Curtains (27 page)

“Yeah, Knut,” the Memory Artist says. “This is a shame.”

He holds up his glass for a refill.

“I’m seventy-three next month,” he says.

——

I walk the beach by the San Francisco Zoological Gardens looking for old headstones from the purges, but no luck. Of course, the Pacific is even more popular than Colma as a place for what some call the Mitford Method of final disposition, even with, as Robert Pogue Harrison wrote, the sea’s “irresponsibility, its hostility to memory, its impatience with ruins, and its passion for erasure.” You can’t mark the sea like you can mark the land, it won’t let you, and if it matters to know where your dead are, the sea responds with a wet salty question mark. I couldn’t think of anything more cold and terrifying.

Karen Leonard, who lives in Willits, deep in Northern California’s granola and redwood belt, wrote me to say, “Out here, we have the Russian River meeting the ocean, at a place called Jenner-by-the-Sea. It’s beautiful, and the park rangers swear that the building up of the sandbar near the mouth of the inlet is due to cremated remains.” Willits was farther than I wanted to go on this trip, but Karen and her husband Steve invited me to come up and stay the night, camp on the futon. It made sense for my twisted pilgrimage: Karen was, after all, a link to death-care history. She’d been researcher and right hand to Jessica Mitford, helped her write
The American Way of Death Revisited
in the late ’90s, just before Mitford died and was herself scattered at sea.

Willits is a toy-train village in the mountains. Lumber trucks roar through it, and proto-hippie kids with canvas backpacks hitchhike into it, then stand in the mist outside Burrito Exquisito looking authentic. It takes three tries and an act of faith to get my rental van up Karen’s steep driveway, just before it starts to snow.
She welcomes me, puts on a fire. On the wall above her desk in the living room is a poster-sized black-and-white framed picture of Jessica Mitford playing Scrabble.

Karen tells me her parents were Southern Baptist. “They talked about sex before they talked about death. With them there was a right way to die and a wrong way to die. I’m sorry,” she laughs, “I’ve always found that hysterical.” As a young activist she toured funeral homes, undercover, as a fake mourner. Some undertakers made their living on one customer a week, she says, and she wanted to figure out how they did it.

At the time she met Mitford, “my icon,” in the ’90s, Karen wanted to join a memorial society, the consumer groups that fight high industry prices and monopolies, but Mitford shook her head: eggheads and Quakers and old farts, she said, you don’t want anything to do with them. So she hired Karen to help with the book. For Decca, as Karen calls her, you waged war against the enemy directly, you didn’t sit in a church basement and chat about it.

“It’s a show,” she says of the American funeral, “and the undertakers, I used to refer to them as ‘godshead waiters,’ as if you have to book passage through these guys to get into heaven.” In Willits they prefer a Home Depot approach: gather the materials yourself, build your own box, wake the body in its own bed, and then, once the ritual’s done, call the undertaker to take care of the cremation. There is nothing illegal about tending to your own dead. You keep the body cool by packing pillowcases with dry ice (the fabric keeps the ice from sticking to the body), wash it, chant, pray, let the kids decorate the box with Magic Markers. Some people drive the body to the crematorium themselves, in a station wagon or pickup. “But you’re talking about people that bake their own
bread,” she says. “One of the wealthiest places in America, and I hear people say they don’t use hot water. This is the land of the fruits and the nuts and the flakes. But absolutely every cultural trend starts here first.”

Just like do-it-yourself home renovation. Turn on Slice channel, you see half the schedule given over to people covered in their own drywall dust. It sounds empowering and meaningful and I could practically smell the incense—but did people really know what it meant to handle a dead body?

Pros: it’s a very intimate, tactile way to say goodbye.

Cons: the dead will shit, piss, purge gastric muck from the nose and mouth, clench up with rigor mortis, and tumble off tables. Their tongues dry out and their eyes sink like bad grapes.

“It’s not for everybody,” she says. “You need a community or a strong family.” And the same people who take care of their own while they are alive, feed them and clean them and change their adult diapers and wash their soiled clothes, will tolerate a bit of purge when they are dead.

I ask her about Jessica Mitford’s memorial. I’d read there were horse-drawn carriages, and that some critics, and she had plenty, found it curious that the queen of the quick disposal had what sounded like a big fancy funeral.

In fact there were five memorials, Karen says, including one in London and the family event in San Francisco. And a memorial, unlike a funeral, is not the property of an undertaker. The industry’s end of it was less than $500 for cremation and sea scattering at Pacific Interment. On Decca’s request they sent the bill to Robert Waltrip at SCI in Houston, in exchange for all the ink she’d given him in her lifetime (they never got a reply). It’s true, six black
plumed horses pulled a hearse, followed by a twelve-piece marching band: they couldn’t resist. It was a standing Mitford family joke to give her a ridiculously overproduced send-off (Decca had also said she wanted to be embalmed, “since it would make her look twenty years younger.” She wasn’t). The hall was packed. Maya Angelou spoke. Everyone was welcome. It was held at Delancey Street, the halfway house for addicts and ex-cons that Decca and her husband Bob Treuhaft had founded. Delancey Street is across the parkette from my friend Peter’s condo, where I’m staying while in San Francisco. I go to the coffee shop every morning. I wondered why the baristas had so many jailhouse tattoos. Now I know: they’re Decca’s people.

“What would she have made of the teddy bear urn?” I say.

“Oh my God,” Karen says, “she would’ve just loved it. I’m sorry she never lived long enough to see one.”

Most states have loose and untested laws about DIY; almost all of them require a licensed funeral director to at least sign a form (for a fee) when the body is picked up or buried. In Manitoba, when the medical examiner releases a body, he releases it to the family. In theory it’s the family’s choice whether to use an undertaker. All the province cares about is that someone with legible handwriting fills out the paperwork at Vital Stats. Then, if you want, you can back up the station wagon to the hospital for pickup. “My bet,” Neil told me, “is anyone who does it will call us next time.”

