Curtains (19 page)

“Living space?”

“Space for the living. To sit down and have a picnic.”

Cemeteries are big on living space, out of economic necessity. The burial business is tanking, and to justify their existence and to raise money for their perpetual care funds they’re promoting themselves as tourist destinations. Hollywood Forever, the cemetery
of the stars in Los Angeles, shows movies at night on the wall of the mausoleum where Rudolph Valentino is interred. People bring blankets and food.
Rock ’n’ Roll High School
is on heavy rotation: Dee Dee Ramone is buried just a few dozen yards away from where they show the film. Other cemeteries hold dog parades, jazz concerts, mausoleum brunches and Halloween parties. Oakwood cemetery in Troy, New York, has plans for a Renaissance fair with knights in armour and jousting matches. The industry calls it rebranding, making graveyards into “destination necropolises.” Neil wants something more modest, a few benches, a path and a gazebo. Families can bring a lunch, then visit their loved one in the Garden of Memories. There might be room for monuments of the kind I’ve described.

“What if I want a statue of an angel riding an elephant?” That one just came to me.

“Then Chapel Lawn would be happy to help you,” he says, gets into his car and drives off to church.

Neil calls Chapel Lawn a waste of good farmland. One of the oldest commercial cemeteries in the city, west of the Perimeter Highway and across from Assiniboia Downs racetrack and the drive-in, it’s modelled after Forest Lawn in Glendale, California, the original lawn-style cemetery that Evelyn Waugh lampooned in his 1948 novel
The Loved One
:
An Anglo-American Tragedy
. It’s an eye-catching splash of green and trees and ponds with firehose fountains in the middle of the dry prairie. There are no headstones, only flat bronze markers that you can’t see until you’re standing on one of them, and a few towering white stone statues of Christ and the apostles and the Old Testament prophets. The intended aesthetic appeal of a lawn cemetery is the open vista: no upright stones to get in the way
of the view. The economic spinoff of a lawn cemetery is that it’s cheaper to mow the grass: no upright stones to get in the way of the equipment. It looks like a golf course if that golf course had been designed by Presbyterians. And it’s divided into themed “gardens”: the Garden of Everlasting Life, the Garden of the Old Rugged Cross, the Garden of the Last Supper, and the accidentally ironic (if you say it out loud) Garden of Four Prophets. Chapel Lawn is owned by the Arbor Memorial Corporate, a minor conglomerate compared to, say, Service Corporation International, the big guns from Houston, but they own a number of funeral–cemetery combos in Canada, and do well in Winnipeg, which is where they started.

The reason Neil spits when he hears the name is that Chapel Lawn has taken him to court over the rose garden. Their position is that it’s a cemetery by another name, and should be licensed as such. Neil should have to pay the perpetual care fees for its long-term upkeep the way any cemetery does, by law. In other words, he’s running a bootleg graveyard.

Neil’s argument is that he’s a private landowner who is giving people permission to scatter on his land. A cemetery is for the interment of human remains. Cremated remains, he says, are not human, not the way a flesh-and-Plasdopake body in a casket is human. This is a tough call for the courts. They’ll have to decide on an itchy existential question: what are ashes? Are they people? I can say when I poke through a pile of broken bone pieces on the sort table and come up with a tooth, it looks human. When it’s whisked into a powder in the processor, it doesn’t. Did it lose its human-ness in the blender, or in the retort, or when the man in question stopped using it to chew his food? What an arbitrary mess of a semantic argument, and as long as the court case hangs over
Neil’s head, the bank won’t give him a loan to build his dream: the reception centre, the indoor scattering garden.

The best place to go at Chapel Lawn if it’s rainy or cold is the Lasting Tribute indoor columbarium. It’s heated in winter, bright in the summer, a labyrinth of marble and glass-front niches where the dead repose in their urns, surrounded by intimate thingums from their previous lives. Toy trains, Hot Wheels cars, Shriners’ fezzes, golf balls and airline bottles of VO whiskey are laid out in diorama. In one niche, a laminated ticket stub from a Supertramp concert is propped against a square wooden urn. Most have family-album photographs: men playing with dogs, women in canoes. Anything you might keep on your office desk or corkboard can follow you into your Lasting Tribute niche. The most expensive are the ones you can touch, at what industry types call the “head and heart level.” If you have to stand on a chair or kneel on the floor to see in, they’re cheaper. The place smells of wet flowers and baby powder, and through the looped Muzak system I hear what might be the Stones’ “Satisfaction” played on harp and zither. There are no other people here but I feel as if hundreds of eyes are watching me, so I find my way out through the maze and follow the path to the funeral home.

