Curtains Read online

  For Annie

  Has your life been a failure?

  Let’s make your death a success!

  —Jean Teulé, “The Suicide Shop”

  Books … are tombstones.

  —Antonin Artaud

  PROLOGUE

  1. THE FACTORY

  2. A WAY OF LIFE LIKE ANY OTHER

  3. “ALL THAT MALARKEY”

  4. I’M SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS, BUT YOU’VE MISTAKEN ME FOR SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING

  5. LOVE YOUR HAIR, WHO’S YOUR EMBALMER?

  6. FUNERAL FAMILY VALUES

  7. TO KEEP THINGS THE WAY THEY ARE,WE HAVE TO CHANGE

  8. RESPECT, DIGNITY AND BLACK UNDERPANTS

  9. GRIEF SNEAKS PAST

  10. TWO HUNDRED CUBIC INCHES OF YOU

  11. TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE DOWN: THE “CELEBRATION OF LIFE”

  12. CONTRIBUTING TO SHAREHOLDER VALUES, ONE CORPSE AT A TIME

  13. “SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”

  14. THE STORM

  15. DEATH IN VENICE BEACH

  16. THE MYTH OF PERMANENCE

  17. THE SPOOKIEST TRADE SHOW IN AMERICA

  18. ONE LESS UNDERTAKER

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Two rules for picking up a body at the hospital, known as a “removal”: (1) Make sure it’s the right one. This business, when you shake it down to first principles, is the burial or cremation of the dead, two relatively irreversible acts. Mistakes are frowned upon. Please check the ID tag carefully; and (2) Never stop for food on the way back to the funeral home when you’re “carrying,” not even at a drive-thru. It’s bad for the brand, and is apt to put other drive-thru-ers off their doughnuts.

  I’m anxious about my first removal at Seven Oaks Hospital, which has, I’m told, a finicky loading dock that makes getting the stretcher into the van a game of brute strength and faith. And my stretcher technique is poor. I know this. I’ve practised a few times with an empty stretcher, shuffling it in and out of the van at the crematorium. The stretcher has collapsing legs that fold under on the way in, and fall back into place on the way out. The trick is to make sure the legs snap back when you pull it out, to listen for the telltale click that says the legs are locked in place. Everyone talks about the click. If you don’t hear the click, you’ll be picking your body up off the floor. In industry jargon, this is considered “undignified,” and dignity is an even bigger deal in funeral service than not going through the drive-thru with a dead body.

  For the Seven Oaks gig, Glenn comes with me as a spotter. Glenn is younger than me; he runs his uncle Neil’s crematorium and in his off time he plays rugby and tends nighttime bar at the Pasta La Vista restaurant on Kenaston Boulevard. He’s not an undertaker: though Neil agreed to sponsor him at the embalming school, Glenn said he didn’t want to spend his life stuffing cotton into orifices, thank you. But he’s worked the technical side of funeral service since high school, during which time he’s removed and cremated and buried scores of dead people, and sold “pre-need” funeral insurance to a few of the living.

  At Seven Oaks, there’s a hallway at the back near the loading dock, where the undertakers gather every day to pick up their cargo. Here they chat about the weather and hockey and chew nicotine gum while they wait for Security to unlock the Silver Doors like they are waiting for Walmart to open. Every hospital in Winnipeg has its Silver Doors, a gentle nickname for the morgue, only at Seven Oaks the entrance is neither silver nor plural: it’s just a door. It could be the entry to a janitor’s closet. Glenn makes small talk with a red-faced undertaker from another firm who wears a baseball jacket and tie, and tells us about the time he pulled the short straw and got the oversized body, a “hernia case” that took up two gurneys and nearly flipped off the stretcher on the way into the van. The mood is light, courteous. Me, I’m rehearsing stretcher moves in my head. My track record with mechanical objects is spotty. Once, while trying to fix a bicycle chain, I got a knot in it—which a mechanic told me was impossible until he saw it.

