Curtains (30 page)

The cards are for people who “don’t have the words,” she says.

She hands me a few more samples.

They have a certain businesslike charm, like a well-crafted memo (“comprehensive and fulfilling”). After all, we buy cards to mark other life transitions: birthdays, bar mitzvahs, graduation, Secretary’s Day. But I think about people I know in Newfoundland, who aren’t so much superstitious as practical about omens, who would spend a day and a night at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist with a rosary if they ever got a greeting card from beyond the grave. “Stay in Their Memories Forever,” the pamphlet says. Who could forget such a card? I thank Toni, but I know she knows I don’t get it.

“Until you go through it,” she says, “you don’t understand.”

The words, and her eyes, give me a chill.

Ed’s clocks are urns, or his urns are clocks. Some clocks are set into pen-holder desk sets which are also urns. They are, I would say, conceptually busy. Am I supposed to reflect on the tyranny of time or the transience of human communion through the written word, or is it just a clock and a pen holder? The desk set with the clock set into a golf ball is even more work. I’m growing tired of everything being packed with cryptic meaning.

“Is this working?” says Ed.

I don’t know what he means. I’m not wearing a watch, so I can’t tell him if his clocks are running on time.

“Do people want this?” he clarifies. “I mean, you probably know about these things.”

Richard calls them pot-and-pan salesmen and Neil calls them carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs aiming to elbow their way into the funeral market with gadgets that have no inherent meaning except as vessels for ashes. Take an object, a paperweight or a model boat, carve out a space big enough for a capsule: whammo,
a $675 memorial keepsake. But I feel bad for Ed. He’s in a near panic. He seems to sense that his clocks lack something, a necessary gravity. All I can think to tell him is what I’ve learned today: that if you don’t have a fool running your business and you love your families, you cannot go wrong by value-adding, and revenue-and cash-flow replacing. Instead I tell him to hang in, that the marketplace is a rich tapestry.

The casino beckons. I sit down at an
I Dream of Jeannie
slot machine and feed it a dollar, but it can’t even muster the energy to play me like a fish, so pathetic is my bet. It just eats the dollar and chirps, beckoning someone who knows how to play. I’m lost in here, like I was in the exhibition hall. I remember what Sean Dockray said, that Vegas is a managed experience: playtime for families who seek the fantasy of living in a pyramid or medieval castle for a weekend, to escape the chaos and discord of their real lives. They don’t come to win, they come to experience the
possibility
of winning, on the next turn of the slot machine barrels, which never happens but that’s not the point. The target customer in Vegas does not lose his shirt nor does he win the jackpot. He’s simply delivered through time, distracted. For this he and his family will pay, and buy the T-shirt and eat shrimp in buckets. This, in a way, is the goal of the funeral trade too: to divert your attention long enough to get the body into the ground or the retort. Every funeral is a gamble that through some combination of product and ceremony, greeting cards and clocks and barbecues, you’ll feel better, not transformed or changed but carried, dazed, over the hump. Is that enough? Is it better than nothing? I don’t know, but neither does the industry, and it occurs to me as a dreamy revelation that death-care is playing the Vegas game too: blowing itself up and
rebuilding in a panic, hoping their invented traditions will stick this time and draw a crowd.

I pass a craps table and a twenty-ish man in a porkpie hat and plaid shorts, with a beer in one hand and the dice in the other, calls out, “Who’s feelin’ it, because I’m not feelin’ it.” He looks at me. “Is anyone feelin’ it?” Vaguely depressed I go back to the expo.

A small group has gathered across from the Shiva Shade boys. Perhaps, I think, a knife fight has broken out between Batesville and House of International Inc. But I look closer and see that the crowd is huddled around a dog, a golden Lab. Undertakers are patting him behind the ears and making clucky tongue noises at him. The dog’s name is Derek, and he’s a canine therapist. He wears a vest. Derek belongs to Tom Flynn, who owns a cemetery in Hermitage, Pennsylvania. His son, John, runs the family funeral home. Tom’s philosophy on death-care is elegant: adapt or perish.

“For me,” he says, cupping my elbow, “it came down to pets or vets. We got a lot of Catholics where we are, but Catholic cemeteries get them all. With veterans, Catholic or Presbyterian or what-have-you, they still identify as vets.”

“But people will spend more money on pets,” says John.

So pets it was.

They cremate pets, bury pets, host 150 pet funerals a year (“We had one family spend $800 on a guinea pig!” John says, as if he can’t believe it himself), and once they got the okay from the city of Hermitage, they branched into burying pets and people together, Dad and Spot in the same grave. “We pre-need like crazy,” Tom says.

“At first I was terrified,” John says. “I thought we’d have people dragging their dead dogs in the front door of the funeral home.”

Tom puts it this way: His cemetery has 25 percent of the local market (human, that is) and the funeral home gets 20 percent. But two-thirds of all homes have pets, and as the only pet death-care provider in town, that gives him a 66 percent share, plus most people own seven or eight pets in a lifetime. And satisfied pet owners buy pre-needs for themselves and their families too: for most people, burying a pet is their introduction to the death-care industry. Meanwhile, thanks to cremation, other, less diversified funeral homes are down to twenty funerals a year. How do you make a living on twenty funerals a year? By jacking the unit price, which only drives people to find cheaper cremation elsewhere, and the wheel keeps turning. “The whole world’s changing,” he says.

