Curtains (16 page)

In Princeton, British Columbia, a funeral director was charged with thirty-four counts of fraud and negligence for allegedly giving the wrong cremated remains to families, or in some cases filling
the urns with kitty litter. A woman who’d buried her husband’s ashes in his favourite hockey skates, or thought she had, later learned the ashes were somebody else. The skates were dug up, cleaned out and reburied once the right husband was restored. A couple who’d kept their son on the mantelpiece, and who lit a candle for him every day, sometimes taking the urn with them when they shopped, found out it wasn’t their son at all. When a reporter asked police what recourse there’d be for the affected families, the police said, “It depends on how you define ‘affected.’” This is the key. How
do
you define
affected
?

Words like
horror
and
desecration
are easy enough to get your teeth around. Bodies in the swamp: this is bad. Where things get fuzzier is in the day-to-day mundane business of death-care, where one man’s transgression is just another man’s fair business practice. Customers who feel duped or who sniff hanky-panky have, in Manitoba, a provincial funeral board to which they can complain, but as the chair of the board told me, “We’re not here to stifle innovation.”

“Funeral directors,” she said, “even some of my bad apples, are very sympathetic to people. That doesn’t mean some of my boys and girls don’t, how shall I say, oversell and up-sell, but an individual entering any transaction has to enter it with a certain level of knowledge.” In other words, buyer beware.

I’d gone to see her about a local story that ran on CBC Television about a widow who’d contracted with one of the deep-discount cremators. There are three in Winnipeg, and I’ve come to refer to them as Curly, Larry and Moe. Moe was a bit player, but Larry and Curly accounted for the highest volume of calls in Winnipeg, higher than Chapel Lawn, the big funeral–cemetery combo owned by the Arbor Group, and more than Neil: they were burying him.

Curly had come up through the corporates, and Larry was a former wedding deejay; now they were in bitter competition over the so-called “shoppers” market, the customers for whom price meant everything. When the widow, Mrs. D., lost her husband to a heart attack, which he suffered while riding the Number 12 bus, she went to Curly because of his advertised price: $695 for direct cremation, $1,500 for cremation and a “service of remembrance.” She agreed to the latter. By the end of the arrangement, after totalling costs for the casket (a simple cardboard model with a faux velour covering), cremation and a “priority rush” feel, the estimate came to $2,977.83—not including disbursements for the church rental, the pastor’s honorarium, the catering, a mixing-board operator for the sound system, and flowers, all of which added up to an additional $1,040.

She asked what happened to the $1,500, and was told that was the “sit-down price.” Not knowing what else to do, she signed. The insurance would cover it. Only later, when she discovered there was no insurance, did she call Larry, who cut her a better deal. In the business they call this “unplugging”: switching from one funeral home to another. It’s a common if annoying practice. Curly would be paid for his time and the removal fee, and Larry would get the body. Only there was no body: Curly had already cremated it. And he told the widow D. she could have her husband’s ashes back when she paid the bill in full: just over $4,000. The family didn’t have the money, so Mrs. D. held her own memorial at home in the backyard, without the dead man present, with food she bought at Safeway. The remains stayed on a shelf at Curly’s funeral home for three months, as collateral. Then Curly took the widow and her family to court.

He held up the estimate signed by Mrs. D. With some sympathy for the confused widow the court played Solomon and awarded Curly a compromise: $2,100. The family paid, and only then did they get the ashes back, in a plastic shopping bag with Curly’s logo on the front.

“The biggest set of complaints we get,” the board chair told me (speaking in general: she wouldn’t comment on Mrs. D.’s complaint specifically because it was before the board), “are people who see an advertised price and they’re very unhappy when they get there and the price escalates.”

So what do you do about that? I asked.

“Well,” she said, “there’s not much we can do.”

In the end, a simple cremation, advertised at $695, wound up costing the family $2,100 with the province of Manitoba’s blessing.