  Security arrives, bored. We follow him into a small office. A wastebasket in the corner is full of latex gloves, and there’s a baptismal font of Purell hand sanitizer on the wall. He checks our paperwork. Death is a bureaucratic event. No one is allowed to die unless the right forms are signed and cross-checked by a high-school dropout with a lot of keys. Then he opens another door, and I feel the cold breeze and smell what smells like a refrigerator that needs a box of baking soda. It’s dark in this second, even smaller room, and I can make out a few gurneys set at odd angles. I expect big stainless steel drawers, but here, every cop procedural and scare-’em-straight after-school special I’ve ever watched has betrayed me. No drawers. The dead are on the gurneys, wrapped tight in white plastic from head to feet like frozen turkeys, packing tape around their necks and ankles. Four of them, identical. No toe tags even. Which one is ours?

  Glenn and the red-faced undertaker commence shopping. Each body has a file card taped to its shin, an impression of its plastic hospital ID in purple ink.

  “Bingo.”

  Glenn has a match. Then, the other undertaker finds his. Glenn gives him a hand loading out and leaves me to “check for valuables.”

  Here the job is to inspect the corpse’s hands for jewellery, rings and bracelets, and to double-check the hospital wristband while I’m there. To do this I have to feel for the hands through the plastic and rip a hole in the shroud to get at them. I want to do this, to show I’m able, but in fact I’d rather cut off my own thumb with tin snips than hold hands with the dead.

  They’re folded on his belly. The plastic is thick, but I tear a gap. His hands are big, like he built things outdoors. They’re yellow and cold, the nails white and trimmed too short. No rings, the wristband matches, and he has an IV lead taped to his wrist still red with dried blood. The moment seems to call for a gesture and all I can come up with is to give his hands a light squeeze. This is a lonely way to end up, wrapped in plastic in a room full of strangers, and if I think about it, and I’d rather not, I’ll end up in a cold room too, one day, maybe holding hands with a trainee undertaker who I hope will have better stretcher technique than me. Just not today, not next week, please, not for a while.

  He slides on like a charm: shoulders and butt first, then the legs swing over. I brace the stretcher with my hip so it doesn’t roll away. We strap him in with seat belts and cover him with the cloth sham, on which the name Neil Bardal Inc. is embroidered, since you never miss an opportunity to fly the company colours. Gloves come off, hands are ritually Purell’d, and we head for the loading dock, leaving the last two wallflower corpses in the dark, still waiting for their rides. The dock turns out to be mismatched for the height of the van, but with Glenn ready to catch whatever falls, me or the stretcher, I’m able to aim, trigger the collapsing legs when they hit the bumper and then let gravity do the rest. The body is now in the truck. I lock the stretcher in place with a cotter pin, so it doesn’t roll out the back on the highway back to the crematorium like in a Flintstones episode, and we’re off.

  Glenn once “removed” a body at a seniors complex in Winnipeg. It was Halloween. When he got there the corpse was still in the bed where it died. He strapped the body to the stretcher, and on the way out, the doors of the elevator opened onto a costume party, staff and residents dressed like Disney characters. What could he do? He had to slalom his stretcher through the wheelchairs, those in the crowd alternately wondering who was under the cloth and whether they would be next. A nurse dressed as Snow White scowled. Glenn might as well have been carrying a scythe. This, he says, is why the Silver Doors are always in the back of the hospital with the laundry bags and medical waste. People don’t want to know. There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the ce
metery or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with the arrangement. We in funeral service cover the gap. People pay us to keep to ourselves what goes on there.

  The body in the back passes wind when the van hits a bump. It happens, Glenn says. He opens the window.

  At the crematorium, I hop out to finish the job and haul on the stretcher—but it won’t budge. Forgot the cotter pin. Second try, the stretcher rolls free, and I listen for the click. The first set of legs locks in place, then the others drop, clickless, but it’s too late—the head end of the stretcher smacks the bumper on its way to the pavement, which it hits with a whang like an aluminum baseball bat. If he wasn’t already dead, I’ve killed him. I pull back the cot cover to discover that the man’s hands are still folded comfortably on his belly. He’s past caring.

