Curtains (4 page)

To let off communal steam, we devised orgies, bacchanalia, All Souls feasts; Ariès says that graveyard parties were so common in medieval France that by 1231, the Church councils had to ban dancing, juggling, theatre and mummery in cemeteries under threat of excommunication. Meanwhile, how the two circles of sex and death intersected was the business of poetry and porn, and the subject of apocryphal stories of men who got erections when they were hanged.

This worked fine until the Enlightenment and later, when we “found ourselves,” pre-California-New-Age-style, and funerals were
less about confirming the collective permanence of the social order and more about me me me, which peaked with the Gothic sobfests of the nineteenth century. The Church, which used to own ritual, had to cede to the private sector, which could make up ritual as it went along. The fantasy of redemption and immortality, out of which Darwin was kicking the stuffing, gave way to a marketplace solution to death, the purchase of things: rings and brooches made from the hair of dead loved ones, the memento mori, and burial robes, badges and gloves for the pallbearers (the gloves were to be left on the lid of the casket and buried with it). Neil Bardal says his grandfather sold memorial clothing, pants and dresses and shoes that split at the back for a more comfortable fit (on the corpse); for an extra five dollars he’d squirt an onion into the eyes of the horse that pulled the coach so it looked like the animal was crying. Death got more elaborate and personal. And more private.

But the dead themselves became a nuisance. Urban cemeteries were thought to be the source of some fusty miasma that made city folk sick, so the dead were segregated to suburban park cemeteries, where families could visit if they had the car fare, bring flowers: the sanatorium model, a kind of refugee facility with nice trees and stonework. The whole puzzle of how we deal with death comes down to that nasty poser: what to do with what’s left behind? Awe of the dead was giving way to modern science’s misguided itchiness about hygiene. People just kept digging holes, farther and farther away from the living. Soon, as Geoffrey Gorer pointed out, the Victorian fussiness over sex and its fascination with death switched places. Sex came panting out of the closet, and death, and all its trappings, went in: it was best managed in the dark, preferably after a few stiff drinks.

Henry James got so fed up with the privatization and apartheid of death that in 1895 he published a story called “The Altar of the Dead,” in which his character George Stransom builds a shrine of candles in a London church to his growing list of dead friends. In his journals, James says Stransom is “struck with the way they are forgotten, are unhallowed—unhonoured, neglected, shoved out of sight; allowed to become so much more dead, even, than the fate that has overtaken them has made them.” Without the comfort of a community, he invents his own private religion, one candle at a time, for the “worship of the Dead,” until he has a blazing do-it-yourself memorial, which of course won’t be complete until there’s “just one more” candle: Stransom’s own. But who’ll tend the altar when
he’s
gone?

I know this story, or a version of it: the story of how we ache to remember or to be remembered. I heard it as a kid. I prefer not to think about it, but there’s a memory itch I can barely reach.

I had a grandfather who fought in Spain with the International Brigades, killing fascists and blowing up rail lines while the Nazis test-drove their military hardware for the other big war that followed. He never discussed it. He never discussed anything. They were Finns, he and my grandmother (he was her third husband: the second was buried in Mount Pleasant cemetery in Toronto when I was still an infant, and the first, I have no idea what happened to him). Finns, especially Red Finns of their generation, had neither the language nor the inclination for chit-chat. Bertolt Brecht once said the Finns he knew, most of whom also spoke Swedish, were uncommunicative in two languages. There’s a story of two Finns in a bar drinking vodka. A half hour passes in silence, glasses are emptied.

“Do you want another?” the first Finn says.

“Are we here to talk or are we here to drink?” says the second.

My grandfather had only two things to say about Spain: One, it’s possible to survive for weeks by eating toothpaste. And two, the worst thing Franco’s fascists did was to bury the enemy, the Republican soldiers, in unmarked graves. The victors got monuments. The rest were left unhallowed, unhonoured, neglected, shoved out of sight.

I have two pictures of my grandmother, taken years apart. In one she’s sitting on the grass, wearing orange culottes and cat’s-eye glasses, her expression neutral, looking at the camera. She’s holding flowers, and she’s on a grave in Mount Pleasant, her second husband’s. A shrub barely clears the top of the granite headstone. In the second picture, the shrub is taller, but there’s no grandmother now, just the headstone, with her name on it. She’s under the grass on which she once sat. The framing is almost identical, as if they’d been taken seconds apart. I used to play a game with the pictures, flipping them like cartoon cards: now she’s alive, now she’s not, above ground, below ground, the disappearing grandmother. But what struck me when I got older and lined them up side by side was how little I knew about what had happened in the years in between. Maybe she saved a girl from drowning or fell in love with a Hungarian prince, but probably not. I know she lived in a house with the man who’d once survived on toothpaste, they had a floor lamp made from a rifle, and she cleaned other people’s homes for money. Other than that, there’s just the picture of her on the grave, waiting to get in.

The lesson, or the one I invented, said that life was a series of unconnected, disappointing and treacherous events, the goal of which was to acquire enough property, six by six feet of it, for a
decent burial and a headstone with your name on it. Death wasn’t something to fear, it was something to aspire to, after the troubling business that came before it, of which there was little need to speak. Folklore says the only time a Finn ever feels joy is when he’s imagining his own funeral: the flowers, the people who’ll come and the nice things they’ll say, the coffee and cardamom
pulla
, the hymn from Sibelius’s
Finlandia
and tango on accordion. A quiet, dignified ending, the payoff. As Herodotus (Greek, but in spirit a Finn) says in
The Histories
: call no man happy until he is dead. At that point life takes on the glow of retrospection: it sucked, really, but as we remember me now, it had its moments. Read it this way: life is chaos, but the funeral narrative makes sense of it.

