Curtains (10 page)

“Is that open to everyone?” Richard says.

“Yes.”

“Good, because they’ve got the Sip to Win going on, eh?”

“Oh. Yes, the contest.”

“Sip to Win, yeah. Who’s next?”

Eirik reports on the prep for a man due tomorrow at Gimli Lutheran for a service followed by cremation. His family sent an American flag to drape over the casket. He was in the U.S. Air Force, retired, and the flag is very old, an heirloom, forty-six stars. Next is the case of the woman in the casket that may or may not be too small for her, depending on whether you agree with Eirik, who thinks it is, or Shannon, who thinks it isn’t. Shannon says the woman’s only five feet tall, and Eirik says it’s not her height that matters but her width, and whips out a tailor’s tape measure and stretches it with some drama across the woman’s shoulders. She’s lying in her casket just behind us in the dressing room. She does look a bit cramped, but not uncomfortable, if that’s any way to describe a dead body. Shannon says the woman’s sister picked out
the casket herself, and Eirik says we’re all wider when we’re lying down, that’s physics, and Shannon no longer appreciates the implication that oversights were made, and I look at the woman in the middle of all this. She’s holding a heart-shaped picture frame in her folded hands. Inside the frame is a photo of Elvis.

Richard calls for order, and Neil says, “Wait a sec.”

We all stare at the speakerphone.

“What the hell kind of flag has forty-six stars?”

We all stare at Eirik.

“Forty-eight,” he says. “Sorry.”

The working day starts in the prep room, where I meet Adina, the new apprentice, a tall young woman with her hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight she looks permanently surprised, or terrified, or both. She’s studying for her licence online, with Shannon as her sponsor, and so far she has nineteen embalmed bodies to her credit. To graduate she needs fifty. Ten years ago this would’ve been a snap, a month’s work, but with cremation overtaking the full-fig funeral as the disposition of choice, she needs every prep she can get her hands into. Today, Number 20 is a thin man with a few days’ growth of beard, a scrubby moustache, dry cloudy eyes and a breathing tube still stuck between his teeth, which Adina pulls out with a wet
pop
, then drops into the garbage bin as if it were a dead mouse.

While lathering his face I remember what Natalie told me about shaving the dead: long easy strokes, never choppy. Corpses get razor burn too. Before we go any further, Adina wants a ruling on the moustache. Shave it off or leave it on? Half-hearted as it is, that may be the way he wore it, or it may be the artifact of a long hospital stay. Either way it’s not our place to infer intention when it
comes to grooming, so she calls Richard, who agrees to call the family. Families get calls like this all the time, between the arrangements and the funeral: Collar up or down? Shirt tucked in or out? Eyeglasses on or off? If a man wore his hair like Stalin in life he should not look like Dee Dee Ramone in the casket.

Clothes cutting is another matter. Families aren’t consulted, it comes down to undertaker taste, although there’s been a minor power struggle here vis-à-vis the practice. Eirik posted a rule on the dry-erase board in the dressing room, in four-inch black letters:
ALL CLOTHES MUST BE CUT FROM NOW ON
,
NO EXCEPTIONS
. Shannon meanwhile has made it clear she won’t do it. At best it’s lazy undertaking, and at worst it’s undignified. This puts Adina in a pickle. Shannon is her sponsor, but Eirik is the boss’s son.

“What would you do?” she says.

I have to think about this. I’ve yet to develop a philosophy on dead people’s clothes. Natalie never cut, she said all it took was a little extra tugging and tucking to get a decent fit, but Neil was a cutter at Trull and for all I know clothes cutting is a Bardal family tradition, like ham at Easter. At the same time, can you run a man through with a trocar and bleed him like a trout into a toilet, but refuse to cut his shirt collar on moral grounds? This has little to do with clothing and the corpse, and everything to do with Shannon and Eirik and politics, and who’s on whose team.

Richard calls back. The family took a vote. The moustache stays.

Neil says he’s not worried about a little dysfunction on the Factory floor: he won’t micro-manage. Glenn’s quit so many times, Neil has a thick file of his resignation letters in his desk, and if Shannon’s showing some pluck and ambition, good for her, it might light a spark under Eirik. As long as everyone remembers
the mission.

“Which is what?” I’m starting to lose track.

