Curtains (20 page)

According to Ed Horton, with the accounting firm Citrin Cooperman & Company, it was time for the funeral trade to shift priorities and develop new revenue streams, charge for that which they used to do for free: estate planning, investment advice. Shift from a body-centric industry to a knowledge-based service. SCI
launched Dignity Memorial, “the first transcontinental funeral service brand in North America,” which offers tiered packages of goods and services including casket, embalming, hearse and prayer cards, but also Web-based memorials, a twenty-four-hour grief counselling hotline, discount airline tickets for the bereaved, assistance in booking hotels and rental cars, a phone card (one hour) and a child/grandchild protection program. With this, a parent or grandparent who buys a Dignity package gets an additional free funeral for their unmarried child or grandchild, provided that child or grandchild dies before turning twenty-one. To help promote the brand, SCI established the Dignity Memorial Escape School, which teaches kids how to recognize threatening situations, get out of car trunks and such, through seminars led by “trained Dignity Memorial® funeral care professionals.” In 2007 SCI joined the American Diabetes Association in a three-year campaign to promote awareness of the disease. In the same way Starbucks wants us to feel like we’re saving a Guatemalan child every time we buy a coffee, the Dignity Memorial brand reflects a set of values: Are you against child abduction and diabetes? So are we. Unlike the local family funeral home, which is only after your body.

As well as going after new revenues through fee-for-service, they’re gambling on the North American consumer’s fondness for brand names. Is it working? In 2009, SCI’s profits dropped 64 percent from the previous year, and by the time the global economy tanked, its share price sat at $4.25, or a tenth of its worth in the booming late ’90s. They’re down to 1,300 funeral homes (and 365 cemeteries) in forty-three states, eight provinces, and Puerto Rico. European expansion plans have been shelved. They’re focused on the Sun Belt states: 30 percent of their properties are in California, Florida and Texas,
where people go to retire and often never come home, except in urns. In 2009 SCI sold the Swackhamer, Blachford & Wray funeral home in Hamilton, Ontario. It will be turned into student housing.

Maybe, like me, you’re just a hard-wired anti-corporate curmudg eon, and when it comes to conglomerates in death-care the bad taste gets worse. There’s something unsavoury about dealing with funeral directors who have sales targets and a head office in Houston. In 2002, CBC News’s
Marketplace
investigated five in dependents and five SCI funeral homes in Vancouver. For a traditional service, excluding casket and extras such as flowers, the prices ranged from $1,935 at one of the indies to almost $3,400 at an SCI home, 75 percent more for the same basic package. But indies have sales targets too. Look at the widow D. who shopped for a deal and wound up with an estimate of $4,000.

The chains sell pre-need packages like mad, to people on tight budgets. The shame-game is a powerful motivator: do you want to burden your family with the cost of a funeral? Why not take care of it ahead of time in two hundred easy monthly payments. But then, plenty of indie funeral directors have skipped town after draining their own pre-need trust accounts. The big guys are easy targets but there’s plenty of commercial foul play to go around.

My best window on the conglomerate philosophy came from Darin Hoffman, a former big fish in the corporate tank. He’d been a general manager at the Alderwoods Group, working his way up to vice-president and director of sales, based at Thomson “In the Park” in Winnipeg, the funeral–cemetery combo everyone around here called the Taj Mahal. When SCI bought Alderwoods, he got
his pink slip, but now he runs an independent home called Mosaic, which focuses on pre-need sales in the local Filipino community.

“The corporation is a product of society,” he said. “It’s the face of society. The investment world and public greed drives it. The challenge is to balance that with what the community wants. The family’s need is a noble cause, but we have to have a pay-cheque too.” The indie directors burned time at the Rotary and other service clubs, scratching for leads, but the corporates know the power of direct marketing, working the phones, and they have the resources. “We can be fairly aggressive too,” he says, “because it’s what people want. They’re dealing with wills and estate planning. We have products and services they need. Fine. Why not do it all ahead of time? People plan weddings a year in advance.”