  “It happens,” says Jon, the boss’s son, who comes to my aid.

  But I can feel the impact still humming in my hands. Dignity, I say to myself. I’m afraid it doesn’t come naturally to me.

  THE FACTORY

  The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says that humans are the only creatures who know they’re going to die, and even worse, they know they know it, and it’s not something they can “unknow.” All they can do is distract themselves, briefly, like you might mask the smell of burnt food by spraying the kitchen with Lysol. The main reason I’m here, working as a trainee in Neil Bardal’s funeral home in Winnipeg, in my ham-fisted, dignity-challenged way, is to figure out if the screwball rituals we perform and the industry that’s evolved to support them are part of the Lysol, or if in fact the way we handle death, with caskets and trinkets and stone markers, is our way of facing up, finally, to the smell. Not that I think that by being mindful of death we can lead richer lives. A life “forgetful of death,” Bauman says, “life lived as meaningful and worth living, life alive with purpose instead of being crushed and incapacitated by purposelessness—is a formidable human achievement.” I’m with him, and Epicurus too, who said that there’s no need to fear the oblivion after we’re gone if we never cared about the oblivion that came before we were born. Cheer up. Death obsessing is for boozy existentialists and bad poets.

  Which prompts a bony question: why do we each spend up to $10,000—for most, the third-biggest cash outlay in our lives after a house and a car, according to Jessica Mitford, who wrote The American Way of Death—on funerals?

  Neil Bardal says we need the ritual to know the person who’s died. We need to see the body, we want the proof: we’re empirical, modern, enlightened souls who benefit from looking at death when it comes, standing up to sing and pray in its presence. Neil’s my boss. He’s a third-generation undertaker, his oldest son Eirik is an undertaker, and Jon, the youngest, works at the crematorium (although, like his cousin Glenn, he’s not keen on it and is studying to be an electrician instead of an undertaker). Neil’s sister Jean answers the phones and his wife Annette does the books. There are four other funeral directors on staff, and in flush times they sponsor trainees. That’s where I come in. Neil has agreed to take me on as a paid intern (plus free dry cleaning and a company golf shirt) if I agree to hump caskets and flowers, set up chairs at service, mop floors, wash the hearse, help the directors do what they do, and otherwise participate in the day-to-day rituals that families need, even if we don’t agree on what constitutes an empirical, modern, enlightened response to death. Full disclosure: when I die, I’ve asked to be left in a blue bin at the curb on recycling day.

  The funeral chapel is downtown in a strip-mall on Aubrey Street, ten minutes from my house, but the crematorium is a long bus ride away, near the airport, the last building on Notre Dame Avenue before Winnipeg turns into plenty of flat, treeless nothing. From the street there’s little to betray its purpose: could be an insurance office, until you see the hearse parked in the side lot and the stone slab in the walkway inscribed ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS. Could be a very frank insurance office. Inside I meet Jon. He has his father’s sad eyes and he yawns a lot.

  My internship starts with a slapdash tour, beginning in what Jon calls the Committal Space, a faux living room with faux colonial furniture, faux plants, and prints of other faux plants on the walls. Each end table has a box of Kleenex with a single, perfectly teased-out tissue, and on one there’s also a picture frame, empty, which gives me a chill. There’s something unwholesome about an empty picture frame. The Committal Space is where the family gathers to “view” the body before cremation: there’s a nook for the casket, and a brocade curtain for privacy. At the back of the nook is a heavy armoire with a bronze sculpture of a horse. The room is cold and clean, and smells of Endust; it reminds me of the living rooms of kids I knew whose parents had some kind of preservation fetish and declared the good furniture off limits. The horse is a nice touch, a bit of whimsy, but the horse turns out to be an urn: the ashes go inside the wooden base. The Chinese lantern next to it is an urn too, and so is the little blue porcelain teddy bear holding an umbrella, designed for infants. I don’t want to touch anything in here lest it contain someone.

