Curtains (23 page)

The light in the tunnel, if you want to call it that, is that the boomers are getting a head start.
The New York Times
says middle-aged Americans represent “ballooning crises” of addiction and high-risk behaviour, including double the number of binge drinkers compared with teenagers and college students combined, and a 30-percent higher incidence of fatal accidents and suicides than people ages fifteen to nineteen, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. At the age at which their fathers retired and bought their first La-Z-Boy chairs, they’re still skydiving and competing in triathlons and running the bulls in Pamplona. Yoga and colonic irrigation won’t save them if they keep this up.

William “B.T.” Hathaway, an independent funeral director in Fall River, Massachusetts, has been studying the numbers. The normal death rate up to age 29 is one in 10,000, but over age 60 it increases a hundredfold. If you define the boomers as those between ages 45 and 74, the number of what B.T. calls “prime of life” deaths will increase in the next five or ten years, up to 400,000 in the United States before the demographic hits peak mortality. These are people with jobs, living spouses, school-age children and social lives. “At the very least,” he says, “baby boomers will offset the trend seen in recent years towards limited gatherings and non-facility memorial services,” by dying early enough to warrant well-attended funerals. “Now is not the time to get out of limousines,” he says.

Still, for the most part, the self-same boomers are engaged in a standoff with death-care. I brought this up with Neil, who’s also on the board of Riverview, one of the chronic-care hospitals. At some point, he said, simple economics will kick in.

“Your generation has to make a decision,” he said. “When I grew up, twelve people lived in the same self-contained house, the
grandparents lived upstairs, and it didn’t cost the state a cent. But a hospital is driven by tax dollars. By keeping mother alive for eight years at $300 a day we might ask: can we afford it?”

“What’s the alternative?” I said, knowing that he always has one.

“We need to teach people my age who’ll be in that situation fifteen years from now to be agreeable to things like a living will, but with more of a definition, giving the state some room to be proactive.” The elderly should take on a new leadership role, he said, by spearheading a social revolution and taking themselves voluntarily out of the economic loop.

“You mean …”

“Overdose,” he said, and his eyes brightened up for the first time that day. “You can’t put a family member in that position, you have to do it as a community. But we’re not talking about it at all. I grew up in the ass end of that era when you took care of grandfather, and now people are saying goodbye years before he actually dies. You hear people say, we quit having birthday parties eight years ago.”

It’s an interesting concept, coming from an undertaker: socialized euthanasia, as in Christopher Buckley’s novel
Boomsday
, which imagines, once the boomers hit retirement age, a social security system on the edge of collapse. An influential blogger comes up with the solution: encourage senior citizens to off themselves in exchange for tax benefits.

“That’s where I want to be if the cancer comes back,” Neil said, “on the fast track. My kids will have no problem with this.”

The collective kids at Aubrey and the Factory, meanwhile, are taking the opportunity of a slump in business to crank up the interpersonal
sniping. Richard’s peeved at Eirik for unilaterally stocking Colonial caskets in the showroom, which Richard considers his turf. A detente’s been declared on the issue of clothes-cutting, but now Shannon and Eirik are at odds over her prep room techniques, in particular her practice of “wicking” the dead. This involves cutting into the inner thighs and stuffing the holes with cotton Webril, raising the feet, and leaving the body overnight to drain, to counter act puffiness and edema. Eirik calls it a waste of time and valuable embalming chemicals (Richard suggests putting the body in the retort “on low” instead, but no one’s in the mood for gags). Shannon threatened to quit, to take the repeated offers from Chapel Lawn, but Richard, acting on Neil’s request, spent half an hour on the phone with her, talking her out of it. Just keep your head down and do your work, he said, same advice he had for Natalie. It’s like any zoo. When they’re no longer sure where the next meal’s coming from, the monkeys turn on one another.

“I’ve seen this place like a roller coaster,” says Richard, “but now the plunges are getting deeper and that part at the top where you catch your breath is too short. Times like this you hang on for dear life.”

The truth is, Richard has thought about moving on himself. The province runs a good disaster management program, and if Winnipeg has anything to offer it’s the potential for disaster. The Red River floods every spring. The mosquitoes all carry West Nile virus. FedEx planes are always falling out of the sky and crashing into Osborne Village (in fact it only happened once, but I sense Richard’s on a roll). Just once, he says, he’d like a family to call and ask for him by name: not for Neil, not for Eirik, but for Richard.
There’s been a death
.
We need Richard
.

