Curtains (24 page)

Outside Neil pulls his coat tight at the collar against the wind and snow, like King Lear in the storm. I’m not sure I understand the play (I get my Edgars and Edmunds confused), but in some ways Neil’s story and Lear’s seem to match up: he’s already lost his Cordelia (Natalie), the most-loved daughter who refused to suck up to her father and was cast out, and I’m doing my best to play the Fool, even knowing that it doesn’t end well (hanged to death: act 5, scene 3). But what’s
Lear
if not a story of parents and children
whose motives are doomed to clash? Neil is an undertaker first and a family man second, while Eirik sees it the other way round. Why was he late today? Maybe he took the kids swimming. In any case, Neil and Eirik, like Lear and his daughters, have different ideas about how to run a kingdom, and as much as I can fathom Neil’s commitment to the twenty-four-hour always-on-call status of the proper undertaker, Eirik seems intent on breaking a generations-old pattern of disconnect between a father and his children. Each has a commitment to family. Only Neil’s commitment is to his customers’ and Eirik’s is to his own.

Neil and Annette have a house in Gimli, but I know most nights Neil sleeps at the crematorium in a hideaway bed under the wall unit in his office. I picture him there by himself, poring over the blueprints, the statue of Rheinhold’s ape on his desk, the pedestal globe beside him. Then, when it’s time for lights-out, he sleeps in a drawer, same as the morgue drawers at the Victoria General Hospital, his only company the embalmed corpses down the hall in the dressing room, wrapped in flannel, everyone warm from the retort heat. This is his life. He didn’t pick it, but he’s been living it ever since he was twelve and he first helped his father dress a grave.

This isn’t my life. For me it’s a project. I can walk away. Not so for the families who are stuck with their grief, or even the family undertakers who are stuck with one another.

On Saturday Shannon and I get lost on the way to Dominion City. I follow her Jeep in the big black Dodge, but just before we hit the U.S. border she turns around and pulls to the side of the highway. The back of her Jeep is filled with flowers. Her uncle’s in the seat
next to her, in the fish urn. She consults a map. Dominion City is where she grew up, but she’s not used to the highway. She only knows the back route through the Roseau River Anishinabe First Nation. Once she sorts it out, we’re back on the road, and at length we arrive at a crossroads: a snowy street and a railway track, with a hotel on one corner (G
OOD
F
OOD
, says the sign), and across the street, a giant fish on a pole. This turns out to be a full-sized replica of the famous Dominion City sturgeon, 15 ½ feet and 406 pounds, caught in Roseau River in 1903. The town also has one grain elevator, where Shannon’s uncle used to work before the company closed it.

The United church is down the street from the fish. There we set up flowers on the stage next to a Christmas tree, and Shannon’s uncle is placed on a table beside the piano. Two hundred people show up, too many for the chapel, so some have to be sent to the basement where they’ll hear the service on speakers. The Legion honour guard stands by the door with their flags, awaiting the family. When they arrive I hear a thundering bellow as if an aircraft is landing on the roof of the church, but it’s just a train, grain hoppers and cattle cars, roaring by close enough to hit with a rock. No one else is alarmed; they’ve seen trains before.

Three of Shannon’s aunts (she seems to have many) give quiet eulogies. They talk about their brother’s liver transplant, how he was sure he got a lady’s because all he wanted to do after surgery was talk and talk. They tell us about the “horrible day when Jesus took him.”

“Please stand, those who are able,” Shannon says, and they sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” On her cue I hit the CD player for Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” and next to me one of the cousins, a young man with a shaved head, weeps and weeps.

At the cemetery, Shannon makes the sign of the cross on the urn and reminds her family, gathered around the grave, that this would have been the week of their annual Christmas supper. Her voice breaks as she lowers the velvet pouch. When we go back to our cars, the cousin with the shaved head stays behind, standing over the grave. Through the trees I can see the backhoe, waiting for him to leave.