I told him my walnut-sized brain had a hard time with insurance. I understood that if I bought my funeral now, the Taj Mahal or Chapel Lawn would lock in the price, then earn their end off the commissions. Still, Neil has pre-need contracts in his drawer from the 1980s guaranteeing a price of hundreds of dollars for funerals that will cost thousands when it comes time to cash them in. What was the point in giving up revenue in the future just to get the sale today?

“If I sold a policy ten years ago for a traditional funeral,” Darin explained, “and the person died today, in the cremation era, then I’ve delivered a traditional funeral into the cremation age.” He was beaming about this. In a way, it seemed to me, the pre-need was a hedge against trends towards cheaper disposition. In the future, when we all drive flying cars, maybe the dead will be processed at home, in the microwave or through some iPhone app, reduced to
cuboctahedral blocks of salt and mineral like on
Star Trek
. By selling even a direct-cremation contract now, Darin would guarantee his own survival. Locking in today’s prices sounds like a bargain for the shopper, but what if death-care just gets cheaper and cheaper? For Darin, pre-need insurance was a form of economic time travel. I liked that. It put me in mind of parallel universes.

One of the problems with pre-needs, as I see it, is that you’re giving money to a funeral director or a corporate chain for them to play with in the meantime. There are regulations, but every trust fund holder is allowed to invest a certain amount of the money (12 percent in Manitoba) and earn interest. It’s no longer yours, it’s theirs. You could put the same amount in a savings account or a trust account that pays out to a named beneficiary when you die. If you change your mind, it’s still your cash. You can take it out. Buy something frilly. Plus in Canada, if you’ve paid enough years into the Canada Pension Plan, you get a $2,500 death benefit. Spend spend spend while you’re alive, and let the feds cover the brunt of the funeral, provided your survivor’s tastes are modest. The other problem is that when you buy a pre-need, it might amount to little more than a down payment. Neil says he knew a man who made pre-need arrangements with one of the chains. He wanted to be cremated. He spent $5,000 on a grave with a marker, an urn, and an outer box for the urn to be buried in: the works. When he died, his wife figured it was all covered. But the funeral home told her she’d still have to cover the cost of the actual cremation, plus the opening and closing of the grave, and if she wanted a service, that would be extra, plus disbursements for the minister and flowers and cards and the newspaper notice. “She pays another $5,000,” Neil says, “and curses her dumb sonofabitch husband. You wind up with two
people overpaying on two separate occasions. The funeral home gets two cracks at a sale instead of one. No wonder they’re raking in the cash.”

Richard and I meet with a woman, a forty-one-year-old pharmacist who wants to pre-pay for her funeral. She wants to be cremated but she doesn’t want to leave the worries of arrangements to her family. She has no children, but there’s a niece in her thirties.

“Do you want a memorial service?” says Richard.

“It’s kind of funny to think of who would come to my memorial service,” she says. “I guess I sort of want what my dad had, except without the alcohol.”

“Let the family worry about the service and anything that goes with it. We’ll keep it on the basis of doing the cremation. It’s a year deal, 20 percent down if we do it today. In twelve months it comes to $1,995 plus GST.”

“Nineteen ninety-five,” she says. “You mean two thousand. I thought, wow, twenty bucks.”

“I don’t get out of bed for twenty bucks.”

“That’s what I thought. For a service, I guess I’ll be dead, I won’t care.”

“Let’s not set too much in stone. Ten years from now you’ll probably have been to three or four other funerals and you’ll have seen something you liked, a video display or something. You may want to revisit it, like if you get involved in a Church.”

“Not that I don’t believe in God,” she says. “I guess I never imagined a funeral in a church. I’m not Catholic or Jewish where it’s a big thing. I’m pretty … I don’t know. I don’t want a headstone.
People I know will carry me with them. I’d like donations made in lieu of flowers, probably something to do with the hearing impaired or the deaf.”