Some families, all they aspire to is leather furniture. My Finnish version lived in the blazing light of the Altar of the Dead.

Growing up, I rejected this absurd Nordic death wish and came to see the funeral as a wrong-headed act of vanity. Does this mean I’m just covering up my own fear that life is hopeless and death is a delicious release, and the best party is the last one? I circle it and circle it, but I can’t get any closer to understanding it, other than to take a stab, make a Solomonic compromise: both life and death are absurd. But … what I know is that when I’m alone, I feel a bony finger tapping my thick forehead and then a voice with a Finnish accent says: What’s your smart-ass alternative? To just disappear? Without a remainder? It can’t be done. In death you’re a cold, physical problem that must be dealt with.

The voice gets louder the older I get. This may go some way towards explaining why I took a job at a funeral home: to get a closer look at what I may be fated to never figure out: why we do what we do when someone dies, and how we handle the leftovers.

“A
LL
T
HAT
M
ALARKEY”

I
n “that book,” as Neil calls it, Jessica Mitford asked a similar question: What constitutes a nice, decent funeral, and why on earth is it all so expensive? Nobody expected her book to be a hit, least of all the undertakers, or Mitford herself, who figured she’d sell a few copies to Berkeley profs and the cardiganned members of the San Francisco Bay Area funeral society, arguably the least sexy of the anti-commercial rabble-rousers on the West Coast in the ’60s, who were lobbying for more access to low-cost, no-fuss
cremation. But
The American Way of Death
, published in 1963 (and again, as
Revisited
, in 1996), was a knockout success. Bobby Kennedy said “that girl’s book” influenced the choices he made for his brother’s funeral. It’s why he chose a simple casket and kept it closed (and in the end, JFK did for funerals what he had done for men’s hats: he changed fashion).
TAWD
empowered consumers otherwise too embarrassed to ask questions about a taboo transaction; for the industry it was a kidney punch. The undertakers called Mitford by just the one name, hissing it out:
Jessssica
. She was thrilled. In America, she said, only the super-famous get single-name status, like Cher and Madonna.

They heckled her at conferences. They called her a communist. Of course I’m a communist, she smiled.

“How much money did you make on
The American Way of Death
?” they asked her.

“Absolute tons,” she said. “So much I can’t even count it—it made my fortune.”

They tore out their hair.

And all she’d done, she said, was consult their own literature and sales pamphlets, use their own words to make her case: that far from being an honour-bound tradition, the modern funeral was a recent invention, not much older than she was, a luxury item hooked to some vague promise of “grief therapy,” with products aimed not at meeting consumer demand but at defining it. The casket, the vault (with a 3/8-inch reinforced concrete inner liner, “Guaranteed by Good Housekeeping”—guaranteed against what she never dared to ask), the makeup and funeral clothing, “all that malarkey,” were the tools of high-pressure sales disguised as good works. Where funeral men believed in the “Beautiful Memory Picture” provided by
a well-prepared body, as a means to repairing the mental health of the survivors, Mitford saw embalming as a way to “make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container.” And only North Americans still did it. This was no small point. As a Brit, she admitted this was as much about taste, or lack of it, as it was about economics (and H.L. Mencken said, “No good American ever seriously questions an English judgment on an aesthetic question.” Although, as theologian Thomas Long points out, it’s too bad Mitford didn’t live long enough to see the Diana funeral, and the row of horrified royals watching Elton John sing “Candle in the Wind”).

If, as the industry’s own rhetoric said, the funeral was a “drama” in which “emotional catharsis or release is provided through ceremony,” then why did we pay to have the star of that drama “sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed” before plowing him underground?

The questions had been asked before. Bertram Puckle for one said that while “almost all our present [customs] have their origin in stupid pagan superstitions, they have none the less an interest of their own to record,” which he did, with cool pictures, in 1926 in
Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development
. But not as colourfully as Mitford asked them. What had once belonged to the Church— ritual, and rites of passage—she called out as a meaningless commodity, the way Andy Warhol said art wasn’t art anymore, it was soup cans. Warhol made his soup cans the year before the Mitford book came out. Culturally, her timing was spot on.

The book was her husband Bob Treuhaft’s idea. At first she thought, if there’s muck to rake, surely the pharmaceutical and automotive industries are meatier targets. Why pick on the poor gruesome undertakers? But Treuhaft, an activist and union lawyer,
saw that when working men died, their hard-won death benefits, for which they might’ve walked the picket line, and which were intended for their widows and families, wound up in the hands of the funeral director. “These people seem to know exactly how much a warehouse worker gets, and how much an office secretary,” he said, and they set their prices to match.

He did the fieldwork—sat in on an embalming, went undercover to price property at the famous Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, California (taking his friend, the actress Julie Andrews, to play his wife)—while Jessica studied the ads from the Practical Burial Footwear Company of Columbus, Ohio, and did her sums: the “formula pricing” of a mainstream funeral, she discovered, was based on a markup of 400 to 900 percent of the wholesale cost of a casket.

In
TAWD
she cites Wilbert Krieger’s 1951 template for a successful casket showroom. The product—your steels, your hardwoods, your cheaper cloth numbers, he said—should be arranged in a broad semicircle, with a path leading from the least expensive to the most expensive, left to right, the natural inclination for shoppers and lost travellers, since 85 percent of us are right-handed. This is called the Avenue of Approach, and encourages families to “pick cherries” from the top of the tree. To the left are the low-end caskets, on what Krieger calls Resistance Lane. Some will push hard against the current into Resistance Lane, but most consumers will find themselves stopping midway along the Avenue, in the heart of generous-markup-land. To the civilian, a casket showroom looks like a random array of boxes. In fact it knows more about you and your commercial habits than you do.