Curtains (5 page)

Readers loved the book (my favourite entry in the index is the one for “caskets and coffins, burping”). It confirmed what they
already suspected about a creepy underground brotherhood, worse than Masons. The undertakers fought back, or tried. It got dirty. They called Jessica anti-Christian (when the red-baiting flopped) and they said she was grinding a personal axe, that she hadn’t grappled with the grief of losing her own son, who was hit by a bus in 1955, and that now she was swinging at the closest target (she never responded to that one).

At the time, Neil was a young undertaker, and he saw more than a few family funeral home owners call it quits. “Maybe it would’ve happened without her, but it was the start of the end of the family business. People panicked, they sold. She created a buyer’s market for the new corporate chains who bought up all these funeral homes” from motivated, panicky sellers. (This is Neil’s analysis, but even if it’s only half true, it’s wickedly ironic: the publicly traded corporate funeral chains were her broadest targets, with their higher-than-average prices and their covenant with shareholders to boost market value and keep up with the Dow Joneses—no way to run a funeral home, according to Mitford.)

Still, he says, if he and his mates had done any kind of self-analysis, they’d have seen the cracks in their own shell. As an embalming student he used to brag about doing two preps at the same time, and lightning-quick twenty-minute family arrangements to get the volume through the door. “We figured people trusted us. But to be honest, I was taking shortcuts. She woke us up.” He speaks with neither contempt nor reverence about Jessica Mitford. To him she’s just a fact of life, like the weather.

But her attack on embalming did sting.

Neil was taught, by his father and his uncle, that if they lost embalming they’d lose everything: No body to show, no casket.
No casket, no hearse and then no chapel, and soon enough they’d be an overdressed pickup and removal service for the blasted cremators. And that was the Mitford message: drop the morbid corpse fetish and cremate your dead, liberate yourself from the
thanatos
-industrial complex. Cremation is clean and takes time pressure out of the economic equation: no rush to make snap decisions and get the body in the ground before it turns. Even the Episcopal Church said, “The body has served its sacramental purpose, that of housing the personality of the individual…. The remains are not a person; they are rather like discarded clothing.” Bake, shake, be done with it. The message stuck. Now the cremation rate is over 50 percent in some Canadian provinces including Manitoba (where, when Neil started in 1962, it barely topped 2 percent), higher in B.C. (over 90 per cent on Vancouver Island), and 60 percent or more in Nevada and Arizona, in the lucrative grey-belt, all part of the legacy of
The American Way of Death
.

Turns out the industry made the “best of a bad job,” as Mitford put it in the update of the book published in the 1990s. They pushed urns and cremation-specific wood and pressboard caskets, discouraged scattering (or as the English clergymen preferred, “strewing”) in favour of urn burial, niches in graveyard walls and mausolea, and bronze plaques for the niches. Cremation didn’t have to mean cheap. In fact, with a casket, embalming, two nights of visitation in the chapel followed by a church service, cremation, an urn and burial of the urn in a cemetery, you could make more money cremating than by providing a traditional burial.

When Mitford died in 1996, just before
Revisited
came out, she was cremated and her ashes were “strewn” at sea. Her mourners held a party in San Francisco at Delancey Street, a halfway house
for cons and addicts founded by her and Bob Treuhaft. There was a New Orleans marching band and a cortège led by four horses in black plumage, the most ironic funeral ever held in the Bay Area. The bill for the cremation, the only taste the industry got that day, was $490.

To me, the heart of the debate she left behind is a nagging question: what is the body, anyway? Is it charged, mystical, something to be marked and honoured with ceremony and balm, or is it “discarded clothing”? Her answer might’ve been: you decide. You figure out your own emotional cost and come up with a price—just don’t leave it to the band of gentlemen who sell product in the name of hygiene, tradition and pop psychology.

