Curtains (13 page)

“I hope I don’t get confused,” the woman says, once she’s settled into the passenger seat.

Her head barely clears the neck-rest, and when she speaks her dentures clack. Before Adina can put the car into drive, Mrs. G. reaches into her purse and pulls out a government cheque for $2,500 and asks if it would be all right if she just signed it over to Adina, here in the car, so she can go back to her apartment. I catch Adina’s eye in the rear-view mirror. She calls Annette, Neil’s wife, and explains the development. Annette tells her to stick with plan A: take the woman to the bank. Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, she owes $2,800.15, not $2,500. When Adina explains this to
Mrs. G., the woman goes back to her purse, where she finds another $2,500 cheque and offers to endorse that one as well. Adina tells her again that she can’t accept the cheques, and we drive off.

There’s a lineup at the bank. Adina delivers the widow to the customer service desk, where a manager is called to manage, while I stand at the door, arms crossed, unsure of my role except as witness to a very awkward and uncomfortable transaction. Adina joins me.

“She keeps pulling out more cheques,” she whispers. “She says she’s confused since her husband died.”

Soon the manager leads Mrs. G. to where we’re waiting.

“Are you the daughter?” she says to Adina.

“No,” Adina says, looking down. “We’re the funeral home.”

The manager blinks, looks at me, then counts out a short stack of cash into the widow’s hands, who then passes it to Adina. We’re just short the fifteen cents, the manager says, and Adina tells her we’re not going to worry about the fifteen cents, which comes as a relief to me, since I thought I’d have to pick the woman up by her ankles and shake her upside down until the nickels fell out of her tracksuit pockets and her dentures skittered across the floor.

On the drive back to the apartment, the widow is silent. Adina offers to take her to Safeway for groceries, but the woman shakes her head no. She has a friend coming in from the country later in the week, she says. We drop her at the door and carry on, aftercare accomplished, and all I can think is that I should’ve said something proper, that I’m sorry for her loss or I’m sorry we dragged her out of her apartment to ride with the Angels of Death, or whatever it is you say to strangers when they’re so clearly lost in grief, or just lost. It occurs to me I’ve got used to the silent and unreachable dead, but that I don’t have a clue what to do, or what to say, or
how to act with the silent and unreachable living. At funerals I stand at the back handing out memorial cards, positioned as far from the families as I can get away with. Why? Grief scares me more than death; it may be as simple, and as complicated, as that.

Pointy-heads like Zygmunt Bauman say that previous generations, for whom death was natural and inevitable, had experience with grief but that we’ve lost it: we’re insulated. Without a religious script or community to tell us how to act, families are left on their own. They come from a foreign country. Mourners speak a different language. All we can do is shrug, send a card, go to the funeral and talk about the weather, make some human gesture based on guesswork. Even worse, Bauman goes on, we’ve replaced the comforts of religion and tribe with a near-hysteric faith in technology and medical science, to the point where we’ve deconstructed death into a series of solvable puzzles: cancer can be beaten with drugs, heart disease can be avoided through yoga and diet, and aging is a problem of biochemistry and grumpiness. So if someone dies, it means something’s gone wrong. It may not be the dead man’s fault, but he’s implicated, and so are his wife and children. Who messed up? It’s not normal, and the family wears the stigma. Add a third factor: the fetishization of happiness. Sad people just don’t fit the social bell curve. We worship entertainment as much as technology, and there’s nothing less entertaining than grief. That’s why God invented lorazepam, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and vodka and television—which in my experience work best in combination, with a pizza. Three strikes against the modern widow: she is exotic, suspect, and she brings us down. So she keeps her grief to herself. Geoffrey Gorer says we treat mourning as a weakness, a self-indulgence, and that a
modern widow would no more throw herself on the casket than she would take off her clothes or pee in public.

