Curtains (18 page)

“I can get you a bell,” says Richard.

They settle on the ash with an eggshell interior, based on its grain, which the dead father would’ve admired. The sons want to decorate the casket with racing stripes, like dad did all his cars.

“Can we do that?” the first son asks.

“It’s your casket,” says Richard. “You can do whatever you like.”

The next morning, minutes after Richard unlocks the door, the widow arrives with a bag of clothes, shoes and a can of Pringles chips. Her husband will be buried like a pharaoh, with his most valued earthly possessions.

For families who want a secular service without a preacher, Neil uses Lee Barringer, a celebrant and freelance undertaker from
nearby Stonewall. By “freelance undertaker” I mean that he has no bricks-and-mortar funeral home, just a cell phone and a Toyota and a listing in the Yellow Pages. He subcontracts all the technical work: for removals, he calls Winnipeg Funeral Transfer Services (two men with a grey van and a stretcher), and for preparation or cremation, he has the body sent to Neil’s. He rents space for services, including the chapel at Aubrey Street, and does arrangements at the family’s home or a coffee shop. This way (and it took me a while to get my head around this), he can offer a direct cremation for less money than Neil charges, even though it’s the same cremation, in the same retort, with the same hand-sort. Without overhead, he can afford a lower markup. Once Neil’s friends figured out that they could get a cremation at Neil’s for a cheaper price than a cremation at Neil’s (still with me?) they took their business to Barringer. Neil had to drop his price to compete with himself through a third party. But there are no hard feelings: Lee did his apprenticeship here years ago, and Neil likes him. And he’d like to see Lee as part of his law-firm model of associates, to bring some fresh, as it were, blood to the business. So when families want a celebrant, he calls Lee.

A small crowd, mostly women, is gathered in the chapel at Aubrey. Shirley opens with a stringy “My Heart Will Go On” and moves to a jaunty barrelhouse “Spirit in the Sky” before Lee brings the event to order. “This is a chance to come together,” he says, “and we want this to be a celebration of life.” Again, no body, no ashes are present, but next to Lee is a picture of the deceased, named M., a smiling woman with white hair and glasses.

“Khalil Gibran said, what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and melt into the ground? When you have reached the
mountaintop, then it is time to climb. Pictures of heaven come from whatever your faith is, but perhaps death is nothing but a doorway, an exit as well as an entrance. Sir Edward Arnold said death may give more than birth, colours we don’t now see, sounds we don’t now hear …”

Aphorism after aphorism, Lee is lobbing them into the air and smacking them out of the ballpark.

“Edward Arnold,” I whisper to Richard. “Wasn’t he the husband on
Green Acres
?”

“I think so.”

“We celebrate life,” Lee continues. The crowd is attentive. “One day we too shall have to die. It’s important to live each day as if it’s your last because one day you will be right. Death brings down our walls and our comfort zones, but perhaps, like M., we need to go on more walks or visit Hawaii.”

Then the daughter takes the podium.

“I’m going to try to do this,” she says.

She read in a magazine that there are three details on every headstone: the name, and two moments in time, the date of birth and the date of death. But between those moments in time is a dash, and that, she tells us, is the most important part of the headstone.

“It represents the moment my mother first smiled, or her first step, or her first time on a horse, or when she stepped off the train in Winnipeg, the moment she retired from Eaton’s, the terrible moment she got the call that Dad was gone, the moment when her friends came to the hospice, that dash is Mom, an energetic, sweet, loving person. Now think what that dash means to you.”

Shirley plays “Circle of Life,” and the guests rise and gather in the reception room for coffee. My own default setting, the cynical
hard-shelled bastard I’ve nurtured since college, knows that this business about the tombstone dash is at the heart of another sub-industry, based on a poem by Linda Ellis, of hardcover gift books, a DVD movie, a music CD, and “Dash” daily-planners that funeral directors can sell as add-ons or as part of some casket-urn-celebration-of-“Dash” package.

And there’s an uneasy imperative in that little granite notch: the opportunity it provides to be as competitive in death as you were in life. Fill up that dash! What you achieve from now on will be fodder for your eulogy. Why are you wasting your time watching
Everybody Loves Raymond
or raising a family when you could be getting a tattoo or dining at La Chevre d’Or or skydiving or seeing Stonehenge or driving a Shelby Mustang, all items on the bucket list from the movie of the same name, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men whipping through a list of last-minute goals before they kick the bucket. Taj Mahal, check. Serengeti, check. Great Wall of China, check. Why leave your life up to chance? Choreograph it, script it, as if it were the film you always felt like you were starring in anyway. Lives don’t just happen. They are projects. This is what gives them meaning, in lieu of some modest, mundane story about love, community and family. It’s old-fashioned boot-strapism: you are responsible for the contents of your own celebration of life, and if you don’t have the tools to build your own project, there are books:
1,000 Places To See Before You Die, 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 1,001 Foods You Must Taste Before You Die
. Get cracking.

“Now think what that dash means to you,” the daughter had said, which to chronic underachievers like me could mean: acquire, conquer, move on, time’s galloping. In the end they may not
embalm your body, but if you’ve hammered away at your bucket list, filled your dash to the limit, they’ll embalm your life story, make it look even better than it was when you lived it.

Still, I’m either tired or I’m entering a post-ironic stage in my life, because I am actually choked up by a stranger’s eulogy for her mother, and I didn’t see it coming. It’s hard to admit to unearned emotions. They’re not quite real, are they? I don’t have to bear the impossible weight of actual grief here, just a featherlight spinoff. Same effect as being moved by a cheese-ball pop song that you would never, even under threat of water-boarding, admit you liked. I know that there’s more truth about the human condition in Verdi, but “I Want It That Way,” by the Backstreet Boys, I’ll confess, makes me soft and mopey. It’s just less work than unpacking
Il Trovatore
.