Richard takes her vital stats, tells her he’ll keep information on file for the obituary. He explains the cremation process in some detail. For the pre-need, there’s a ten-day cooling-off period if she wants out. The contract won’t cover disbursements: flowers, printing, clergy—all the costs that we don’t control. If she plans on travelling, he says, there should be someone charged with calling Richard if anything happens while she’s away. She tells him she probably won’t leave Winnipeg. But she’ll keep his card on her fridge. She pays the deposit and I witness her signature. Now all that’s left to do is wait for forty or fifty years, while Richard’s card grows yellow on her fridge door.

“S
HALL
W
E
G
ATHER AT THE
R
IVER?”

I
n celebrating Mom’s life,” says the silver-haired man at the lectern, “there are three things. Her handwriting was superb. The other thing was her ability to solve puzzles. And the other thing was her ability to keep a secret in a big family, but anyways, in my opinion, she was basically a pillar of strength, however you consider a pillar of strength.”

It is a big family, nearly 150 of them filling the Aubrey chapel: daughters and husbands, nieces and cousins, three wailing infants and at least two sets of identical twins, some of whom are playing hide-and-seek behind the chapel chairs. Two kids run past me in the office spraying it, and me, with Dixie cups full of water. The eulogist is one of the sons-in-law.

“Right now,” he says (he really does sport an impressive hairstyle, shellacked like a helmet, like it would ping if I tossed a paper
clip at it), “she’s experiencing the hereafter. The most oldest and authentic document is the Bible, written between 1500
BC
and 100
AD
, which has also been a best-seller for sixty-five years, did you know this? And that in itself is a feat. Jesus Christ is the saviour of the whole world, and that includes Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

The crowd is attentive but reserved, hands folded in laps, parents whispering at children to knock it off. No doubt they’ve heard his routine before, at summer suppers and Thanksgiving, or whenever there’s enough of them in a room for uncle to take a crack at saving their souls.

“If our lives are but a puff of smoke, guess what? We have a million years in eternity and it will be with Christ. The Bible promises us seventy years, and to be born of the spirit is to be born again, born spiritually, so we trust in our saviour Jesus Christ, and we wish Mom a swift fulfilling life afterwards. She is blessed beyond anything we can think of.”

Time for food. The family brought their own: carrots and dips and a Black Forest cake from Costco. Men gather at the door to decide if they’ll have another cigarette, discussing the likelihood of an al-Qaeda attack on Manitoba. A legless nephew is lifted from his wheelchair onto a couch where he moans until someone brings him a coffee. The twins are now running in circles, grinding Black Forest cake into the carpet, until one of them smacks forehead first into a door jamb and hollers. A teenage cousin picks him up and carries him into the chapel where people have lined up to view the body. The funeral has all the frantic energy of a dysfunctional family reunion, with none of the grim, repressed bleakness of the standard, secular service. It’s as if Mom’s being sent on a cruise, “blessed beyond anything we can think of,” instead of into
the retort, which is where we’ll be taking her in the morning. Can it be this easy?

I’m so caught up in my own community of lovable cynics and born-again pagans and Facebook friends who bark about alienation and a mechanized, globalized world where the old myths no longer hold up that I forget there are people who’ve got the whole puzzle solved: Believe, and even death is no biggie. When the family leaves, I scrape cake from the rug.

The main distinction between human beings and all other life forms, according to Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist in Sarasota Springs, New York, and a student of Ernest Becker, who wrote
The Denial of Death
(and who, as fate would have it, died just before they awarded him the Pulitzer Prize), is that we’re smart enough to recognize that we exist. Unlike the houseplant, we experience the awe of being alive and knowing it. But once we know that we’re here, it’s a short step to knowing that one day, maybe tomorrow or in an hour, we won’t be. Without some system of defence we’d be paralyzed with overwhelming terror over the fact that we’re “breathing, defecating pieces of meat, no more important or durable than a lizard or a potato,” he says. So what we did, cleverly and quite unconsciously, was to collaborate in the construction of a culture to give us a sense that we live in a world that has meaning, a world with art and industry and borders and trade rules and quality daytime talk-television, all earthly distractions from the nasty fact parked in our heads: we are doomed. Is it enough? Of course not. Anxiety gnaws, and we build our protective walls higher. We invent a God.