At the community hall, long tables covered in kraft paper are laid with food for the funeral lunch. I sit across from an aunt, who passes me egg and tuna sandwiches, orange and maple cake squares, and tells me that Shannon was a good swimmer as a child.

“So you’re a Bardal,” she says.

“No, but I work for Neil Bardal.”

“Isn’t there a Bardal son who owns a funeral home in Portage?”

“There’s a Bardal son who works at Neil’s funeral home on Portage Avenue in Winnipeg.”

“That’s what I said.”

Women in Christmas sweaters bus tables, emptying coffee dregs into an ice cream bucket. A man with a sixteen-point buck on his jacket scoops sandwiches to take ice fishing. We’re joined by yet another aunt, and I’m introduced as Neil Bardal’s son. The aunt says she lived in the city once, but didn’t much like it. The steam radiators made her sneeze. All the time, I’m watching Shannon as she works the room, shaking hands and hugging cousins. I meet her father and little brother, who work together in the same Winnipeg plant. Father puts his arm around little brother’s neck, and Shannon stands behind them, her hands behind her back.

“It’s late now,” I say. “Time to get the car back to Winnipeg.”

“My father’s never seen me in my new job,” Shannon says, walking me to the door. “This is the first time.”

“Congratulations,” I say, the wrong word for the occasion, but she smiles.

A week ago she was ready to quit over a cotton-stuffing dispute, but today she’s come out to her family, who see her now not just as a niece and daughter but as a professional undertaker. Richard was wrong. She didn’t have to pick one role over the other. In the end what we got was no Celebration of Life with its showbiz and murky mission. This was a funeral.

I’ve told Neil that Dominion City will be my last call for a while. I’m off to California and Vegas, the twin meccas of the future of death-care. There’s a trade show in Vegas, at the Mandalay Bay casino, and San Francisco is ground zero for the do-it-yourself funeral movement. In Mill Valley, across the bay, there’s a cemetery that’s branded itself as a green alternative: no embalming, no vaults, no caskets, just a shroud and a hole in the ground under a tree, with a rock to mark the spot. In Graton, just up from Mill Valley, there’s a gallery that deals exclusively in cremation urns designed by artists. Of course, the Bay area was also home to Jessica Mitford, patron saint of the alterna-funeral, a good-enough reason for a pilgrimage. If the industry is going to change, the seeds of change will come, like organic millet, from the American West Coast.

D
EATH IN
V
ENICE
B
EACH

L
ike any North American town with indoor plumbing, Mill Valley has its Starbucks. I had trouble finding the Fernwood cemetery so I stopped there for directions. Outside, a woman in leather chaps and dreadlocks, wearing snowboard goggles as sunglasses, danced along the edge of a railroad-tie planter and talked at her cell phone in some chirpy local dialect. I managed to make out the word
armoire
. There’s money in Mill Valley. The local high school looks like a Spanish cathedral.

“No idea,” the barista said, when I asked about Fernwood.

“It’s the famous green cemetery,” I said. “They wrote about it in
The New Yorker
.”

He shrugged.

For most people cemeteries and funeral homes are invisible, just like old folks’ homes and landfills: blind spots. San Francisco
was doubly odd. It had no cemeteries to ignore, just the historic columbarium. All the city’s founding dead had been dug up and shipped, evicted in fact, to the suburbs in the early decades of the twentieth century, to a town called Colma, which now had 1,500 living residents and 1.5 million dead. Old headstones were dumped in the bay, or used to build breakwaters for the Aquatic Park and the St. Francis Yacht Club. San Francisco is penned in on three sides by water, every square inch of property matters—and cemeteries were deemed a waste of commercial potential.