  Not only can you view the body before cremation in this room, you can also watch the main event, car-wash style, through a window separating the Committal Space from the working side of the crematorium. When Jon snaps open the blinds, I’m face to face with a monster machine, one of the facility’s two “retorts,” which looks like an over-designed Soviet-era East German pizza oven, with a fat stainless-steel chimney growing out of its head and a small glass porthole in its black iron door. A single unblinking eye. This is Retort Two. She’s fussy, tends to belch black smoke and burn out of control when dealing with the heavier bodies, which the Bardals prefer to assign to Number One, an older, less temperamental machine. Number Two prefers thin, elderly bodies without much fat.

  This whole place is built like a theatre: a public space up front, with its living room set, and a backstage where all the magic happens. Only Neil’s broken the fourth wall, encouraging people to bear witness, to see the event through to the end, which is both noble and oddly post-modern. Jon admits most Winnipeg families prefer not to watch, unlike in England, where watching is the norm. But if you’re into it, Neil’s the only open-window cremator in town.

  Backstage presents a different vibe than front-of-house. Twenty degrees Fahrenheit hotter, and noisier. As soon as Jon opens the connecting door I hear the low rumble and feel the dry heat. We pass Number Two’s backside and all her ductwork, stop at the sort table, where the remains—shattered bits of bone and whatever else survives two hours at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit in the retort (casket hinges, pants zippers, artificial knees and hips)—sit to cool before human is separated from non-human. They use a magnet to pick out the metal artifacts and then sort through the pile by hand, chucking out anything that doesn’t look white and bony. Then it all goes into a sturdy blender, which turns everything to powder.

  Jon hands me a plastic bag full of a recent customer: it’s about the size and heft of a two-pound bag of cornmeal, clearly labelled with name and number, since at this point we all look very much the same. I sneeze. It’s dusty at the sort table; there’s a thin white film on everything, on the heavy black vacuum hose that hangs over the table, on a Remembrance Day poppy stuck to a bulletin board, inside the blender. People dust.

  To get to Number One I follow Jon down a dark hallway lined with medieval instruments: long-handled iron hooks and brooms with steel bristles, and a winch affair, an upside-down L-shaped bracket with three blue canvas straps for getting a body into a casket without wrenching your back. Number One is in action, and I feel the rumbling of its burners in my chest. Jon explains the routine: body comes in from the hospital, it’s transferred to a cardboard box and stored in the cooler, waiting for its place in the cremation queue. Or, if it’s going to be embalmed or “prepped” for what Jessica Mitford called the full-fig funeral (viewing, visitation, open-casket service at the chapel or church) it goes onto a gurney and into th
e prep room, the door to which is always locked, to keep civilians and wayward deliverymen from walking in on an embalming-in-progress. This is a full-service operation: some bodies are cremated, some are prepped, some are even prepped then cremated, an act, if you’ll forgive me a one-time use of the term, of overkill. It all depends what the family wants. If you want a full-fig funeral followed by cremation, you get it.

  If you buy a casket for the service, the casket goes into the retort: the Bardals don’t reuse them. Some funeral homes rent caskets for the funeral–cremation combo. The casket is a shell with a collapsible door at the foot end, through which slides the body in an MDF (medium-density fibreboard) liner: the body goes in for the service, comes out for the cremation. The shell goes back into rotation. The rental fee is usually the wholesale cost of the casket, so the unit pays for itself after its first outing: factoring in depreciation (nicks and scrapes), the undertaker may get fifteen or twenty uses out of it before the casket is retired. Neil doesn’t carry rentals, he doesn’t like the concept. “Same concept as shoes at a bowling alley,” he says. If you just want to scatter at the lake, the body might go straight into a cardboard box off the van and into the retort, and you can pick up the ashes the next day. Every former soul that comes in through the garage door is assigned a number: it’s written in Sharpie on their cardboard box and the corpse’s wristband, not unlike the wristbands they issue at raves and folk festivals.