“Getting the body from the bed to the grave in the most creative way possible, with the most meaning for the family,” Neil says, whether that involves a casket and grave, or cremation and scattering, or all four in some elaborate combination. And transparency too: opening the door between front stage and backstage, letting families see the machinery behind the curtain—deconstructed death-care. Unthinkable in his father’s time. Unthinkable right now in any other funeral home in Winnipeg.

“Let them see the cremation?”

“Yes.”

“Let them see the bones being sorted?”

“Yes, it’s happened already.”

“Let them into the prep room?”

He pauses. There’s no law that bars families from watching an embalming, and if someone asked he’d consider it. It hasn’t come up yet. There was one time, a boating accident. The family wanted to see the body, but the boat’s propeller had made a mess of it. So they covered up the face but left the hands exposed, and the family was able to touch the hands. There are ways. And limits.

On a slow day, Neil takes me along on a special delivery: a man from Roblin, a small town five hours northwest of the city, on the Saskatchewan border, has lately been autopsied at the Health Sciences Centre and is now free to go home for his burial. Instead of sending him by courier (the usual route: not inexpensive) we’ll drive him to the local funeral home ourselves. It’s a large day, the sun is bleaching the asphalt, and on the highway past Portage la
Prairie there’s little to distract us but wheat, more wheat, a grain elevator, and then more wheat. We pass a collapsed farmhouse and Neil says, Imagine the family that used to live there, they thought it would last forever.

When he bought the family business in 1968 Neil had hooked up with a business partner, but the partnership was doomed. Ten years later they couldn’t stand to be in the same chapel together, so they agreed to a shotgun divorce: the first to come up with the money to buy the other’s share could keep the place, while the other walked, albeit with a pocketful of money. This would have marked the second time Neil had to buy his own family funeral home. But this time, the partner beat him to it, and Neil lost the business, A.S. Bardal’s one-time frame shop and livery service on Sherbrook Street. He lost the family name, too: it went with the funeral home. (There’s still a Bardal Funeral Home on Sherbrook, but there has been no actual Bardal on staff since Neil was bought out in 1979. This is very confusing for local consumers.)

Now he was on his own, both liberated and terrified. He’d followed developments in California, where the Neptune Society had launched its deep-discount cremation-only service: no pricey caskets, no embalming, no cemeteries, just a simple burning and scattering of the ashes at sea. Like Allen Ginsberg on pilgrimage to the crematory ghats of Varanasi in India, Neil flew to San Francisco to discover his inner undertaker, remembering what his father had told him: If you’re smart, you’ll show people there’s another way to do all this. Neil came back enlightened, a born-again bake-and-shaker.

In 1983 he spoke in Toronto, at a meeting of the Ontario Funeral Services Association. The message was simple: As undertakers, he
said, we have to go back to our roots. We’re trained to take care of the body, not sell product. The age of the casket is over. With cremation growing in popularity, we should replace it with a simple cardboard box.

“I got booed off the stage,” he told me. Colleagues called him a heretic. At a meeting in Penticton the next year, where he pitched the same message, he was described as the gum disease of modern funeral service. As far as Neil was concerned, his audience missed the point: he wasn’t preaching the end of the funeral but calling for a creative response to its evolution. His colleagues wouldn’t hear of it. The fact was, cremation terrified them.

He made plans to adapt the Neptune model to Manitoba. He acquired the crematorium near Brookside, although scattering-at-sea was ruled out on account of logistics, the nearest ocean being the Pacific, or the Atlantic, depending on whether you turned left or right on the highway at Steinbach. What the Prairies had were oceans of grain and oceans of trees, however, so Neil studied a parcel of land near Kenora on the Ontario border as a site for a scattering forest. Families could scatter remains and enjoy a picnic: no graves, no markers, just acres of woods. He commissioned a pithy radio jingle:

But he never bought the land.

Next, in consultation with a plant scientist at the university who said cremated remains made for a potent fertilizer, Neil thought of buying farmland to grow wheat—magically, disturbingly tall
wheat—until it became clear consumers might be disinclined to buy, much less eat, bread made indirectly from dead human beings. In the end he dug a kidney-shaped rose garden in the front lawn of the crematorium and pitched it as a third way, between the cemetery and what the industry called “wildcat” scattering: private disposal in parks, the river, the lake at the cottage, golf courses, places with personal meaning but without the tangibility of a permanent memorial.