In the old days, undertakers had profile and charisma. When Tommy Cropo walked the centre aisle of the church, his arms out, palms turned down, parishioners would touch the tops of his hands, as if he were God’s second son. Cropo always gave free caskets to nuns and priests. “It was about looking good,” says Richard, “and helping the Church. He helped build Holy Ghost on Selkirk, he put in the bell at St. Vladimir’s, which was Martin Corbin’s turf. When the priest at St. Vladimir’s died and went with Corbin’s, Tommy cut off the relationship.” That was how things worked in the north end. Loyalty mattered. Richard drove coach for Cropo and his right-hand
consigliere
Malcolm, and they always fed him breakfast at the Lincoln: bacon and eggs for the long, ninety-minute mass, or coffee and toast for shorter services. When one of his apprentices asked for advice on where to get a mortgage, Tommy bankrolled the house himself. He treated staff and community like family. He had no children of his own, just Malcolm and a dog for whom he’d buy a separate seat on the airplane when they flew to Florida. According to Richard, after Tommy died his brand fizzled. Now owned by a small consolidator out of Brandon, Cropo’s is chasing rich south-enders for pre-needs, leaving the working-class Catholics to Corbin’s and the Knysh brothers. The joke’s on them, Richard says: rich south-enders don’t buy big funerals. They want deals. They go to Curly, Larry and Moe. Loyalty’s no longer a value in funeral service.

“I had the dream again,” he tells me. This time, all he could see was the face of the corpse, like a marble sculpture surrounded by black. It was Neil. Annette was there, but the boys, Jon and Eirik, were not. He reached out to touch the body, but then he woke up. What will happen to this place, he says, when Neil’s gone? He’s
built up a brand based on cremation, ever since his own father died, but when Eirik takes over, what then? Eirik is more like his great-uncle Karl, a casket and burial man.

I’ve thought about this too, since the day a few weeks ago when Eirik lumbered into the office at Aubrey with a roll of blueprints under his arm. He’d been at the bank with his dad, pitching them on the renovations, which are still up in the air pending the court case with Chapel Lawn.

“We had to hear about the Garden of Memories for the first half hour. The accountant was falling asleep, he’s heard about it so many times. Dad wants to fire him.”

He showed us the plans: valet parking, a wash bay for the vehicles, a change room for clergy, an office for his mom, and a huge reception hall with a circle in the middle representing the indoor garden.

“He’s focusing too much on the scattering garden,” Eirik said. “People are going to cemeteries. They want that stone.”

Soon enough, as if he wants to keep his hand in the game, Death throws us a gift to occupy our time, but it’s wrapped in sad irony. Shannon’s uncle has died. At the morning meeting, Richard runs through the details: private interment, reception at the community hall in Dominion City. Cremation is done, opening and closing of the grave is confirmed. Shannon sits at the table in the office at Aubrey in jeans, her feet tucked under her, her hair wet but combed. On the table is a silver-framed picture of her uncle in a white sweater, wearing a boutonniere and a stiff smile. The funeral is Saturday, but she’s booked to work at the crematorium on the weekend. Eirik volunteers to cover her shift.

“There’ll be an honour guard at the church from the local Legion,” says Richard. “The urn is the one with the fish. Did we get a deposit from the family?”

The room is silent. We all look at Shannon, who finally laughs and throws a pencil at Richard.

“I’ve buried one, two, three, four, five? Six aunts and uncles,” he says. “Come Saturday, you’ll have to decide: are you the niece or the funeral director?”

Shannon says when her great-uncle passed last year, she did the embalming. Her great-aunt didn’t want a stranger to see him naked. She found it therapeutic.

“Even with my uncle yesterday,” she says, “my auntie said it gave her comfort that someone he knew was with him at the crematorium. I closed his eyes, set his features, closed his mouth.” She asked her aunt if she wanted prayers, and her aunt said no, but called back later and had changed her mind. Shannon went back to the crematorium at six o’clock, pulled the container out of the cooler, said the twenty-third psalm and put him back.