No one but the widow challenged Curly’s right as a businessman to hold the remains until the bill was paid. “There’s no such thing as debtor’s prison,” she told CBC. “My husband wasn’t a dog. He was a human being.”

But no laws were broken. Curly had a contract. The death of Mr. D., an immigrant from Yorkshire, the former lunchtime maî-tre-d’ at Old Bailey’s on Lombard and retired beverage manager at the Marlborough Hotel, was a heartbreak for the family, but for Curly and the provincial small-claims court, it was a transaction. This is a business. Neil says if you want to run a funeral home based on low price and volume, you need a strong stomach. The modern widow, Jessica Mitford wrote, has to be a cool customer indeed. And in Winnipeg she has to be prepared to stand up alone, without representation or support from a governing watchdog, and say: All I wanted was to do the right thing for my husband. How did we end up here?

——

I’m standing at the front door of the Factory, looking out at Brookside cemetery, watching a misty rain darken the tombstones. “Come on,” Neil says, handing me my jacket. “Let’s go see our lady friend at the Norwood Hotel.”

The friend is a soon-to-be widow: her husband is in palliative care at St. Boniface hospital, close to the end. We meet her at the Jolly Friar coffee shop at the Norwood. She’s young, fifty-ish, with two children. Her nails are bitten to stubs, and she orders coffee but doesn’t drink it, just folds and unfolds a sugar packet.

“What do you want to do?” Neil says.

“Whatever he wants.”

“Well, it’s got to be what you want too.”

She’s thought about a service at Holy Trinity, something for the boys, nothing big. What she needs is someone to handle the cremation.

“What about the ashes?” Neil says.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you want to do with them?”

She looks down at her sugar packet. We’re talking about a man who isn’t dead yet.

“I can’t get out of him what he wants,” she says. “I guess I’ll keep them with me.”

“I want you to think about that part. Because it’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Think about cremation, then burying them or scattering them before the service, and then when the service is over, it’s all done. What about an urn?”

“Do I have to buy that from you?”

“We’ve got one for $6,000,” he says, and she looks up.

He’s smiling, and she sees that he’s joking. She laughs. “I think I’ll use the money for the kids’ education.”

“You can use anything you want. Do you have something at home?” Neil has buried people in coffee tins and fishing tackle boxes.

“How much?” she says, cutting to the chase.

“Twelve hundred.” He’s offering her a deal. And he’ll throw in four hundred memorial cards, otherwise a buck apiece.

“The guy in the newspaper says $700.”

“With administration and all the extras, the memorial cards and the guest book, it won’t be $700. Does it matter how the cremation is done?”

She folds her legs under her chair and looks out the window at the traffic on Marion Street.

“Do you want to know the process?” he says.

“No.”

“Are you going to want to see him before the cremation?”

“No.”

“What about the boys?”

“No.”

“You’ve had a difficult year,” Neil says. “We’ll get you through this.”

Neil pays the bill, and we leave. He tells me on the drive back to Aubrey Street that we’ll never see her again, that she’ll end up at Larry’s or Curly’s or Moe’s. As long as cremation is seen as a commodity like gasoline or wheat or carrots, people will price-shop, and for all the right reasons. For the kids. That’s what her husband would’ve told her: Instead of blowing money on a funeral, do it
yourself, save the money for the kids, for God’s sake. I don’t want anything fancy. But will she be in any condition to take care of all the finicky details of a service? What if the priest is late, or takes a day off? What if the printer forgets the memorial cards? All the things that Richard takes care of. You can pull your own teeth if you want to, he says, but most people use a dentist.

