Curtains (17 page)

For today’s service Neil’s booked the Pan Am Room at the Winnipeg Convention Centre. He’s excited, pacing a hall lined with posters for next week’s professional mixed martial arts Ultimate Cage Wars. The guests are mostly captains of middle industry, Rotarians in knit vests, hair either blow-dryed or wet-combed for those that have any, plenty of lapel pins that are too small for me to decipher but that I assume represent some Winnipeg social pecking order. The crowd is small, maybe fifty people, well behaved, not overly formal. One woman wears rubber gardening clogs. At the door, I invite newcomers to sign the guest book. A matron in a fur-trimmed suede coat hisses at her husband, “Make it readable for a change, please.” Neil and Eirik have set up rows of chairs in front of a podium, but no one’s biting. Mostly they hang back at the food table where there’s coffee, tubs of fruit juice on ice and diabetic cookies.

Shirley Burton, wiry and electric, with shaggy black hair and wearing heels, sits down at her keyboard and plays “Misty.” The volume of chatter in the room rises to match the music.

“I work with seven funeral homes,” Shirley whispers to me. “This is 75 percent of my business, I always talk to the family first, to help them ‘create.’ We need this, we need the service. We have a lot of unhealthy people walking around with a lot of unresolved issues. You should see the smiles on their faces, that’s why I do this. It’s the send-off, the healing, I’m passionate about it.” She segues to “Stardust” and the guests take their seats.

Speeches are short. A man tells us that we’ve all been called to live right, and that we must not only remember but also affirm what we remember, but it’s not entirely clear what he’s talking about. He mentions God’s will, and then stacks up his memo cards, ceding the podium to a family friend who reports on the dead man’s happy retirement (the dead man has already been tilled into Neil’s rose garden). Four years ago he bought an RV; he had big plans to travel, but then he died. Neil thanks everyone for coming and then Shirley launches into a bossa nova rendition of “Night and Day.”

“This was great,” Neil says afterwards. “They threw in more religion than I wanted but that’s the risk you take. I really think this is exactly what the boomers will want.”

I help Shirley pack up her gear.

“Families love what I do,” she says. “I sing to them on the phone. It’s like design. Do you like warm colours, vivacious colours? Like the right throw cushion or a rug that completes the room, the music completes the service. Let’s say they love Broadway, I can do Broadway tunes, or lounge it up. I can do jazzy or traditional. I don’t just use the piano sound, I got string guitar sounds, trumpet and saxophone. I can do a country ballad.”

I follow her down the escalator, carrying her amp. She’s parked on the street.

“People should take control of how you celebrate that life,” she says, opening the trunk. “I did a lady, thirty-five years old. She had a six-year-old and a six-month-old, didn’t feel good, went to the doctor: boom, full of cancer. She was on chemo and died a week before Christmas. The husband had money, he bought twenty-five floral arrangements with pink bows and we did Blue Rodeo songs. For him, he could move on in his grief journey.”

She drives me back to Aubrey Street, stopping her monologue just long enough to answer her cell phone.

“Faith is a huge part of my life,” she says as I get out.

True believers like Shirley exhaust me. Maybe it’s because I have so little in my own life that I’m as sure of as she is about her work. She has faith in the power of soft jazz to sooth grief. Neil adores her. She gives him a commercial edge. He’s heard “Rock of Ages” so many times in his career he could play it himself on spoons without sheet music. What Shirley brings to the funeral, or the memorial, or the Celebration of Life, or whatever it was I just witnessed at the Winnipeg Convention Centre, is what the modern ritual not only needs, according to Neil, but what it will perish without: a taste of showbiz.

Other funeral homes find their own ways to stand out. I’ve had a tepid but otherwise tasty cappuccino at Salon B, the Euro-chic glass-and-halogen espresso bar and art gallery upstairs from the Alfred Dallaire funeral home on trendy Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montreal. Students and locals too cool to be creeped out by the Gothic vibe hang out, play chess, read books on art and mortality in the Library of Death, eavesdrop on funerals (although the day I was there, the funeral space was being dressed for a CD release party). The Michigan Memorial Park in Flat Rock has an on-site
grief therapy dog, a golden retriever named Zoey, for guests to pet during visitations and memorial services. According to Zoey’s “business card,” his best friend is Clare the cat, and his favourite toys are socks and slippers.

