Curtains (15 page)

“Have you heard?” Adina whispers to me. She’s come over to watch Glenn work on the overstuffed urn, as if he were a cardiac surgeon performing a pig-heart transplant.

“Heard what?”

“We’re getting a body from MacKenzie’s tonight. Five hundred pounds. The fire department had to carry him out of his house. We’re cremating him.”

“What do you mean tonight?” We never cremate at night.

“Are you kidding?” she says. “He’s 500 pounds! He’s going to smoke like crazy. Neil wants us to do it after dark so no one can see.”

I’m used to 98-pound grandmothers; it’s work enough getting them into the retort, since that’s 98 pounds of literal dead weight. A 500-pound man is more than five grandmothers in one pair of pants. And how much of that is raw fuel? He’ll blow the door off the retort, if he fits. The oven’s not exactly an airplane hangar: even with a normal casket it’s a tight squeeze. I have to see this. Adina and Glenn are booked for the cremation and I volunteer to help.

The Factory at night is a menacing sight. Locking up my bike, the only lights I can see are those of the airport to the west, and the open garage door of the crematorium, where Adina and Glenn are waiting for the delivery. Behind me, Brookside cemetery is black. Adina seems giddy. She brought her ten-year-old son along. He’s in the arrangement room doing his homework. Glenn’s nervous. He’s seen big bodies in the retort before: the fat melts and pools and then burns out of control, and sometimes it’ll weep through the gap under the retort door and you have to use kitty litter to
soak it up. The biggest body he’s cremated was 300 pounds and this man’s twice that size.

I can see headlights now on Notre Dame Avenue. A grey hearse pulls into the lot, riding low. It backs up to the open garage door. The driver is Ken, one of the undertakers from MacKenzie’s, our trade client from Stonewall. MacKenzie’s is run by two young sisters who took over the business when their father died of a heart attack while driving home from an interment. Most of their business is traditional burial for a rural clientele, but they also control a valuable piece of turf, the highway between Winnipeg and cottage country to the north, where, if there’s a fatal car accident, they usually get the first call. They use us for cremations.

Ken opens the back door of the hearse. Inside is a plywood box as wide as it is tall, with yellow rope handles. The top of the box touches the roof of the vehicle. Ken made it himself. First he prepped the body so the family could view it (it took him an hour, standing on a stool, just to close the autopsy Y-incision), then he built the box, from scratch, around the body, to save the family from having to order some oversized custom casket that would just wind up in the retort. It takes all four of us to drag it from the hearse onto the groaning scissor-lift. The trip between garage door and retort is twenty feet and it takes us ten minutes. The wheels catch in the gaps between the tiles on the floor, and halfway there, we get stuck in a drain-cover, and have to rock the lift back and forth to free it. If it tips, and I’m under it, they’ll have to peel me off the floor like a cartoon cat, take me home, ring the doorbell and slide me through the mailbox for Annie to find, but it doesn’t tip. We reach the retort and I pump the jack-handle, leaning all my weight into it, until the box is level with the mouth of the oven.
Glenn releases the lock on the rollers and we push, the wood grinding on the stone retort floor, until the box clears the door. Then he stacks a line of bricks at the lip of the oven to act as a dyke, to keep the excess fat from pouring out.

The door closes, secondary burners are lit, and we watch the temperature rise. At 500 degrees, Glenn hits the primaries to ignite the box. Through the peephole I can see the jets, then the sides of the container catch and collapse and fly-ash from the man’s burning clothes scatters in the turbulence.

The machine is factory-tested to top out at 2,400 degrees Fahrenheit. “But I’ve never seen it get there,” says Glenn.

“I say it won’t go higher than 2,000,” Adina says.

I can see where this is going.

“Want to make it interesting?” I say.

We agree on the parameters of the bet. Whoever gets closest to the maximum temperature without going over,
Price Is Right
– style, wins, and the other two will buy Tim Hortons coffee and muffins. I opt for a conservative 1,800 degrees. Ken declines a piece of the action.

The gauge hops, 20, 60 degrees at a time. It passes 1,000 degrees without looking back and steadies at 1,500. Come on, 1,800. Then 1,800 flies by without a blink, and 1,900 and 2,000. The cover on the porthole rattles. Glenn taps it open, and all we can see is a white wall of flame. Tongues of fire lick out from under the retort door, and we stand back. Glenn picks up the fire extinguisher and aims the nozzle, ready to pull the trigger. I’m no veteran cremationist, but fire
outside
the retort doesn’t seem right. The floor shakes.