The lobby has homespun charm: rose and gold wingback chairs, a faux fireplace, fake trees with twisted trunks, lit votive candles in hexagonal glass lanterns and prints on the walls of Mediterranean scenes that, like every painting I’ve ever seen in a funeral home, have no people in them. Just boats and empty bodegas. Maybe they represent some kind of earthly heaven into which we can project the recently departed, or maybe they just match the wingback chairs. Down the hall is the jewel of the Arbor brand:
a reception hall with a full-service kitchen and a covered patio facing the parking lot, with a barbecue and propane heaters for chilly post-funeral gatherings. It’s Arbor’s position that if funeral homes don’t get into the hospitality game, then cremation customers will take their business to golf-and-country clubs and hotels and mall restaurants.

Annie and I are here to meet with a pre-need counsellor. As if by divine hand, a card appeared in our mailbox last week inviting us to answer questions about our future memorial plans. I checked off every available box on the questionnaire. Yes, I was interested in cremation. Yes, I was interested in burial options, and memorialization and personalization and pre-planning, yes yes. I sent the card back and within forty-eight hours got a call from Chapel Lawn. I had made their hot-lead list. They invited Annie and me to come down, so we did.

The counsellor is pleasant, if a bit tightly wound, red-faced with a thick neck and a hedgehog haircut. The three of us sit down at a conference table in a small basement room, the walls of which are lined with bronze grave markers and urns. Thick binders are opened. He’s been with Arbor Group for eighteen years, and before that he worked for Snap-on Tools. You’re young, he says, we just did a service, two parents of a nine-year-old girl, both killed in a car crash. The airbags worked fine. It was the fire that got them. Now imagine that poor girl in the back seat. What’s she going to do? They didn’t plan ahead. You can never plan too early, and by buying now, we can lock in the cost of a funeral, a burial, a cremation, whatever we want, at today’s prices, without burdening our children and families with difficult choices. Matthews, the company that manufactures bronze markers, can cut one this week
with our names and birthdates and store it in their warehouse until we need it, if we don’t want to store it ourselves in the garage or basement.

“I’m not sure what I want,” I say. “I think I’d like to be cremated and have my ashes scattered somewhere nice.”

He turns to Annie. Okay, he says, let’s pretend your husband here is dead. Think of the details: even if you don’t want a casket, there’s the newspaper obituaries, and maybe his family wants a service—so where do you go? He’s left you nothing but questions.

I tell him I don’t want a service, but he hushes me. Remember, he says, you’re dead. “You’re not sick or anything, are you?” he says, touching my arm. “Good, so I can make jokes.”

The thing about scattering, he tells us, is that it’s illegal. Once he was in White Rock, British Columbia, sitting on the beach, when he felt something sharp. “I’ve got this bone fragment sticking into my butt cheek. I dig around and come up with this little coin, the size of a loonie or toonie, and I’m in the business so I know what it is. It’s the identification marker from a crematorium.” With this coin he was able to trace, through the funeral home, the social insurance number, driver’s licence and address of the woman who’d paid for the cremation.

“I showed up at her house with an RCMP officer,” he says. “She was fined $2,000 for littering.” He looks at me, and I sink in my chair. “On the coast you can go twelve miles out to sea and scatter, no problem, but punting them off the pier at White Rock? Sorry, no, that’s not okay.

“You think you’re scattering to the wind,” he says, “and then— plop—you’ve got Dad in your pants cuff. Nobody wants that. My own father said he wanted to be scattered in Lake Huron, and I told
him, number one, you’re from Saskatchewan, and number two, you can’t swim. So why would I do that?

“Indians go home, they scatter their ashes in the Ganges, then people swim in it. I don’t want to know about it. I like pickerel— I don’t want you putting human remains in the lake where I catch them. What if you had cancer and they put in those radioactive seeds? Then you’re scattering remains that are radioactive.”

By now I’m not only dead, but implicated in crimes against humanity and nature and obliquely responsible for the scar on his butt. We could debate the facts, but I won’t. I’m supposed to be an average consumer here, a role to which I’m naturally suited. I tend to believe the last thing I read or heard. I don’t want to put him off his game, hang him up on a technicality, but the truth is there’s no explicit law in Manitoba against scattering cremated remains. It’s perfectly legal to scatter on private property as long as you have the owner’s permission and do it “discreetly,” according to the province’s online FAQs. Ontario is even more explicit. You’re free to scatter on Crown lands, provincial parks, conservation reserves and the Great Lakes. In fact Ontario officials are more hung up on the flowers people leave behind, which might hurt the wildlife. They ask that you don’t. Cremated remains are pure mineral. After two hours at 1,600 degrees they’re as sterile as dental tools. Glenn says radioactive pellets have short half-lives on purpose. By the time a body’s cremated these can barely raise a Geiger tick. But I don’t get into it now, and besides, he’s after bigger quarry here: shame, and the “ick factor.” We either live in a civil collaborative society or we live in anarchy. My choices affect others. People should be free to walk in the park without fear of getting bits of me on their hiking boots. Scattering is romantic but selfish, and it
robs future generations of a permanent place to visit to honour my memory. He’s plucking all the right emotional strings.

