Curtains (26 page)

New works are due from a European artist named Nadine Jarvis who makes birdfeeders out of seeds and beeswax and cremated remains. The birds eat the seeds, the ashes get “distributed.” Jarvis also makes wood pencils with human lead, on average 240 per cremated body, and teardrop-shaped eggshell vessels that hang from tree branches. The string will eventually break, and the vessel falls and shatters on the ground, and that’s how you’re scattered. Coincidence and gravity, the artist’s collaborators, decide when and how.

I like the pencils. Each one is embossed with a name and dates (birth and death), like a headstone. Once again, a working death: you could become a doodle, or a tax return, or the answers to the
LSAT
. It was out of your hands and literally in someone else’s, although it’s significant the pencils have no erasers.

But is it art? John Dewey says art “renders men aware of their union with one another in origin and destiny,” and by that measure the big cigar and the pencils qualify: we’re all doomed to be ground out or worn to stubs.

Driving back over the Golden Gate Bridge (the most popular place in the United States to commit suicide), I think about green burial and birdfeeders and wonder what it would take for mainstream death-care truly to warm up to them. The problem is that the industry craves safety and sameness. Even the Celebration of Life, where each service is unique, has as its blueprint the traditional chapel funeral. In the funeral, the body’s embalmed. In the Celebration, the life story’s embalmed. But burying a body in a desert or feeding the ashes to starlings and cardinals is wild, chaotic, against all the undertaker’s instincts for order. For him, the cloisonné urn is a comfort, like a pop song he’s heard a thousand times. The alternatives are atonal noise, and they make him change the station.

Now there are new beta technologies for dealing with human remains in the works: promession, a Swedish innovation, freezedries the body like camping food and then pulverizes it into a pink powder that can act as a fertilizer wherever it’s buried, preferably in a biodegradable cornstarch box. “In the beginning,” says Susanne Wiigh-Masak, the biologist behind the prototype, “a wild animal found you dead in nature and saw you as something edible. They tore you apart and spread you around, and you became soil.” Promession just cuts out the wild animal factor.

Resomation, meanwhile, involves putting the body in a silk bag and then into a hot bath of water and potassium hydroxide, which
dissolves the flesh through alkaline hydrolysis. What’s left are bones, teeth and a small amount of green-brown liquid which can be poured into a grave or scattering garden with the other pulverized remains. It’s cremation without the fire and fossil fuels, another eco-friendly alternative, according to the company that pitches it. We’ll see if the boomer market, which enthusiastically recycles its glass and plastics, will drive any of the new technologies.

Built on the old Odd Fellows cemetery downtown in the nineteenth century, the columbarium was the last stand for San Francisco’s dead; the rest had been deported to Colma after burials in the city were banned in 1919. Inside is a huge marble rotunda, lit by a lead-glass dome, and three storeys of niches along circular walkways. Climbing the stairs, I follow the music, Ella Fitzgerald singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon” from a portable CD deck on the top level. I stop at a niche with two Elvis busts cheek to cheek. Some of the older niches hold brass urns tarnished blue and green and salty white by the sea air. Cookie jars are popular: rabbits, harlequins, Indian chiefs. Mardi Gras beads hang from the flower vases. It’s all very democratic: kitty-corner to a portrait of a stern, unsmiling European couple is a G.I. Joe lunchbox and a set of handcuffs. Not as literal as the niches I’d seen at Chapel Lawn, these are more cryptic and playful. Next to G.I. Joe is an urnless niche with a camera and a pair of pink ballet slippers. Farther down, someone has propped plastic tomatoes on a pair of brass vases. And it’s hard to miss the number of rainbow flags and rainbow ribbons: plenty of the dead were young men, born in the ’40s and ’50s, dead in the ’80s and ’90s, when AIDS hit San Francisco fast and hard.

On the main level I come across a man on a ladder measuring a niche. His name is Emmitt, and he’s the caretaker.

“Some of these older apartments got ten, some got twelve people all dumped in the same container. Whole families, generations,” he says, then comes down the ladder to say hello. “People come for weddings and birthdays. One lady comes every Thursday at 10:20. The fellow I call the Storyteller, he came every single day until he died. I give people nicknames, like the Tomato King.”

“I think I saw the Tomato King,” I say.