Adina calls me to the side door and I follow her outside, to the parking lot.

“Look,” she says.

Orange sparks fly up from the chimney, swarms of them, and every few seconds a blue flame shoots out with an audible
whoosh
. On the one hand this is all physics, the second law of thermodynamics, which says a closed system, if given a nudge, will seek to increase its entropy. The more stored energy there is, the more heat and light and sparks and blue jets and chaos you get, and this man is a load of stored energy. But physics can’t explain this amazing light show. In Hindu cultures the body is burned on an open-air ghat using fire brought from the dead man’s house by the oldest son (or, in the case of the mother, the youngest son), and once the fire takes, the son will break open the skull with a bamboo pole to release the spirit, just as we do with the iron hook. Japanese Buddhists will only cremate on certain days of the week, never on
tomobiki
, or “friend-pulling days,” when the spirit, once it’s freed by the heat, might grab the closest mortal and take him along to the afterlife. With burial what you get is a slow release of potential energy, the second law dragged out over twenty years, but with cremation it happens in a flash, and if you watch, at night, from the crematorium parking lot, you can see something spectacular, either billions of chemical bonds breaking or the spirit being freed, depending on whether you’ve put your faith in Isaac Newton or some god. I can’t help but think I’m witnessing a kind of second life.

The temperature never goes past 2,000 degrees. There’s no more fire under the retort door, no conflagration. Glenn’s theory is that because the body was prepped, the chemicals rendered the fat less flammable. In fact, as I take another look through the peephole, the white blaze has cleared now and the body is glowing under the primary burners, not so much flaming as roasting.

“This is going to take a while,” Glenn says, “but at least the building isn’t going to burn down.”

He’ll stay and wait for the cremation to run its course and then process the remains so Ken can pick them up in the morning. The rest of us go home.

In the morning, Adina brings us Tim’s coffee and cranberry muffins. She seems to have missed the point of winning the bet. The ashes of the 500-pound man are already bagged and sitting on the shelf for pickup. There’s not much left: an average batch, less even than the big-boned meat packer.

It’s hard to overstate the impact these benign bags of ashes have had on the industry in the last twenty years or so. Every bag represents a potential loss of cemetery revenue, the mothballing of a fleet of funeral director’s vehicles, hard times for the florist, the clergyman, the tombstone maker, and the casket and vault manufacturers. Twenty years ago that body would’ve been buried with fanfare, but now, anything goes. The cremationist’s boast is that the remains, after two hours at 1,600 degrees (or more), are inert and sterile. Now there’s no charmed and haunted and perishable body on your hands: you can take the ashes home and display them on the mantel piece like a Hummel figurine or scatter them to the wind or mulch them into Neil’s rose garden, wall them into a columbarium niche or, if your mood is old-school, bury them in a grave.

But whatever you do, an option exists that never existed before: you can handle the ritual yourself, or skip it entirely. All you need from the undertaker is his removal van and his retort and one of
his heat-sealed bags, and even then there’s no law in Manitoba that says you can’t pick up the body from the hospital yourself in an SUV. Cremation is liberating. And cheaper, of course. The average direct cremation in the United States in 2007 cost $1,500, while the National Funeral Directors Association pegged the average full-fig funeral at $7,000, before cemetery fees. I’ve seen the increasing number of weekday shorts in the
Free Press
announcing that “cremation has already taken place, and at the request of family there will be no service.” People are taking death into their own hands, clawing it back from the undertaker.

When Kurt Cobain died, his widow, Courtney Love, had him cremated. Some of his ashes were buried in the garden, and some she spooned into a Buddhist shrine she and Kurt kept at their Seattle home. She approached two local cemeteries about interring a third bit of Kurt in a permanent spot. One declined, and the other asked for $100,000 a year to cover upkeep and security, knowing that Kurt’s grave would become a shrine, a mecca for overripe plaid shirt–wearing Grunge pilgrims and romantic kids who weren’t even born when Nirvana released
Nevermind
, but who would presumably make a mess of the place. That was the end of Courtney’s relationship with the mainstream funeral industry. She packed the rest of Kurt, along with her wedding dress, into a teddy-bear knapsack and travelled the country. At hotels she’d empty the sack for private communion, warning the cleaning staff not to be overzealous about any ashes they found on the furniture: she’d sweep them up herself.

