The woman is two hundred pounds, maybe more. We decide to lower the stretcher to the floor and let gravity work with us, but the space is cramped, and if she falls, the three of us will be wedged between the bed and the wall, and they’ll need the Jaws of Life to get us out. I put on the latex gloves and hug the woman under her arms. Our cheeks are touching. She’s still warm and smells of baby powder. One–two–three, we hoist her from bed to stretcher and then one–two–three we ratchet the stretcher back up to its cruising height, lock it in position and cover the body with the fitted cloth sham.

“Have a nice day, ladies,” Adina says as we squeeze the stretcher between the two television sets, careful not to knock them over.

One of the women, without taking her eyes off her show, waves her hand as if she were shooing a fly. In the hallway we pass a nurse and three visitors who look at us blankly, then carry on with some conversation about cooking a turkey.

There’s something spooky about Deer Lodge. In a weird way I’m getting a sense of what it must be like to be dead: ignored and invisible. The elevator closes behind us and Adina says, this is just how people are: they act cool and imperturbable, not because they’re bored with death but because they hardly ever see it. If they push it away it loses its potency. What makes this ring true is that she’s describing my own evolving attitude at work: cool, distant, pretending it’s normal to bash a human skull before lunch. But what I felt from the two little old ladies in the room was different, more hostile, as if they might’ve pelted us with their remote controls and Salisbury steaks if we’d stayed any longer. It felt like a
rescue mission. We need to get the woman to the funeral home, where at least she’ll be more welcome.

But when we arrive at the Factory we discover there’s been a mix-up: the family had made arrangements with the other Bardal’s on Sherbrook Street, then called us to pick up the body by mistake. Neil admits it’s an uphill marketing challenge, competing with his own name and the funeral home in which he grew up; sometimes we get theirs and they get ours and it all needs sorting out. All we can do is let the lady chill in the cooler until Glenn drives her to Sherbrook, her second road trip of the day. When she leaves I can’t help imagining her on some endless journey, from one funeral home to the next, from Bardal’s on Sherbrook to Cropo’s to Glen Lawn to Thomson In the Park, like the dead man in Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus,” who sails from port to port looking for shelter and rest but never finds it. I used to think death was the end of everything but it turns out it’s just the start of a whole new set of troubles.

Sundays I work with Sherman, semi-retired and a friend of Neil’s. Weekdays he teaches waste management to engineering students at Red River College and on weekends he covers removals and cremations at the Factory (for Sherman, semi-retired means working seven days a week). His philosophy of funeral service is twofold: First, manage the details, and this includes ensuring the tools that hang over the sort table match their painted silhouettes on the pegboard. One day I will need needle-nose pliers to close a fussy casket hinge, and if they’re not on the pegboard, if there’s only the empty painted-on needle-nose plier doppelgänger, a funeral may well be delayed. Second, never lose your awe of the dead human
body. It is neither an object nor a widget to be processed and packaged, but a highly charged and haunted thing. He knows this because he’s had run-ins with spirits at the crematorium, brought on, he says, by his own hubris.

“Spirits?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

“I didn’t see anything,” he says, “but you know how it is with these Icelanders, they believe the spirit stays with the body for a time. We had this one case, a man who’d hung himself, and I was alone with the body in the dressing room.”

My neck tingles. I don’t like to be alone in the dressing room with the embalmed dead, for my own mixed-up superstitious reasons. I once thought I heard a corpse clear its throat, as if it had something to announce, but it turned out to be the lawn mower outside.

“I said something about how selfish it is to put your family through such a thing, and then I felt it, like I’m being pushed from behind by a pair of strong hands. But of course no one’s there.”

“Then what happened?”

“That was it. After that I keep my mouth shut.”

The point was that he’d spoken out of turn, acted superior. You should respect death and respect the dead, not out of fear, but because it’s the proper human thing to do. He says hospitals have made us ashamed of death. When we die we should all be allowed to leave through the front door, same way we went in, “not [be] shit out the back through the so-called Silver Doors.”

I think about this, the difference between respect driven by fear and respect driven by compassion, next time I’m in the dressing
room with Shannon. The body to be dressed is male, tall and pudgy, with a thick neck and earlobes like dollar pancakes. His suit is hanging on a hook in the dressing room, still in its dry-cleaning bag, so I unwrap it, lay out his shirt and tie, and discover a problem: no underwear. And we have no spares. Shannon makes the judgement call: we’ll dress him anyway. Time is burning and there are two more in the on-deck circle.