“Him and his wife used to grow tomatoes. Those ones, they’re plastic. I put them there. Because I knew that’s what he would want.”

The lady who loved baseball has a ceramic baseball urn, and a hand-painted crowd scene behind her. Emmitt says if I look close I’ll see Santa Claus and Batman watching the game. He’s rigged a gizmo to turn on a light inside the niche, “since Miss Lily didn’t like the dark.”

His hands are white from plaster and paint.

“People are already so sad, they don’t need more to be sad about. I say you can bring some life and air to death, some personality. I look at you, you look at me, we contribute to society,” he says. “Then we die.”

He glances over my shoulder to the front door.

“There’s my ride,” he says. And with that he’s gone.

Colma is, at first blush, just another suburb. It has more car dealerships than seem necessary for a town with a thousand times more graves than people, but Colma is where San Franciscans buy their SUVs, when they’re not burying their dead. According to Pat Hatfield,
who runs the local historical society, they’d just built a card room called Lucky Chances Casino on property leased from one of the Jewish cemeteries: between the car lots and the Texas Hold ’em, Colma was doing fine, despite any new social trends vis-à-vis burial. In fact, they ran a surplus. If you lived in Colma, you got free cable TV.

I wander up the hill to Cypress Lawn, to a stone proscenium at the entrance of the cemetery. In front of me is San Bruno Mountain, and to my right, past a plastic orange fence, what we’d call a snow-fence in Manitoba, was a nine-hole golf course. It used to be eighteen until the cemetery, in need of more real estate, cut a deal to build more grave plots. Sunlight sparkles on the stone columbaria. On either side, as far as I can see, the land’s overrun with headstones and palm trees. Behind me is Woodlawn, SCI’s piece of the action, and to the right, the Jewish cemeteries tucked next to the huge Catholic Holy Cross. Scattered round about, according to my map, are Japanese and Chinese and Serbian and Russian cemeteries, and somewhere, the pet cemetery where Tina Turner buried her dog wrapped in a fur coat (the dog, not Tina). According to Pat, the pet cemetery is the most visited spot in Colma.

It used to be, as far back as the late 1800s, that funeral homes in San Francisco or nearby Daly City did all the prepping and casketing, and families would come to Colma by procession or on special black trolley cars, fifty cents per mourner, a dollar to transport the body, the most popular trolley being the swank
El Descanso
with its black leather armchairs and separate parlours for Ladies and Gents. That separation of labour, between undertaker and cemeterian, continued until Cypress Lawn put up its
palazzo
of a mortuary, riling their former business partners. As I walk across the parking lot the
building seems to recede, getting farther away the closer I get to it, like Kafka’s unreachable castle, a trick of the eye or the climate or something weirder. The head of a red carnation and a Kleenex blow across the pavement in front of me.

I wait in the lobby, at the foot of a spiral staircase, under a cupola, while a woman at a black marble desk whispers into a telephone. Soon a gentleman in a blue suit and red hair skitters down the stairs, hand outstretched. His name is Martin, communications director for the cemetery. I had an appointment with Ken Varner, the CEO, who’s just back from a trip to China, Martin tells me, and can’t make it. I can speak to him later by phone. In the meantime, Martin offers a quick tour. He whisks me past the chapels, the Cypress Room, the Rose Room, the Laurel Room, all bright and white and palm-frondy, and introduces me to a series of smiling women with clipboards. They hold regular lecture series (next month it’s “Body Disposal Through the Ages”) and genealogy seminars and a popular antiques appraisal show-and-tell like the one on PBS. In the showroom are caskets I’ve only ever seen in catalogues: a hand-carved mahogany Marsellus President, just like the one JFK was buried in, and a bronze Promethean full-couch (meaning a single lid, without the split in the middle, so mourners can view the whole body) with mirror finish otherwise known as a “James Brown,” the same casket in which the Godfather of Soul lay in state at the Apollo Theater in New York and then, for months after, in an air-conditioned room in his home on Beech Island, South Carolina, while his family argued over the estate. Cypress Lawn also carries
dzi-dzat
, the miniature paper houses and paper cell phones and paper plasma TVs that Asian families use in burial rituals, which Martin calls “Chinese burning things.”

“Sixty percent of our families are Asian,” he says. “I mean, my
wife
is Asian!”