On the ceremonial side, plenty of funeral homes offer the services of “celebrants,” or humanist motivational speakers, to meet the needs of non-religious families who prefer not to use priests or other clergy. Kate Smith of Seattle is both a Certified Funeral Celebrant and a professional clown. “Clowning is, among other things, ultimately an intensely spiritual experience,” she says. “I believe this spirit is natural to death, meaning that in good clowning, you have some of the same elements that you might like to have in a death ritual: genuine human connection, truth, sadness, and, yes, humour.”

And there I think she’s nailed it. The big, fat-sucking spiritual void that a death creates used to be filled by the redemptive magic of religion, through ritual: pray over the body, sing the body into the ground, mark the casket with the sign of the cross or place a stone on the grave marker, light candles, burn the body on a riverside ghat and scatter the ashes to the water. All the sacred customs were ways to signal to one another that we’re not alone, that there’s some continuity even in death, a consensus that we could beat back the senseless, arbitrary fact of it by holding hands and chanting. Death was rendered powerless. God had a plan, even if His blueprints were impossible to read.

Take God out of the picture. What’s left? The sucking void is still there. How do we fill it? With new sacred customs, or by picking and choosing the best from the lot and adapting them for the occasion: a bit of Zen, a touch of Zoroastrianism, yes to candles, no to
Psalm 23, a clown, a puppy, show tunes, trained doves released at the graveside to symbolize the flight of the soul, or whatever else reflects the unique life lost. We’re no longer part of a community of believers, but a marginally organized tribe of individuals, where each life story is as important as the next. Each funeral or Celebration of Life is different from the last, a variation on a ritual that used to matter back when we believed in something bigger. For the modern undertaker in the arrangement room, a man is defined not by his faith but by his hobbies and quirks. Did he golf? Was she an avid gardener? Everyone is an avid something: an avid bowler, an avid water drinker, an avid sailor or avid snake charmer. Avidity is the key to unlocking the story that can be told in the chapel, through readings and eulogies and props.

Deirdre Blair, an event planner in Florida, markets theme kits for funeral homes, Tupperware bins full of ready-made decorative items with which to dress the chapel, for added value. The avid gardener’s kit includes a watering can, gardening tools, gloves, artificial flowers, garden-themed picture frames and a plaster snail. The undertaker arranges them around the urn, and when the service is done, he packs it all up for the next time: $250 a box (her fee, the undertaker can charge what he wants). Men and women are defined by separate, gender-specific “passion lists.” Men might be artists, Audubon Society members, avid readers, car collectors, cigar connoisseurs, motorcycle/RV enthusiasts, movie buffs, musicians, outdoorsmen, pet lovers, ranchers, war veterans; women might be bridge players, cooks, antique collectors, interior designers, needleworkers, grandmothers or travellers. “I believe in ‘take-aways,’” she says. “I did an avid basketball player. Everyone signed a ball with a Sharpie. Now the family can leave the funeral home with something more than
the death certificate. They’re blown away that someone’s created this environment.” Look at the wedding, she says. “We try so hard to personalize it. We talk about the bride’s lifestyle, her colours. She despises green, she loves pink. Is it going to be casual or formal? Will it be all organic food? Are you holding it outside?” These are all questions that can apply to the death ritual too.

So, what’s your legacy? What will be your theme in death? You’ve been liberated from the one-size-fits-all casket with two nights of viewing and a church service, we all have, and herein lies my existential angst. Who am I? What’s in my Tupperware box? I’m a member of nothing, I can dribble but not with a basketball, and cigars make my tongue itch. At most I consider myself an avid procrastinator. When I die, they can dress up the chapel however they want, then tear it all down and do it again two days later when I finally show up.

Mark Krause, who runs three funeral homes in Milwaukee, told me, “Absolutely, a funeral is all about the show. When I see a family walk in the door, I tell the staff, ‘It’s
Riverdance
time.’” He ditched the selection room in favour of banquet tables, got beer and wine licences, and served food and drinks at visitations. Not after, but during. “Like at any other family holiday,” he said. “We are not in the funeral business, we are in the hospitality business.” A funeral is an experience that should touch all five senses.