So what does she do? At the funeral she plays hostess. I’ve seen this at services. I’ve seen widows and widowers, children and siblings working the room, making sure their guests are watered and fed, thanking them for taking the time to come to the funeral. During the eulogy, or when Shirley and Ed, our musicians-for-hire, sing “Wind Beneath My Wings,” a funeral standard, the Kleenex is passed around, but these are moments of sanctioned, performative grief. Only a monster wouldn’t cry. Otherwise the family leads by example: they’re brave, selfless, the hardest-working people at the service. The widow is often the last to leave. She gathers the flowers and packs the photo boards and helps clear dishes, which is my job, but what a relief—and this is my guilty admission—that she’s not a mess. I wouldn’t know what to do. Thankfully she knows her role in the drama. Joan Didion calls the funeral an anodyne, a brief bit of theatre after which well-wishers go back to work and their normal lives. Later of course the widow is left on her own to go through her husband’s clothes, cancel his credit cards, and stare at the door waiting for him magically to reappear.

But that’s none of our business.

I worked a service for a woman who died young, of cancer. After Richard and I had stacked the chapel chairs and rolled the comfy couches and coffee tables in for the reception, to create the usual atmosphere of post-funeral fellowship, the widower held court. Men shook his hand and discussed fishing. One of them asked, “So what are you going to do now?” The widower thought about this, and with his wife a few feet away in a La Precia urn flanked by two lit candles, he said: “I think I’ll find
myself a pretty squaw and go live in the bush for a while.” His friend smiled stiffly, and another laughed too loudly. If the man was joking, he was bombing. But it seemed to me he was doing what the script told him to do: put people at ease by lightening the mood. That was his role.

But sometimes, rarely, real grief sneaks past. Funeral service and the rituals we choreograph are meant to tamp down the wild, animal fact of death, but I’ve seen gaps open up, brief flashes of reality, and it’s like watching a glass vase fall and hit the floor.

When Neil renovated his crematorium in the ’80s he put in the Committal Space because he wanted to bring ritual to an otherwise technical event, the cremation of the body. For him, cremation and burial were the same act, the final disposition: in time all that’s left are bones and a few teeth, it’s just that cremation gets there faster. People gather at the graveside for a committal ceremony. Why not do the same at the mouth of the retort? It’s how they do it in England. A pastor does his thing, makes the sign of the cross on the lid of the box with dirt, and the family watches the casket go into the oven the same way they might watch it lowered into the hole at the cemetery. But taboos are hard to shake. The so-called Committal to the Flames is a hard sell in Winnipeg. More often families will have a short service in the Committal Space and then leave. We watch the last car disappear down Notre Dame Avenue, and only then do we roll the box back stage for the final event. I call this Committal Lite.

A family of three arrives at the Factory. They’ve brought their pastor, a major from the Salvation Army, in uniform, and while Adina leads them to the Space, Glenn and I set up the body in the casket nook, behind closed drapes. The body’s in a cardboard
cremation container. There’ll be no viewing. Instead we lay a quilted pall overtop, and then Adina joins us.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says. “Where’s Neil?”

Glenn tells her to bring them water. Mourners are always thirsty. She fills four cups from the cooler, and I follow, to hold the door, and we run into one of the family members, a woman, possibly the widow.

“Are we supposed to pray in here or what?” she says.

“Yes,” Adina says. “Neil will be here shortly.”

With little else to do until the boss arrives, Glenn and I wait in the dressing room. He reads
Esquire
and I wet-mop a floor I wet-mopped yesterday. Then Adina rushes in, this time waving a pocket copy of the New Testament.

“It’s a Committal to the Flames!” she hisses. “They want a Committal to the Flames!”

We snap into action, or rather Glenn does and I follow. First we roll the body from the nook into the tight workspace near Retort Two, hoist the box onto the scissor-lift, whip off the pall and open the retort door. The overhead fluorescents are shut off in favour of more flattering pot lights, and Glenn unfolds a pair of accordion screens on either side of the retort to block the view to the rest of the backstage, with the tools and the sort table and the vacuum-hood that looks like a fat evil snake. But there’s no way to dress up this room, with its concrete floor and all the overhead ductwork and the big black mouth of the open retort. The fake dusty ficus plant in the corner just makes it worse. We can hear Neil’s voice, and Adina runs out to brief him.

“He doesn’t look happy,” she says on her return.

“When does he ever look happy?” says Glenn.

I brush the dust off my shirt.

Adina’s stomach growls. “I’m starving,” she says.