Maybe this is what the celebration of life has to offer, a kind of pop ritual. The heavens don’t open up, you can’t touch the face of God, but with the right minor-key music and aphorism you can be moved to something approaching an actual human emotion. Yet there’s something else here too, something deeper. Even framed by a popular feel-good Oprah-ready ditty, I feel like I’ve encountered something rare: a life that mattered not despite of but because of its simplicity.

C
ONTRIBUTING TO
S
HAREHOLDER
V
ALUE
, O
NE
C
ORPSE AT A
T
IME

S
unday, and I’m booked to work. There’s no traffic biking in, just the bottle-collectors pushing grocery carts, working weekends like me. When I pass Brookside I see a couple laying a bouquet in the cremation section, a treeless stretch of densely packed bronze markers, each with its own vase for fake flowers: purple, yellow, red, blue. In winter the colours poke through the snow. Last time I walked through there I saw the other offerings people leave: plastic racing cars, Mylar balloons, a full cup of Tim Hortons coffee. The cemetery prefers its visitors to stick to the fake flowers.

At the Factory, two new arrivals are posted on the cooler door’s dry-erase board, an M-1 and an F-2, which means a skinny male and a not-so-skinny female. These are codes for the cremationist: they’re both candidates for Retort Two, svelte enough not to smoke. The big boys and girls, the M-3s and F-4s, are saved for
Retort One. A Moore’s suit bag hangs on the hook in the dressing room, marked for
The Late Mr. H
.

Neil’s in the arrangement room, flipping through the latest call sheets. As usual he knows some of the dead.

“Is that Peter B.’s brother?” he says to Shannon. “I did a service at Riverview, we asked Peter to provide music and he did all Scottish songs. The minister said, those aren’t hymns, and Peter said, they are to the Scots.”

“They wanted scattering in the rose garden in late fall,” says Shannon. “What’s great is I got storage fees out of them as well.”

Neil has big hopes for Shannon, as he once had for Natalie. One time, on a drive through Brookside, he told me they were both ambitious young women who scared him pantless, but on the other hand, they fit the future of funeral service, which was no longer a business for old men. The problem with Shannon, he said, is that when she opens her mouth, she sounds like she’s trying to sell you something. The corporate chains would love her. In fact, Chapel Lawn’s called twice, offering her a job.

“How was your Friday?” says Shannon.

“I did the L. ash interment,” says Neil. “They had a shaman. They held hands, people told stories. What I thought would be ten minutes went forty-five. It was neat.”

They wrap the Sunday morning briefing and Neil says he’s going to church, “To prove I’m a hypocrite.” But in fact he goes every week, has for decades, to St. Stephen’s–St. Bede’s, an Anglican-Lutheran hybrid where he likes the music and the community of old ladies who’ve helped him through his tough times. I walk him to his car, and he tells me how the “old dears” rallied around him when he first got his cancer diagnosis.

We stop by the side of the rose garden, where he confides that he’s been through dozens of treatments for prostate cancer already, the radioactive pellets, the works, but the bad numbers keep going in the wrong direction. He’s lost weight. People are starting to notice. He tells them it’s because he’s been power-walking through Brookside cemetery every morning before work, which is true, and that he’s never felt better, which is also true. But as long as the numbers refuse to co-operate, he’s been left to wonder if all his plans to build a new crematorium will still be only plans when he dies. Men die young in this business, he says, at least compared to the clientele. His dad and his uncle Karl were both seventy-two when they died: Neil is five years away from the magic Bardal number. Tommy Cropo, the modern godfather of Winnipeg undertakers, who always wore a red rose in his lapel, never made it to seventy. Neil’s doctor says that in men Neil’s age, prostate cancer tends to creep slowly, and that he may well die of some other ailment before the cancer has a chance to spread. Still, Neil’s told his wife that when the time comes, he wants a three-part funeral: a service at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre with the Manitoba Symphony Orchestra playing Scott Joplin, a reception but no dinner, and then cremation followed by a scattering in the Garden of Memories, his rose garden. You have to believe the religion you preach, he says. Neil’s religion is redemption through the burning of the body. Church is more like a club, like Rotary. I’m struck by his matter-of-factness, and how mortality, for him, calls less for some panicky peace-making with your God than for attention to practical details. But again, that’s what he expects of families in the arrangement room.

Neil’s middle name is Ofeigur, same as his father.
Feigur
in Icelandic means “fated to die,” but by adding an
O
, he says, the
curse is mitigated. “I knew a man in Gimli,” Neil says, “who had a boat called the
Ofeigur II
. I asked him what happened to the
Ofeigur I
and of course it sank.”

Next to the rose garden I see something I’ve never noticed before, a bronze grave marker under a stubby evergreen bush. That, Neil says, is Mr. L., the first man into the rose garden. He heard what Neil was doing and said, that’s for me, and when he died, Mrs. L. asked if she could plant a tree and put in the marker. The tree never really grew. Now Mrs. L. is dying. Neil told her that once the place is renovated they’ll have to take out the tree and the bronze plaque, but that maybe there’ll be a wall of memories too, with names of the people in the garden, or an electronic kiosk. He just needs the bank to hand him a million dollars for the work, and as yet, they haven’t been inclined to do so. They don’t like current market trends vis-à-vis death-care.

“So,” I say, “what if I want to be scattered in the garden but I want a statue too, like a Venus de Milo with water squirting out of her mouth?”

“Okay,” Neil says, hopping over the stones in front of the walkway. “Lookit here,” and he sweeps a hand, directing my gaze to a wide swath of newly mown grass next to his building. “If this guy would sell,” he says, pointing to the tombstone carver next door, “all this could be living space.”