Attendance is sparse for the mainstage event with Dave Norton of Stone Mantel, an “insights consultancy” that counsels business on building “meaningful branding experiences.” The crowd is attentive, if distracted by the crew in the back that’s setting up coffee urns and baskets of muffins. Dave strides onto the stage. “Yours is a highly experiential industry,” he tells us, “but you’re treating it as a service: you offer to memorialize my loved ones for me so I don’t have to.” Meanwhile what people are looking for is an experience that matters, what he calls “cultural capital,” whether it comes from art, spirituality or family life. Our lives are plastic: look around you, the city you’re in, a fantasyland, and people are tired of fantasy. They’re simplifying their lives: couples are scaling down, selling the SUV, or one of them, and living on a single income, eliminating economic premiums in favour of meaning—more time with family, more time for spiritual growth.

“Do they go around saying, ‘I gotta have that latest casket’? They do not,” he says.

They’re hungry for products and experiences with high cultural value. The Body Shop does it by linking a story, of human and animal rights and fair trade, to shampoo and soap. Boomers have money to create a legacy, not because they care about status but because they want their lives, in the end, to have mattered. Look at the rise in volunteerism, and geo-tourism: they’re taking their vacations in India and Guatemala, building housing and wells for clean water, reading to local kids, not sitting on the beach.

“Take a stand,” says Dave. “What is soap?” he asks. (No one puts up his hand to hazard an answer.) “It’s a product that takes a position: it’s against dirt. People say, I’m against dirt too.”

The man to my left is asleep, leaning on his cane, head resting on his hands. A woman at the front applauds lightly. The rest line up for coffee. I feel like I’ve seen and heard something important but cryptic, and this is the trouble with consultants. Like prophets they lead you to the edge of redemption and leave you to find God’s grace on your own. What does he mean, “take a stand?” I suppose if pressed to choose one way or the other I’d have to say I’m against death. But what he’s after is deeper fish. It’s not enough to be against death; I need to face up to its absurdity, find meaning in the mess. How? Through some mystical “premium cultural experience.” No wonder the industry crowd is ambivalent. In a way he’s telling us to strip it down and start again, that the impulse to fix grief through shopping is giving way to the hunger for substance. How do you put that on a General Price List? What’s the funeral equivalent of Body Shop shampoo? Then it comes to me: I’ve already seen it. A simple act, without the artifice of embalming or baroque funerary product. Just a direct application of body to ground where it’s left to contribute to the great cycle: ashes to
ashes and all that, back to Mother Earth in a shroud and a plain wooden box. Instead of deflecting a confrontation with death through commerce, you face it, fill the hole by hand, and then get on with the hard work of mourning, knowing that instead of passively choosing an object from a catalogue and subcontracting the ritual to someone else, you’ve acted, taken a stand, not against dirt, in fact, but
in favour
of it. An act with meaning.

At day’s end I meet Annie for supper, at a real restaurant that serves food on plates delivered by waiters, with none of the wheelbarrow shrimp or deep-fried salad of the casino buffet: an authentic experience for our last night in Vegas.

“I have seen the future,” I tell her. “And it’s Jewish.”

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NDERTAKER

T
he ground in front of the Factory has been dug up and graded. A backhoe sits perched like a vulture over what used to be the rose garden, now a hole ten feet deep and lined with concrete. The steel girders were sunk a week ago, marking the boundaries of the new reception centre. During construction, Neil says, one of the front-end loaders pierced a gas line. They could smell it in the crematorium. All they could do was evacuate the building, then hurry the bodies from the cooler into the removal van and drive them to a safe distance and wait for the fire department. Though the retorts were shut off, the two corpses inside continued to burn on their own fuel. Neil stood across the street and waited for his dream, now finally realized and halfway to being built, to blow up. But the firemen arrived in time to shut off the gas.

The evidence is in front of me: Neil won his court battle with Chapel Lawn, and the judges awarded him costs. The rose garden, they said, is a private matter on private property. If Neil wants to let people scatter their ashes and charge them a fee, that’s his business. Cremated remains, they said, are not human remains. A scattering garden is not a cemetery. With the lawsuit out of the way, the bank fed him the cash for the building expansion, and a ribbon cutting is scheduled for next September. Chapel Lawn will not appeal, and is presumed grumpy.

But with the victory came a sour trade-off. After a twenty-year battle to see a paper idea turn into concrete and steel girders, he’s lost half his staff. Adina was the first to go. After graduating from embalming school she took a job at Glen Lawn, one of the Arbor Group homes in the east end. Shannon followed soon after, to Chapel Lawn. It was their third shot at cherry-picking her and, as she told Neil, they weren’t likely to call a fourth time. So she accepted their offer. Of course there were long-standing grievances, the clashes with Eirik over technique, but as far as Neil can tell, it came down to work–life balance.

“She got that if you give your all to a family in mourning, that it’s worth something,” he says. “The part she didn’t get is you have to have flexible time.” People die at night and on Sundays, Christmas and Easter. Bodies are cremated on Saturday so they can be scattered on Monday. Undertakers who expect to work according to a fixed schedule can’t manage for long in a place like Neil’s: there are some things for which you can only count on family. Staffers won’t get up at 4 a.m. to see a grieving widow, but family will. If you spent your childhood in a funeral home, you already know your time isn’t your own. Eirik understands this,
Neil says. He’s a work in progress, but he knows what it means to “grow up funeral.”

After Shannon left, Glenn handed in what was to be the last of his many resignation letters. He’s now the night manager at Pasta La Vista. But Eirik and Richard have smoothed over their conflicts, and in the new building they’ll share an office.

The fate of the downtown chapel is still pending. Neil would like to see it used for other functions. Richard’s doing the research. He’s reaching out to the gay and lesbian community, pitching same-sex weddings in a funeral home. Meanwhile, Neil’s law-firm model for funeral service has been stashed away in a drawer for now. It might’ve worked with Natalie and Shannon on board, but Richard, he says, is too old and stubborn to buy into it, so the status quo will have to do.