Curtains Read online

  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.

  “ALL THAT MALARKEY”

  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, over the years the funeral men have constructed their own grotesque cloud-cuckoo-land where the trappings of Gracious Living are transformed, as in a nightmare, into the trappings of Gracious Dying …

  —Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death Revisited

  In “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 questio
ns 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.

  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.

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

  The 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.