Ten years ago Cypress Lawn was losing a million dollars a year in operations and had at most a decade’s worth of cemetery land left. Later I talked to Ken Varner, and he said he’d had two choices: “Put up our horns, and go into maintenance mode, or expand.” So they bought half the golf course, and went hard at the Asian and Filipino consumers with “specific needs.” On the model of the Greek and Romanesque family mausolea in the old section of Cypress Lawn, where the great dead white nabobs like William Randolph Hearst are entombed, they built “cremation estates”: private sarcophagi with space for ten, twenty or thirty cremated remains, generations’ worth, plus elaborate memorials, dragons or Foo dogs, whatever a family might want to mark its one reliably permanent spot on earth (in Shanghai, he said, the cemeteries have their own staff sculptors). Feng shui masters were brought in to redesign the cemetery and iron out the chi, and they hired Asian and Filipino sales teams to work the phones. “Every day,” he said, “we go out and tell people they have a problem and that we have a solution.”

“What problem is that?”

He paused, generously, to give me time to figure it out. I didn’t.

“That they’re going to die someday,” he said.

Pat told me her favourite spot in town was the children’s section of Woodlawn cemetery, where parents decorated the graves with toys and birthday cakes. There used to be a sculpture of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, she said, until vandals smashed it. I
drive in circles, past the bilingual sign (English, Chinese) with the familiar droopy-tree Dignity logo, and finally come upon a stone slab with what looks to be half a dwarf, possibly Sneezy, just his hands and knees and feet rooted to the slab, the rest of him gone, like he’d stepped on a landmine. Behind him is one of Snow White’s slippers. According to Pat, Woodlawn wanted to rebuild the sculpture, but Disney preferred they didn’t. “I believe it had something to do with money,” Pat said.

Before dark I stop at Molloy’s, an Irish pub near Holy Cross. Inside it’s pubby and bleak, crammed with pictures of old Colma. “Roosevelt Is Dead!” says a headline in a framed newspaper. The bar is worn smooth from decades of proper use, and behind it, a triptych of silver-backed mirrors barely remembers how to reflect what little light there is. Owen Molloy is behind the bar too. Two regular customers argue about other regular customers who aren’t here. In the early days Molloy’s was a roadhouse and hotel. Owen tells me gravediggers and monument makers used to drink here, but that the companies have all cut back, “now it’s just one guy with a backhoe.” Most of his customers are families in need of drinks or a nosh after burying their dead. He lives in Colma and likes it; he has a view of the mountain with no threat that someone will build a skyscraper in front of it.

I ask him, with seventeen cemeteries in town, most of them filled or filling with Bay Area “commuters” and come-from-aways, what happens to local people when they die.

He leans in towards me.

“I got three, four customers cremated in liquor bottles in the crawl space behind those mirrors,” he says. He looks around as if someone might be listening.

“Shirley lived up the street,” he says. “She drank gin, we put her ashes in a fifth of Tanqueray. Eddy, his ashes are in a fifth of vodka, and Knut, he was a longshoreman, he lived in the trailer park next to us here. Norwegian. He’s there too.”

One of the regulars, a tall, thin man with a knit cap, gets up from his stool. “He used to sit right over there,” he says, pointing to the bar stool next to me. “Ka-nute.” He pronounced it as two syllables.

“He was a customer here since I was a little kid,” Owen says.

“He shake,” the man continues, in a thick Italian accent. “After a few drinks, he no shake no more.”

Owen pours the man more red wine. His name is Franco.

“He say, I’m going to stop living when I’m seventy-five,” Franco says. “One day he got all dressed up, Father’s Day.”

“His favourite bartender had moved back east,” says Owen.

“When I come in, Knut is here, and he show me, he has a gun. I got shocked. I feel so bad, because the next day …” and here Franco makes a pistol gesture at his temple.

Franco is known as the Memory Artist. “I paint my village from my memory,” he tells me. He comes from Pontito, in Tuscany. When he moved to California, he was haunted by vivid dreams of his boyhood town, so real that when he woke he found he could reproduce them, in frantic detail, on canvas, even though he had no artistic training. In his mind, he could follow scenes in three dimensions, turn his head to look around buildings and church doorways, even hear sounds. Later I saw pictures of Franco’s paintings and photos of Pontito online, and his realism was chilling.