Her travels brought her to Ithaca, New York, to a Buddhist monastery. The monks welcomed her and agreed to consecrate the remains by mixing them with clay to make votive tablets or
tsatsas
, and to pray Kurt into his next bardo. Courtney poured out the
contents of the teddy bear: the wedding dress, now covered in ashes, and the rest of her late husband. “We inhaled a little bit of Kurt that day,” someone who was there told
Esquire
magazine. There were enough remains for twelve
tsatsas
, which, as of February 1996, when
Esquire
printed their story, Courtney had yet to pick up. The head monk explained he was happy to help, but the fact was, “We’re not the final stop. We’re no Graceland.”

I knew there’d been problems with what the industry called “wildcat scatterings” at Disney rides. Cast Members (i.e., the kids who worked the rides, some of whom spoke to the insiders’ Web site
MiceAge.com
) reported that people had been smuggling ashes into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and the Haunted Mansion, tossing them from DoomBuggies and gumming up the works— making long days longer for the custodial staff, who had to use special
HEPA
filter vacuums to clean up the mess. In Disney-speak, a “
HEPA
Cleanup” was code for an unauthorized death ritual on park property. Disney’s official position is that it never happens. But ashes are scattered at ballparks and golf courses, and in the United Kingdom, the Manchester City football club had so many wildcatters that it built a separate memorial garden, to keep cremated remains off the pitch. Management at Jane Austen’s house in Hampshire had to ban scattering. So many people were using the garden, the gardener was worried about the health of the flowers.

In Neil’s father’s time, the undertaker owned the ritual. In his grandfather’s time, even the clergy deferred to the funeral director. Now Neil faces a paradox: his stiffest competition, after the corporate chains and the deep-discount cremationists who advertise their low-low prices in full-page ads and on the sides of Winnipeg Transit buses, comes from his own customers, who can
do what they want with their bag of remains. They don’t need his hoary old customs. Neil decided a long time ago he wouldn’t take the deep-discount route, since he’d need insane volume to survive, and besides, it wasn’t funeral service so much as a kind of assembly line: retorts blazing all day, no time for hand sorting or ceremony. He believes in the ceremony. I think he’s right, to a point: there’s some value in marking the event, even with a quiet prayer or a drink at the pub. Still, why, in a tough economy, would I pay to mourn in his Committal Space with coffee and dainties and a quick scattering in the rose garden when I’ve got my own rose garden at home? I’m no longer bound by tradition and religious strictures, or the physical fact of the body. And while we’re at it, if the local deep-discounter charges $695 for a direct cremation, why would I pay three times as much to Neil to get the same result? If there’s one thing I now know intimately, it’s that there’s not much to distinguish one set of ashes from another: cremated remains are cremated remains, even after hand sorting.

But Neil insists that when you’re dealing with a man who’s operating solely on an economic imperative, you’re not dealing with an undertaker. You’re putting the body in the hands of a canny businessman, where the intangibles like care and respect and dignity don’t necessarily come into play. But does that matter? It might, if the body’s your mother or father or wife. Can you trust the businessman? He picks up the body and days later you get the ashes. What happened in the time in between? Are you sure of what’s in the bag? With Neil, you can come and watch the cremation. Or, you don’t even have to watch: as long as you know you can, he’s played his trump card—transparency, and the peace of mind that comes with it. What an amazing mind game.

Mention Tri-State to any death-care worker and she’ll bow her head. The Tri-State Crematory, Inc., in Walker County, Georgia, first came under suspicion in 2002 when, on an anonymous tip, the Environmental Protection Agency found a skull and human bones on the property. Within weeks they’d turned up more than three hundred decomposed corpses, some half buried in a swamp, some stored in a shed, “like cordwood” (most reports of the time couldn’t resist the image). The owner, Ray Brent Marsh, was arrested and charged with desecrating the dead and theft by deception: instead of cremating the bodies, he’d dumped them and then given the families bags of concrete dust. As Stephen Prothero, author of
Purified By Fire
, an amazing history of cremation in North America, wrote at the time, it’s not like Marsh was mad. The judge in the case pressed to keep it all in perspective: the man hadn’t murdered anyone. He was a father and a local basketball coach and a respected businessman, yet in the course of his business somehow he thought it was Okay to leave a baby’s corpse to rot in a rusting hearse. Why? It was cheaper for him to dispose of the bodies than burn them, given the cost of fossil fuels. In a way it was a rational act. But of course the community was horrified, and that, Prothero writes, is because they were haunted: the dead deserve rest, and these dead had been abandoned. They feared them, but wanted to protect them at the same time. What made Ray Brent Marsh different from his neighbours was not that he was insane, but that he’d lost all reverence for and fear of the dead. The charge was theft but the crime was moral. He pleaded guilty and got twelve years.