Glenn briefs us: on Neil’s cue we’ll roll the box from the scissor-lift into the retort, being mindful not to jam it against the stone wall, or we’ll have to pull it out and try again, which will disturb the gravity of the event. Now my stomach growls: performance anxiety. I’ve humped dozens of boxes into the retort without incident, but now, with an audience, I can picture the box sliding the wrong way off the lift and onto some mourner’s foot. The backstage door opens. First Neil then the pastor enter, the pastor holding a bible and patting his thin hair with a shaky hand, then the family. The woman is twisting a Kleenex. One of the men is wearing a black eagle T-shirt and red suspenders. He holds the woman at her elbows. Then, as the pastor reads from Scripture, how the Lord is our shepherd and we shall not want, and Neil makes the sign of the cross on the head-end of the box, the woman reaches out and lays her head on the lid and says, simply, “No.” The man in suspenders helps her up. She looks at the open retort, then at us, and she gasps, a short sharp yelp, like the sound a dog makes if you step on its paw just hard enough to surprise it. My hands are shaking like the pastor’s. I shouldn’t be here; this is too private. I feel like a voyeur.

Neil nods and we push, one–two–three. The cardboard whines on the steel rollers of the lift. The box goes in smoothly, the door to the retort slides down and the rollers on the lift keep spinning. Glenn engages the fan and the machine roars to life, its walls rattling. As if they’ve seen and heard enough to get the point, the woman and the two men depart, followed by Neil and the preacher, leaving us to finish the job.

“That’s nothing,” Glenn says. “We had a guy, a drug dealer, he did a header off the Maryland Hotel. His girlfriend was in here, she threw herself on the casket and all these other drug dealers had to haul her off.”

But it wasn’t nothing. That animal noise, quick as it happened, was no performance. That was the real thing. Unfiltered fear or grief or a stormy mix of both. It seemed to me she looked into the open retort and knew: he’s going in and he’s not coming out. And for a beat, she forgot the rules about keeping her pain to herself.

Tuesday: Richard is juggling a tight schedule at Aubrey. He’s booked an ash interment, otherwise known as an urn burial, for Chapel Lawn at 12:45, and another family is due at noon for arrangements. We need to be done with the arranging family and out the door by 12:30 to make it to the cemetery on time. I pack the 12:45 urn in a blue velvet bag, the standard travelling kit, but next to the urn I find a wristwatch. Richard tells me to put it in the bag, it belonged to the deceased, and he’ll give it back to the family when we get there.

“Remind me,” he says.

The noon family arrives, two women and their husbands. The women are sisters: their mother has died. She was Catholic and they’ve already booked Father Sam at Holy Rosary for a visitation and graveside service, followed by a catered gathering.

“My mother wanted a viewing,” the first sister says. “She was very definite about that. But the four of us are very uncomfortable with it. Is a half-hour enough?”

“An hour,” Richard says.

“The point is I really don’t care,” she says. “We need to do it and then close the casket for the service. We’ll have a photo on the casket.”

And flowers: azaleas, hibiscus, calla lilies, carnations, and something blue to make it all “pop.”

“Okay. Father Sam will have a blessing, bless the cross and hand it to you, then we’re off to the cemetery. Send your flowers straight to Holy Rosary, we’ll go half an hour before to set up. How many people are speaking at the memorial?”

“I’m speaking,” the other sister says. “It’s terrifying, but it’s closure for me.”

“Coordinate your efforts,” says Richard. “Keep it to four or five minutes. Once you start it’s hard to stop. But that part you sort out. Our part finishes at the grave. Now, the removal’s been done, the embalming’s done—we need clothing.”

“Can you take her glasses?” the first sister says, sliding them across the table to Richard. “She’d want her glasses.” Her voice catches.

The four of them stare at the wire-rimmed glasses, smudged with fingerprints. Richard puts down his pen and folds his hands.

The first sister looks up. “Can we get some Kleenex, please?”

Again I’m caught, waiting for an intimate moment to pass. Kleenex is distributed, cups of water too. At 12:30, Richard rises to signal the end of the conference. Hands are shaken. I scoot to the back room to get the blue velvet pouch and we follow the family out the door. They go their way, and we head off for Chapel Lawn for the 12:45 ash interment.