Krause’s role models are the Ritz-Carlton and Disney (“Look at their attention to detail. They know how many steps between each wastebasket at Disneyland. Twenty-six!”). At his wife’s and daughter’s urging he bought a therapy dog (different breed but same concept as Zoey in Michigan). “I said he can’t be a little foo-foo dog,” he said. “I need to be able to walk around the neighbourhood with
dignity.” The dog’s name is Oliver and he’s trained not to jump up or eat off the floor. In the arrangement room, every family gets the same pitch: directors are drilled on presentation, they have lines to memorize. They talk food, they talk music. Their “Signature Service” includes a produced DVD of family photos, a video of the service itself, a memorial candle with the person’s picture on it, use of the therapy dog, and for $195 extra they stream it all live on the Web (“We put up a sign in the chapel: this service will be broadcast”). The payoff? Eighty percent of his cremation families have funerals, with the body present, an amazing number. Neil is lucky to hit 20 percent. And Mark never mentioned the word
casket
, but even I could figure it out: if they were buying wine-and-quiche services with live webcasting, they weren’t putting the body in a hockey bag.

Richard says that this is Winnipeg—we don’t hang tiki lanterns at funerals. But if a family wants to “personalize,” we’ll work with them. We have top-end urns in the showroom: an autumn-yellow blown-glass inverted bell-shaped sculpture-thingy that weighs as much as a ten-pin bowling ball, $725. A picture of an empty canoe at sunset is in fact a keepsake urn: in the back is a clear plastic ant-farm chamber for the remains. “It’s supposed to sell for $400, which is nuts. But there are desk clocks that are really nice.” Jewellery too—he carries a C-shaped bracelet with two small channels at the ends for cremated remains, capped with your choice of birthstones. “Wickedly expensive,” says Richard.

“There’re some really neat keepsakes from Quebec that hold hair. You cut off a lock before the cremation. We might sell one every four years,” he says. “Video collages, memorial pamphlets, silkscreen posters, stained glass pictures that double as keepsake urns, these ideas keep flying around. You don’t want to take up
people’s time with all this crap. You don’t want to be cynical, but, balloons at the cemetery, dove releases: you look like a pot and pan salesman. Doves. I mean every funeral director, if he’s honest, says, dear God, what are the doves supposed to mean?”

An elderly woman and her two middle-aged sons are seated in the arrangement room. The woman’s husband, father of the two men, died just this morning. They want him buried. The man bought a plot in Brookside in 1954 for $50, so now all they’ll need is $750 to open and close the grave, plus a casket and some kind of service, maybe a small gathering at the graveside. There are grand-kids in Europe. Richard suggests they bury right away, then hold a memorial service later in the summer so the grandkids will have time to get home.

“You don’t want to deny the grandchildren,” he says.

“That’s very true,” says the widow.

“The death certificate,” says the first son. “Do we get that now?”

“No, there’s a backlog, two and a half months.”

“Too many people dying?”

“Passports.”

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” says the widow.

“Our role in all this,” says Richard, “is going to be the permit for the cemetery, the paperwork, removal from the Health Sciences Centre, and we’ll do the embalming.”

“He loved his shoes,” says the widow. “Put them in with him. He said just the other day, God, I love these shoes.”

The second son reaches out to hold his mother’s hand, and she lets him, but then pulls it away.

“We can talk about flowers for the cemetery,” says Richard.

“Oh, and Pringles chips. He loved Pringles. He ate them all the time with root beer.”

“So the clothing,” says the first son. “Can we bring it tomorrow?”

“And his shoes,” says the widow, “’cause he loved them.”

He loved wood too, and was very particular about finish and grain, which becomes an issue in the casket showroom. The ash “hybrid” cremation casket, suitable for earth burial too, matches the trees on their property. There’s an oak with a deeper grain but it’s a lady’s casket. They like the ash, but if they could get a men’s oak, they might like the oak better. They can’t decide. The son wants a bell to ring at the graveside service. His father loved trains, they had a recording of whistles and train sounds that he and his father would listen to, at top volume, when the mother was out of the house. Mother looks at her son. She’s hearing about this for the first time.