I nod to Annie that it’s time to go, but before we can he stands, looks up at the ceiling and ends his pitch with a poem he recites by heart:

We leave with a handful of brochures.

No wonder Chapel Lawn is taking Neil to court. Neil has four hundred people in his rose garden. Do the math. When I spoke to Andrew Earle, the manager at Chapel Lawn, he put it this way: cemeteries are protected by legislation, they put 25 percent of every sale into a perpetual care fund so the taxpayer won’t bear the burden of upkeep when the cemetery is full.

“Neil Bardal is a private for-profit enterprise,” he says. “Ten years from now, he falls on hard times. Then the airport or Red River College expands. Grandma pulls down the road to visit her husband in the rose garden, turns the corner and now it’s an Old Navy store. Look, Neil is old. What if Eirik decides to pave it over?”

What the corporate chains sell, besides caskets and vaults and urns and a place to bury them, is something more nebulous: the illusion of permanence. In Europe, where land is scarce, cemeteries lease graves for fifteen years. After that the family has the option of extending the lease, but if they don’t, the bones are removed and put in a “charnel house” (a community vault for skeletal remains) or buried in a garden. In North America, where property is a right
and we value products that last, this would never wash: a grave is forever. It’s paid for. The rules of commerce mean we’re entitled to a kind of secular immortality. But it’s become harder to deliver. In 1997, the Cremation Association of North America found that 23 percent of families who cremated went on to bury the remains in a grave, and 10.5 percent bought space in columbaria. Meanwhile, 36 percent took them home and 18 percent scattered on land or on water, while 6 percent never bothered to pick them up from the crematorium at all. We live in a transient society; our families are global. We’re born in Toronto but move to Winnipeg and St. John’s, and wind up at a seniors villa in Victoria gumming root vegetables. When we die, there’s no obvious place to put the remainder. And if we believe that death means a physiological lights-out, that we won’t be called at the Rapture, then it’s even less relevant what happens to the body. Scatter, flush, pack me in a teddy bear— whatever. The culture of whatever is what’s killing the corporate funeral industry. That and the boom–bust cycle of the market.

Ten years ago they were flush, buying up family funeral homes like candy. Funeral directors, tired of doing more for less, were motivated to sell. The model was simple: by establishing econ omies of scale, such as buying caskets in bulk and clustering services like embalming in central locations and sharing hearses and other infrastructure, the corporates could cut costs and boost shareholder value. In 1996, Service Corporation International (SCI) owned 2,882 funeral homes, 345 cemeteries and 150 crematoria in North America, with an eye to expanding in Europe and the Pacific Rim. Revenues topped $2.3 billion (US), and by the end of 1998, the company had $3.7 billion worth of pre-arranged sales on the books. It was publicly traded, with share prices in the high $40s. The problem, says Neil,
is that in their swift expansion they paid more than market value for properties and piled up huge debt; when the bubble burst, the corporates were stuck. The Loewen Group was the first to go. Run by Ray Loewen, a buddy of Neil’s from Steinbach, Manitoba, the company was second only to SCI in volume and sales, and a hungry consolidator. Ray Loewen would fly funeral directors by helicopter to his yacht in Burnaby, British Columbia, serve them brandy and steaks and cigars, and then announce he was buying them out. But in 1999, the Loewen Group applied for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It turned out not enough people were dying. In fact they were living longer than the number-crunchers had predicted. Thanks to flu vaccines, the annual cull of the elderly herd had levelled off. Those who did die were increasingly opting for cheaper cremation. Death rates weren’t expected to rise again until 2020, when the boomers would hit their stride, and shareholders who studied these trends the way they studied other commodity futures dumped stock. In 2000, SCI’s share value was $7. To tackle the debt, the corporation unloaded properties acquired during the feeding frenzy at a loss, sometimes to the same families that sold them in the first place. Caught in the middle were the big casket manufacturers, Batesville and Matthews. Sales had fallen and the Chinese were flooding the North American market with cheap knock-offs. Matthews closed its factory in Marshfield, Missouri, and moved it to Mexico to compete with global labour costs.