The year after she died, an editorial in
The Director
, one of the funeral trade magazines, had this to say: “The importance of the memory picture created by the properly embalmed and restored loved one is something we must never lose sight of and never be ashamed to ask permission to do…. Hold your head high, take care in the work you do and be proud to be an embalmer.”

The battle for hearts and minds (literally) continued.

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T
he downtown chapel of Neil Bardal Inc. used to be a bakery. Neil leased it, tore out the ovens, put in stucco and pink carpeting and a glass-front Coca-Cola fridge to hold snacks for receptions, and a casket showroom. It’s on Aubrey Street between a Domino’s Pizza and a pediatrician’s office, and when the main door opens it dings like at a 7-Eleven. The chapel is Richard’s turf. He’s been with Neil the longest of all the funeral directors, since the ’80s, before which he sold auto parts. Neil says widows love Richard; they want to pinch his cheeks and bake for him. Wiry, boyish, a bit tightly wound, he views the undertaker’s role as therapist this way: grief therapy is bullshit. The only therapy he provides is to make sure the limo shows up when it’s supposed to, the right hole is opened at the cemetery and the right music is played at the service. He manages logistics for families who are otherwise
preoccupied. There’s no false sympathy and hand-holding, which is how the corporate undertakers mostly play it. They want to be your friend. He wants to be your funeral director.

The C. family, recently bereaved, has come to make arrangements. Mother can’t speak English but daughter translates, son says nothing, and another young man, presumably the daughter’s boyfriend, spends the conference fetching her Kleenex. It’s her father who died. Mother wears a cardigan held closed with a safety pin and carries a canvas shopping bag, and wants, it turns out, after some back and forth, a nice decent burial.

“Would you like a viewing?” Richard says.

The daughter looks to her mother, who shrugs.

“What’s a viewing?” the daughter says.

“It’s completely optional.”

Which is true. But realizing he needs to back up a step, he explains the concept. The body is displayed in an open casket, and people come to pay their respects. There may be prayers, also completely optional.

“How is this different from the funeral?” she says.

“Usually it’s the day before.”

“And is he there?”

“Who?”

“My father.”

Richard considers this.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Of course.”

They agree to the viewing.

It emerges that the family has a plot at Brookside, and Richard notes it on his tick-sheet, along with facts relevant to the provincial department of records: where the man was born, names of his
parents, where he worked. Richard’s tone is firm and neutral. When the daughter cries, he stops the conference until she’s finished. Then, with dates set and details ticked, he leads us from the arrangement room, past the Coke fridge, to the casket showroom.

There is a difference between a casket and a coffin. A casket has a round, swelled-top lid, and is sturdier and more furniture-ish than a coffin, which is a simpler box, hexagonal and tapered, common in Europe and vampire stories and Halloween store displays. We only carry caskets. They’re open, to show off the interior fabrics. Some are quilted, some are velveteen, some have design flourishes: three birds and the legend “Going Home” stitched on the underside of the lid. The hardwoods gleam under the pot lights. They’re arranged in a broad arc with a narrow shopper’s path between them à la Krieger’s Avenue of Approach. In a corner to the left (Resistance Lane) are two covered in chintz cloth, known in the local trade as Mennonite Specials. At the end of the lane there is something that looks like a tipped-over dresser, which turns out to have been made by a local craftsman in his garage. Except for the handyman’s special, these are brand-name caskets: Batesville, Victoriaville, Colonial.

Richard stands back while the daughter and mother touch the caskets. They run their hands along the swing-bar handles, tug on fabrics. The mother picks up the pillow from an Octagon Oak and considers it.

“That’s a ladies’ casket,” Richard says. Ladies’ caskets are more tapered, with chamfered edges, therefore considered more “slimming.” Like wearing vertical stripes.