T
URN
T
HAT
F
ROWN
U
PSIDE
D
OWN
: T
HE
“C
ELEBRATION OF
L
IFE”

H
ave a heart for the mainstream funeral director. Consider his overhead, his infrastructure. What does he do with a $100,000 hearse when there’s no casket to drive to the cemetery, and what does he do with the two-hundred-seat chapel when there’s no service for the body that isn’t in the casket that isn’t being driven to the cemetery in the hearse? You might say the only logical response is to do what we did for the banks and automakers: bail him out. It’s not his fault that the burial bubble has burst, that the U.S. cremation rate, 14.9 percent in 1985,
is expected to rise to 59 percent by 2025. It’s another case of Japanese innovation (cremation rate 98 percent) clobbering a North American heritage industry. But corpses don’t vote, and the funeral lobby in Washington and Ottawa is weak compared to, say, all the others, so what does he do? He refits, innovates—lemonade from lemons and all that.

He has to accept that aside from certain pro-burial ethnic and geographical groups (Asian Catholics, Filipinos, Latin Americans, southern Baptist African Americans, Atlantic Canadians, especially Prince Edward Islanders) he’s lost the casket sale. For most cremation families, buying an oak casket just to see it burned in the retort is considered a waste (although, as undertaker-poet Thomas Lynch points out, the same mental calculus doesn’t apply to the body inside). Instead he focuses on what the trade calls “personalization and memorialization options”: thematic urns to match the personality of the deceased, glass and porcelain keepsakes shaped like dolphins or angels blowing kisses that hold just a spoonful of remains, or memorial jewellery: heart-shaped pendants, lockets, rosaries, bracelets and rings that contain just a few grains. The
Wilbert Catalog
(“Expressing a Loved One’s Essence”) offers oak, cherry and mahogany urns etched in a variety of motifs: The Rose, The Eagle, The Golfer (male and female), The Covered Bridge, The Galloping Horse, Pheasant Heartland (a bird perked up and waiting to be shot), Fisherman’s Paradise (a jumping bass), The Wheat, The Elk, The Skier, The Moose, Saguaro Sunset (cactus), Lariat and Cowboy, The Watering Can, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sailing at Sunset and Ducks in Flight. Ashes can be mixed with oil paints to create an original abstract expressionist work of art, or portrait of the deceased, or bagged and zippered into a teddy bear. The
Huggable Urn (as seen on
Rachael Ray
) is a plush toy available in Snow Angel, Cocoa Angel or Military Teddy Bear designs, the latter with your choice of tiny, bear-sized T-shirts with the logos of all five branches of the U.S. armed forces including the Coast Guard. “Boy!” says the inventor of the Huggable Urn. “I have never talked to my dad so much in my whole life as I have since he passed…. It gives me such comfort to be able to pick up my Teddy Bear and give my dad a hug anytime I want.”

And just because a family has chosen cremation doesn’t mean they don’t want some kind of ceremony. Maybe what they don’t want is a funeral. According to Glenn Gould (not the dead pianist but the CEO of MKJ Marketing, a death-care consultancy in Florida), “For nearly two hundred years, funeral service has had a firm foundation in American culture based upon Judeo/Christian priorities…. The question is, what does the consumer really want, and how could operators achieve superior profits by breaking with the past?” Focus groups commissioned by four different product manufacturers came to the same conclusion: “There is far more profit in creating memories and keepsakes than in caskets.”

All it takes is a semantic shift: gather a few dozen people in a room to mark the passing of one of their own, with or without the ashes present, and it’s no longer a funeral but a “Celebration of Life.” Margins realized on room rental, catering, PowerPoint presentations and service fees (based on whatever the market will bear: is $2,000 too much for a catered event? $4,000? $8,000? What do people spend on weddings?) offset the lost casket sale and the mothballing of the hearse. And speaking of the hearse, why not keep it on the list of options for cremation families? Accubuilt makes an elaborate bracket, called a Hidden Gems urn-holder,
that fits into the back floor of the coach and allows for a traditional, if a bit over-roomy, procession to the cemetery. Whatever the customer’s taste, cremation and the Celebration of Life open up—rather than narrow—the undertaker’s options. When 75 million North American baby boomers are ready for their last transactions, the industry is betting this is what they’ll want: a cocktail party, then into the retort. They’ve controlled everything else in their lives. When it comes to their deaths, they’ll want to control that too.