Lately there’d been a fight over a new crematorium the Neptune Society
^*
wanted to build in Richmond, an industrial, low-income, mostly black neighbourhood north of Oakland. The old crematorium in Emeryville couldn’t handle the volume, the three or four thousand bodies a year they expected in the upcoming body boom. Plus, Emeryville had grown and gentrified. Pixar had its animation studio there. So they looked to Richmond. But the people of Richmond fought back. “We don’t want dead bodies spewing over our community,” one activist said. “What goes up must come down.” And that included mercury from thousands of dental fillings, and whatever else came from the factory combustion of the white upper-middle-class San Franciscans who presumably made up the bulk of Neptune’s clientele. When I spoke to Jimmy White, a Richmond resident, he told me the protest had as much to do with the gap between the rich and the poor as it did with what came out of the chimney: we’ve got their oil refineries, he said, we don’t want their dead too. “We have enough death in Richmond as it is.” In the end the town council voted to keep the Neptune Society crematorium out.

Fernwood meanwhile pitched an eco-friendly burial, where each “tree, flower, songbird, boulder and butterfly becomes a memorial to a loved one and a hope for the future.” It was owned by Tyler Cassity, the closest thing the death-care industry had to a poster boy. Charismatic, handsome, a technical adviser to HBO’s
Six Feet Under
, he’d bought both Fernwood, an old Portuguese burial ground, and the rundown Hollywood Memorial in Los Angeles, and given them elaborate makeovers. Hollywood Memorial became Hollywood Forever: he was the one who cleaned out the ponds, brought in white peacocks to stroll the grounds and showed movies at night on the wall of the mausoleum. Cassity was known for hiring ex–porn stars and –sex workers to run the cemetery and funeral chapel (to give them a fresh crack at “legit” commerce), and he told
The New Yorker
that when he died, he wanted to be buried at Hollywood Forever in “a circular island of Carrera marble in the lake, beneath which is a submerged sarcophagus, atop which is a statue of a naked Narcissus on all fours, staring at his reflection.”

He had even bigger plans for Forever Fernwood.
^*
The original idea was to bury people without chemicals in shrouds or pine boxes or biodegradable caskets like the Ecopod, a form-fitting sarcophagus made of recycled paper and starch plastic—or my dream casket, the Capsula Mundi, an Italian-made acorn with a living tree sprouting from one end, in which the body is meant to curl in the fetal position. At the same time they’d conserve land, maybe link it to the nearby Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Cassity was a sharp businessman: if people will pay a million dollars to be buried in a family mausoleum, he told
The New Yorker
, what will they pay to be buried under a three-hundred-year-old oak tree? Green didn’t mean a pauper’s burial, and green didn’t mean cheap.

The main building at Fernwood is under construction, so I meet the manager, Gary McRae, in a trailer, the makeshift office, where they keep a wall of GPS gizmos to help visitors find graves in the green section of the cemetery. I also meet Owen, the company dog. Owen yawns and goes back to sleep.

Before Fernwood, Gary had been a homicide detective at New Scotland Yard for eight years. “This is more peaceful,” he says, driving us up a hill to the cemetery in a Prius. In my head I had expected a rustic burial ground with shade trees and a white fence. I’d heard about burial forests in the United Kingdom where people were buried under mature trees and the land, instead of being manicured and drowned with sprinklers, was left to grow thick and wild. But Fernwood hadn’t got there yet. As we get out of the car, Gary points out the old Portuguese cemetery. Like Brookside in Winnipeg its stone monuments are weathered. Tall grass and scrubby shrubs grow between them. Here they still bury in the traditional fashion: vaults, caskets, the body embalmed if you want—pleasant, and properly spooky. Then, beyond a sharp “no embalming past this point” line marked by a stand of eucalyptus trees is the green burial ground: a bare open meadow with a few Charlie Brown saplings tied to stakes and a couple of rocks. It has a knockout view of the Tennessee Valley, and Gary explains how they’re pulling down the eucalyptus trees, basically weeds, and
putting in native California plants and grasses, wildflowers and irises to turn the land back into coastal prairie.

But it still looks like an oversized, neglected suburban front yard. The point of Fernwood is fantasy, a dream of pushing up giant redwoods from below, feeding them with your own hard-won carbon atoms, the afterlife as compost. People want to be trees: that’s the pitch. But like a lot of things in life, the place doesn’t quite match the fantasy. No crime, but frankly the Web site looked a lot prettier.