“Do I have to make a purchase order for the urn?” she says.

“If you use toilet paper in this place, you have to put in a request,” Richard says. “If you go over the allotted number of sheets you have to give a vivid description of why. Just order it, and send in the paperwork later.”

“On the bulletins, can you put a fish?”

“Like a big jumping fish or a fish on a fly-hook?”

“The big dispute last night was over the fish. The American walleye or the Canadian walleye. In the Batesville catalogue the fin is flat on the top, and this is the only acceptable fish, apparently. This one,” she says, pointing to a picture in the catalogue, “the
coloured fish with the pointy fin? That’s American. My family spent half the day on this yesterday.”

The day before the service in Dominion City, I set up the chapel for a memorial that Eirik booked weeks ago. Neil’s gone to the Factory to change into a suit and Richard’s in the office sorting pre-need files (the “not dead yet” files), arranging them alphabetically, because, he says, they die faster that way. Eirik is
AWOL
. The first family members arrive and I lead them to the arrangement room so they can chill before the service. They ask about cake, there’s supposed to be cake. I tell them I’ll look into it. They ask about photos, there are supposed to be photo boards, and I tell them I’ll look into it. More people arrive so I take my place at the front door, handing out memorial cards. Meanwhile Richard won’t budge. This is not my service, he says, this is Eirik’s service, and I won’t cover for anyone anymore.

Eirik arrives. He takes a quick peek at the chapel and meets with the family before he joins Richard in the office. I can hear them through the door.

“The candles should be out front,” Eirik says. “You should have put them out front.”

“This is your service, Eirik.”

“You could’ve done that much.”

“No goddamn way.”

The service begins, and during Shirley’s first hymn, the voices in the office get louder.

“I’m not covering your ass again, no more,” says Richard, loud enough that a few guests in the back row shift in their seats and
pretend not to hear. “You’re a fuck-up, and you’ve fucked up again. I’ve had it.”

I clear my throat, thinking that might help, but it just prompts more people to turn around.

“Remember where you work, Richard!”

“You can’t even do a Canada Pension envelope. You’re a fuck-up!”

A door slams. The minister begins his homily, a story of the difference between Greek love or Eros and the self-giving love of Agape, as between two brothers.

“A fuck-up!” Richard calls out.

After the service, Richard and I gather flowers. The important thing seems to be to act like nothing happened. The family wants the flowers sent to their mother’s care home for the other residents, and Neil, who showed up after the fireworks, tells them he’ll take care of it. As near as I can tell, the mystery cake never arrived.

I load the flowers into Neil’s car, and we drive off to the Poseidon Centre in silence. It’s been snowing all day, but now it’s storming. Finally, Neil tells me he knows what happened. And he knows that, during the fight, Richard played a card he’s never played before. He told Eirik: I’m more of a son to him than you are.

We turn onto Grant Avenue and Neil says, as if to change the subject, that he’s just read a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian who’d been involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and who was executed by the Nazis. Even though he knew he was about to die, Bonhoeffer spent his last days learning a few words of Russian from one of his cellmates. The detail, Neil says, haunted him. What was Bonhoeffer doing? Then he
thought about his own plans for the new crematorium, how he wants to get it finished while he can, and decided it amounts to the same thing: you do something, anything, right up to the last day, rather than nothing, even if it’s pure folly. What happens to the funeral home after he’s done is none of his business. At that point it’ll be Eirik’s business. Maybe, he says, Paul Werschuk has the right idea. Werschuk runs a funeral chapel in the north end and a crematorium in St. Andrew. Tired of battling with deep-discounters and regulators and the fickle consumer, he’s getting out of the game and into pet cremations. Little Critters, he’s calling the new business. People spend more on pet services than they do for themselves. They love their pets without ambivalence.

We park behind an ambulance at the front of the Poseidon Centre, which is deep with snow. A man in a housecoat pushes his wheelchair backwards through the slush in his slippered feet. “If you could give me a push, that would be the cat’s pyjamas,” he says, so I do. A woman leans out of the ambulance and points at Neil. “I know you!” she calls out, and he waves and keeps walking. We’re buzzed inside by an annoyed attendant who makes us sign a register book and then disappears up an elevator. The lobby smells like steam and potatoes. We put the flowers on the desk and leave.