I’d once helped Adina with a body, one of Reg LeClaire’s frail little French ladies. We washed and dressed her but did not embalm her: she belonged to a small, clubby Christian sect and they wanted her at home, for prayers, before they buried her. When Neil found out, it was as if he’d swallowed a wasp. It’s visceral, for an undertaker,
the idea of civilians handling the dead: you may as well take out your own appendix with a butter knife. B.T. Hathaway, the Massachusetts undertaker who’d crunched the numbers on boomer mortality, told me it was fine, the home funeral, for the 5 percent who have money, time, resources, education, and political and emotional will. “But the average consumer is not so well equipped,” he said. “It’s poetic, but the truth is, I don’t know that many poetic families. And it’s as much a question of time as anything else—people are
on the clock
. They call on other people to take care of them.” This of course is the same argument for why people eat at Pizza Hut instead of milling their own wheat and breeding their own pepperoni cattle: why make it hard on yourself?

Most don’t. But what worries the industry is how easy cremation has made it for other hospitality providers—restaurants and hotels and banquet halls—to rip off their trade: if there’s no body to drag around and all you need is space for a party, what makes a funeral home any better than a Best Western or a Casa Bonita?

While I was in California, I had the chance to attend a funeral at the Cocoanut Grove Ballroom on the beach in Santa Cruz for Robert Anton Wilson, the writer and conspiracist and friend of Timothy Leary. I didn’t know Robert Anton Wilson, except that he’d written thick paperbacks with pictures of pyramids and cats on them,
The Illuminatus
!
Trilogy
(co-authored with Robert Shea) and other head-scratchers that were big with math majors and stoners and the depressive dystopians I used to drink with in university. You didn’t have to know Robert Anton Wilson to go to his funeral: the family sold tickets online, $15 each including parking.
So I went. I got there early and sat in the van outside Cocoanut Grove, eating ice cream and watching the swinging pirate ship on the midway, waiting for the box office to open.

The man’s fans were loyal. They followed a kind of arch religion called Discordianism, also called “Zen for round-eyes,” that said chaos was just as important as, and more interesting than, order, if you could teach yourself not to be afraid of it. They were happy he’d lived to his seventies, that he’d got a good ride from his “vessel.”

The crowd was split into two camps: hippies in fringe vests and pinched straw cowboy hats and feathered white hair; and young hippie wannabes in The Residents “eyeball” T-shirts, striped red and black stockings, squid tendril dreadlocks and stick-on face jewellery. There were top hats in both camps. Inside, I found a table under the mirror ball and ate a quesadilla wedge, while a girl dressed as a Renaissance maiden played Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on a harp. A woman on stage said, “I’d like us to be on the same wavelength a moment.” She had a message from Robert Anton Wilson, who’d written his own brief eulogy before he died: “‘I no longer claim to know anything,’” she read, “‘but I still have some persistent suspicions. Do not dare mourn me.’” The crowd roared. The party had begun.

“Today is my birthday,” a young woman told the crowd. “It just seemed right to celebrate life and death together. We read
The Illuminatus
!
Trilogy
in Dallas, and whenever a character smoked pot, we smoked pot. Thank you for being a light in a very dark place!”

People told me Wilson should have been more famous than he was, that if not for him there’d be no Internet, no
Da Vinci Code
, no TV show called
Lost
, but they weren’t angry about it. They weren’t
angry about anything. They blew into Chinese noisemakers and rattled Chinese rattles. The dead man’s ashes sat at the foot of the stage in a wooden box with a gold apple on the lid, the central image from one of his books. We were invited to line up and touch it. I asked a man in a “They Might Be Giants” T-shirt what he thought of this kind of funeral.

“Is that what this is?” he said.

A young woman took the stage. “Hi, I’m Cathy,” she said, “and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Cathy,” the crowd called back.

Soon, the author’s daughter took the urn and the harpist to a boat, moored at the pier, to scatter her father’s ashes at sea—to join his wife and, I was told, dolphins from other planets. From the ballroom window, we watched the boat pull away in the long, late-afternoon light.

A man in a fez told me he worked in the field of “quantum tantra.” Soon, he said, we’d find ways to contact nature directly, without instruments, and achieve peak experiences through physics the way drugs worked through chemicals. We’d connect with trees and furniture and other people, and of course the dead. He told me his wife had been cremated, and that since then, he’d scattered her in Dixie cupfuls in different places that held meaning. Apparently Robert Anton Wilson’s last wish was to have his ashes scattered on Pat Robertson.

“You guys are all defective,” a woman told us from the stage. “You’re not conforming, you’re not doing it the right way. And I love you.”

In time the event had the feel of a good party gone on a bit too long. A drunk man hit on the harpist. (“My life’s super complicated,”
he said, spilling beer, “but I gotta say you’re beautiful. You’re a princess.”) While some of the wannabes danced, most left: there was a pagan convention in San Jose and it was getting dark. I’d been well fed, the company was weird and friendly, and if the point was to congratulate a man for having lived rather than dwell on his death, I suppose they pulled it off.

In the corner I saw a handful of older guests, the only ones who seemed to remember why there’d been a party in the first place. These were the veteran soldiers of the counterculture, the real Berkeley rebels from the ’70s. From across the ballroom they were the elder statesmen in Birkenstocks, but up close, slouched in their chairs, not talking, just stirring ice in their cups, they looked exhausted, as if they knew the revolution was long over and all that was left was to wait for their turn on the scattering boat.

“I’ll see you next lifetime,” the drunk told the harpist as I left.

T
HE
M
YTH OF
P
ERMANENCE