Mother wants something simple. It’s just going in the ground, she says, through the daughter. They become enamoured of a
Colonial with a deeper grain than the Octagon Oak. It sits on a pedestal. As they tap and tug, it occurs to me that they must know that we know that they don’t have a clue what they’re doing, and why should they? They might as well be buying a nuclear reactor for all the foreknowledge they bring to the transaction. This pretending-to-shop is part of the ritual, the dance. How do you decide which one? Colour? Finish? Handling and durability? City versus highway mileage? The steel caskets have rubber gaskets along the rim, and are known as “sealers.” According to the manufacturer, the gasket “resists” water and foreign elements (things that live underground), although you can’t hold back nature for long, certainly not with a simple rubber ring (in the old days, “sealer” caskets walled into mausolea had a tendency to explode from the gases produced by anaerobic bacteria, which thrive in the very conditions the gaskets create: no airflow, no oxygen. Only later did casket makers develop “burping” technology, which allows for gas to escape, as with Tupperware. We don’t get into this with the C. family).

They settle on the Colonial and a vault to match. The vault is a concrete grave liner with an optional plaque or insignia on the lid. Too heavy to display in the showroom, these are represented by miniature mock-ups, big enough to bury a Barbie doll. The son is confused by the little vault, until Richard explains it’s just a model.

In the office, Richard’s quick estimate, not including cemetery expenses (headstone and the cost of opening and closing the grave are Brookside’s bite), comes to $7,680, which he rounds up to $7,900
to provide wiggle room. Then, if the final bill is less than the estimate, they’ll feel like they got a deal.

“I need a Monticello for Brookside for Monday,” he says on the phone to his rep at the vault-maker. “What do you put on there for a Chinese person? Looks like two tadpoles swimming in circles? That’s it. Give me one of those.”

Understand your families, Richard says. Know where the power lies. The mother was the power. He kept eye contact with her even though she couldn’t understand his language. The son was wallpaper, and the boyfriend was just the get-the-Kleenex guy, non-factors both. Sometimes you get a family member who shouldn’t be there, often a sister or sister-in-law who just buried a husband and now she’s an expert. Stick to your tick-sheet, and focus on the power. This is how to keep an arrangement on track instead of unravelling into a two-hour chaotic hem-haw session. There’s no trick to sales: the room does the work. The Colonial is the most popular casket in the room, and three-quarters of all clients buy it. The place where it sits is what Richard calls the “sweet spot.”

The old-timers had tricks. If a customer wound up in Resistance Lane in front of a cloth casket, the salesman might demonstrate its “solid workmanship” by punching or even stepping on the pillow, then lead him to a more expensive hardwood or steel. At this point the customer couldn’t erase the mental image of the salesman stepping on the pillow, and by extension the loved one’s face, and bought whatever came next. That’s called up-selling, and it’s unethical. Richard’s casket prices are based on 2.5 times markup on wholesale cost, or else a “perceived value” (a cherrywood might be more than 2.5-times wholesale, a Colonial might be less, whatever
the local market will bear, otherwise known as a “wild guess”), with the above-average caskets at the peak of the sales curve. Most big-item shoppers, whether it’s for refrigerators or caskets, consider themselves above-average. They don’t need to be pushed.

I’m still stuck thinking about this “sealer” business, and the whole concept of protection. The body’s in the ground. The ground is full of water and things that crawl and bacteria that, presumably, are nature’s ally in the grand messy cycle of renewal. Why are we fighting this lopsided battle?

“It’s true,” Richard says, “a steel casket will probably rust at some point.” But some have a feature, called cathodic protection, a gizmo used on automobiles and on pipelines too: it’s a bar that sits under the casket to sacrificially attract the rust. You have the same bar inside your hot water heater at home, he says, to keep it from rusting. There are also nice design features, like casket corners that are like porcelain charms, stuck to the casket with magnets. If mom was a gardener you might want casket corners that look like a terra cotta pot with flowers growing out of it, or if dad was a musician, a little doodad that looks like a scroll of sheet music. “There’s four of them, one in each corner,” he says, “and they come off before the casket is buried. You give them to the family, they can frame them with mom’s picture. Keepsakes.”