The pants are snug and the shirt’s a size too small, maybe from an earlier, skinnier time in his life. Families often make this mistake. They pick the clothes they like, even if the dead man hasn’t worn them in years. I struggle with the top button while Shannon ties the tie, Natalie-style, standing at the head end of the gurney, making a neat knuckle of a knot. But now the man looks choked and unhappy. One of his arms flops off the table as if in protest. Judgement call: Shannon finds a pair of scissors in the cupboard and cuts the collar. Sometimes you have no choice, she says.

“I told Eirik, when the Rapture comes and all these people get out of their caskets to meet their God, then what? Their clothes will fall off because we’ve cut them. And he said, God will come up with something for them to wear. I told him we’d take it case by case.”

Once the man is dressed, she steps back to review. He’s barefoot. The family forgot to send shoes and socks too. It’s hard to peg, but there is something unwholesome about a man in a suit and tie and bare feet. Then, just as we’re about to move on to the next case, Shannon spots a Safeway shopping bag on another hook, which I should’ve noticed, and inside of course are the missing shoes and socks, dentures in a blue plastic case (now moot: his mouth is already tied shut) and the underwear. Porn-star brief and black.

What to do? No one would ever know, same as with the man wedged in his casket with a two-by-two. Plus we’d be saving him from an eternity in ridiculous underpants. But Shannon doesn’t blink. We undress him and start again. It’s not our call, she says, it’s the family’s. This is the proper human thing to do.

Friday, at home: I’ve been making notes in my Big Book of Mortuary Tips (never lick anything in a funeral home, et cetera) and lurking on Facebook groups for funeral professionals, including the “I Embalm Dead People And I Enjoy It” group where students and apprentices trade tips on tough cases (“What’s your cauterant of choice for skin slip?” “Why settle for a bulgy stomach?”), but when it comes to the intangibles, respect and dignity and the rookie undertaker’s relationship with his dead, there’s not much chatter, just a note from an embalmer in Florida, an open letter to his clients:

Annie and I rent a DVD, a French film I’ve read about called
They Came Back
, which can best be described as a quiet, existential zombie movie. For reasons that are never explained, the dead of a modern French village simply wake up and leave their graves (in the same clothes and over-coiffed hairdos, presumably, they had going in), not to wreak brain-eating zombie havoc but to return
home to their former lives. Only they’ve changed. Emotionally flat and unreachable, as if in some dopey half-dream state, they have difficulty reintegrating into society. They’re just not as bright as they were before they died. After the shock of their return wears away, their presence evolves into a collective social issue (this is a very European film). Town meetings are held. Where will the dead sleep? Should they be eligible for health and social benefits? Should they get their old jobs back if they’ve lost the skills to perform them? Arenas are turned into shelters, make-work programs are devised. No doubt the movie is a parable about discrimination and the treatment of refugees, or a meditation on loss and the impossibility of connecting with those who have passed, but I can’t help but read it literally: death is a logistical problem, and the dead, like kittens, God bless them, are both helpless and at times a bloody nuisance.

“It’s like being at work,” I say.

Poor Annie: this is what counts as Friday entertainment with a trainee undertaker. As a labour lawyer she has a different take.

“They need to organize,” she says. “The dead need a union.”

G
RIEF
S
NEAKS
P
AST

I
’m sitting in the back seat of the Dodge 300, the black sedan we call the lead car. Adina’s at the wheel. We’re parked behind a low-rise apartment block off Pembina Highway where a road crew is laying down fresh pavement in a hissing cloud of blue exhaust and asphalt steam. It’s noon, cloudless and hot. The air conditioner’s on full blow. At the back door of the building, through the haze and the heat thermals, I can see a small, elderly woman in a pink tracksuit and flip-flops, hugging her purse and looking our way.

“That must be her,” I say.

Mrs. G., recently widowed, contracted Neil to bury her husband for $3,500, which in the end, after taxes and what Richard calls “wiggle room,” came to $3,800.15, less the thousand-dollar down payment received at the time of the arrangements. We’re here to
collect the rest of the money. This was Janice’s idea. Like any business we deal with accounts receivable, and part of Janice’s job is to chase down outstanding accounts. At the funeral home she’s known as The Banker: before she became an undertaker she was a financial analyst at the Royal Bank of Canada. In this case she figured we’d be doing the widow G. a favour by driving her to her bank ourselves so she could cash her husband’s death-benefit cheque and pay her bill without having to shell out for a taxi. The woman is frail and has no relations in Winnipeg. In the funeral trade they call this “after-care”: maintaining a relationship with families after the funeral, helping them with the finicky administrative details that pile up when someone has died, not just so that they’ll remember us the next time there’s a death, but if that happens, so be it: good karma comes around. So there’s no reason I should feel like a hired thug today, or that there’s something sinister about two people in matching chinos and polo shirts hustling an old woman into an idling black sedan, even if it might look that way to the road workers who are watching us as we do just that.