Now Neil wants to expand. He wants to build a reception hall and an indoor atrium for the garden, so families can scatter in winter, enjoy a little garden-side ceremony with coffee and dainties even as it’s minus-35 Celsius outside with the wind-chill factor. Instead of roses there’d be rubber plants. He wants to call it the Garden of Memories. If it works, he’ll franchise the idea.

In the meantime, he wants to change the structure of his business, design it like a law firm. The family would hold the business in a central trust, but the undertakers, Richard and Janice and Shannon, would all work as associates, earning their way on billable hours, developing their own clients, until they achieved full partnerships. They’d have incentive to stay, invest in the place. In fact they’d be working for themselves, under the umbrella of the Bardal trust.

The corporates, he said, were stuck with their fusty, Kafkaesque infrastructure dictated from Toronto or Houston by the bier barons. “Me? I’m not stuck with anything,” he says. “I’m not even stuck with family.”

Roblin is little more than a main street with angle parking, a railroad station that hasn’t seen a train since the route was cut (the station is now a restaurant) and a lot full of rusted school buses that says most people under sixty have already moved to Winnipeg
or Regina. The funeral home is faux church with a gabled roof and heavy wood doors. This is a mom-and-pop shop, what Neil calls a typical rural funeral-a-week (if that) operation. Pop meets us in the parking lot. He’s Neil’s age, wearing suspenders, work pants and a plaid shirt. They exchange greetings and ask after each other’s children and grandchildren. We unload the body and wheel it through the garage, past rolls of pink insulation and open boxes of brass cemetery vases, some crowded onto a kitchen counter like empty beer bottles after a party.

The prep room has two tables, one already occupied by a man in a blue suit and blue fuzzy slippers. In the corner is a red auto-mechanic’s Snap-on tool chest, where pop keeps his embalming gear, and on top of the chest a few pink eye-caps are scattered like potato chips. A half-empty bottle of Plasdopake sits in the sink. He and Neil lift the body, still wrapped in hospital plastic, to the empty table (old-school, no latex gloves), then pop shows us around. He apologizes for his distracted state, but he has the flu, so does mom, and Canada Revenue Agency is on his back, again. The casket showroom is tiny and cramped (mostly hardwoods) but the chapel is huge, with wooden pews, baby-blue walls and dusty-rose curtains, a giant Jesus-ready cross on the wall over the pulpit. Where does one buy such a thing? The chapel is also where pop stores extra caskets that won’t fit in the showroom. It’s cold here. He keeps the heat off between services to save money.

“It’s not like it used to be,” he says.

“Things have changed,” Neil replies.

“When the girls were young they used to play here. We had to tell them not to bounce their balls upstairs during services.”

“With us, it was don’t flush the toilet.”

We follow him out to the parking lot, where he opens the door of his removal van. The tax people have told him he can no longer claim it as a business expense, that it’s a personal vehicle.

“Look at it,” he says. “Casket rollers in the back. You think I drive my friends around in this thing?”

Back on the highway, Neil says the visit was like stepping into a time capsule. Fifty calls a year, and the only reason pop survives is he hasn’t lost the casket sale, not yet. He goes to church, the curling rink, and all the service club meetings; he knows his families and life and death follow a steady, reliable course. The word
cremation
never comes up. Someday it will. Funeral service has always been a panicky dialogue between past and present, and the past is no place to run a business. That’s why the corporate chains only buy urban funeral homes. Out here it’s less of a business, more of a hobby.

Are Neil and pop really that different? I think of the novel
The Leopard
, about a family of Sicilian aristocrats riding out the last days of a class system that’s about to evaporate in the forces of modernity and Garibaldi’s revolution. Same premise as the 1982 TV sitcom
Silver Spoons
with Ricky Schroder, only in the book, Prince Fabrizio, resigned to his fate, is told by his nephew, who’s joined the rebels: “If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change.” Neil is an innovator, but at the heart of the Garden of Memories and the Wheat Field of the Dead are the same steady, reliable undertaker values his grandfather brought to Sherbrook—the body, the viewing, the ceremony.