Curtains (2 page)

Glenn once “removed” a body at a seniors complex in Winnipeg. It was Halloween. When he got there the corpse was still in the bed
where it died. He strapped the body to the stretcher, and on the way out, the doors of the elevator opened onto a costume party, staff and residents dressed like Disney characters. What could he do? He had to slalom his stretcher through the wheelchairs, those in the crowd alternately wondering who was under the cloth and whether they would be next. A nurse dressed as Snow White scowled. Glenn might as well have been carrying a scythe. This, he says, is why the Silver Doors are always in the back of the hospital with the laundry bags and medical waste. People don’t want to know. There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with the arrangement. We in funeral service cover the gap. People pay us to keep to ourselves what goes on there.

The body in the back passes wind when the van hits a bump. It happens, Glenn says. He opens the window.

At the crematorium, I hop out to finish the job and haul on the stretcher—but it won’t budge. Forgot the cotter pin. Second try, the stretcher rolls free, and I listen for the
click
. The first set of legs locks in place, then the others drop, clickless, but it’s too late—the head end of the stretcher smacks the bumper on its way to the pavement, which it hits with a
whang
like an aluminum baseball bat. If he wasn’t already dead, I’ve killed him. I pull back the cot cover to discover that the man’s hands are still folded comfortably on his belly. He’s past caring.

“It happens,” says Jon, the boss’s son, who comes to my aid.

But I can feel the impact still humming in my hands. Dignity, I say to myself. I’m afraid it doesn’t come naturally to me.

T
HE
F
ACTORY

T
he sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says that humans are the only creatures who know they’re going to die, and even worse, they
know
they know it, and it’s not something they can “unknow.” All they can do is distract themselves, briefly, like you might mask the smell of burnt food by spraying the kitchen with Lysol. The main reason I’m here, working as a trainee in Neil Bardal’s funeral home in Winnipeg, in my ham-fisted, dignity-challenged way, is to figure out if the screwball rituals we perform and the industry that’s evolved to support them are part of the Lysol, or if in fact the way we handle death, with caskets and trinkets and stone markers, is our way of facing up, finally, to the smell. Not that I think that by being mindful of death we can lead richer lives. A life “forgetful of death,” Bauman says, “life lived as meaningful and worth living, life alive with purpose instead of being crushed
and incapacitated by purposelessness—is a formidable human achievement.” I’m with him, and Epicurus too, who said that there’s no need to fear the oblivion after we’re gone if we never cared about the oblivion that came before we were born. Cheer up. Death obsessing is for boozy existentialists and bad poets.

Which prompts a bony question: why do we each spend up to $10,000—for most, the third-biggest cash outlay in our lives after a house and a car, according to Jessica Mitford, who wrote
The American Way of Death
—on funerals?

Neil Bardal says we need the ritual to know the person who’s died. We need to see the body, we want the proof: we’re empirical, modern, enlightened souls who benefit from looking at death when it comes, standing up to sing and pray in its presence. Neil’s my boss. He’s a third-generation undertaker, his oldest son Eirik is an undertaker, and Jon, the youngest, works at the crematorium (although, like his cousin Glenn, he’s not keen on it and is studying to be an electrician instead of an undertaker). Neil’s sister Jean answers the phones and his wife Annette does the books. There are four other funeral directors on staff, and in flush times they sponsor trainees. That’s where I come in. Neil has agreed to take me on as a paid intern (plus free dry cleaning and a company golf shirt) if I agree to hump caskets and flowers, set up chairs at service, mop floors, wash the hearse, help the directors do what they do, and otherwise participate in the day-to-day rituals that families need, even if we don’t agree on what constitutes an empirical, modern, enlightened response to death. Full disclosure: when I die, I’ve asked to be left in a blue bin at the curb on recycling day.

The funeral chapel is downtown in a strip-mall on Aubrey Street, ten minutes from my house, but the crematorium is a long bus
ride away, near the airport, the last building on Notre Dame Avenue before Winnipeg turns into plenty of flat, treeless nothing. From the street there’s little to betray its purpose: could be an insurance office, until you see the hearse parked in the side lot and the stone slab in the walkway inscribed
ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS
. Could be a very frank insurance office. Inside I meet Jon. He has his father’s sad eyes and he yawns a lot.

My internship starts with a slapdash tour, beginning in what Jon calls the Committal Space, a faux living room with faux colonial furniture, faux plants, and prints of other faux plants on the walls. Each end table has a box of Kleenex with a single, perfectly teased-out tissue, and on one there’s also a picture frame, empty, which gives me a chill. There’s something unwholesome about an empty picture frame. The Committal Space is where the family gathers to “view” the body before cremation: there’s a nook for the casket, and a brocade curtain for privacy. At the back of the nook is a heavy armoire with a bronze sculpture of a horse. The room is cold and clean, and smells of Endust; it reminds me of the living rooms of kids I knew whose parents had some kind of preservation fetish and declared the good furniture off limits. The horse is a nice touch, a bit of whimsy, but the horse turns out to be an urn: the ashes go inside the wooden base. The Chinese lantern next to it is an urn too, and so is the little blue porcelain teddy bear holding an umbrella, designed for infants. I don’t want to touch anything in here lest it contain someone.

Not only can you view the body before cremation in this room, you can also watch the main event, car-wash style, through a window separating the Committal Space from the working side of the crematorium. When Jon snaps open the blinds, I’m face to face
with a monster machine, one of the facility’s two “retorts,” which looks like an over-designed Soviet-era East German pizza oven, with a fat stainless-steel chimney growing out of its head and a small glass porthole in its black iron door. A single unblinking eye. This is Retort Two. She’s fussy, tends to belch black smoke and burn out of control when dealing with the heavier bodies, which the Bardals prefer to assign to Number One, an older, less temperamental machine. Number Two prefers thin, elderly bodies without much fat.

This whole place is built like a theatre: a public space up front, with its living room set, and a backstage where all the magic happens. Only Neil’s broken the fourth wall, encouraging people to bear witness, to see the event through to the end, which is both noble and oddly post-modern. Jon admits most Winnipeg families prefer not to watch, unlike in England, where watching is the norm. But if you’re into it, Neil’s the only open-window cremator in town.

Backstage presents a different vibe than front-of-house. Twenty degrees Fahrenheit hotter, and noisier. As soon as Jon opens the connecting door I hear the low rumble and feel the dry heat. We pass Number Two’s backside and all her ductwork, stop at the sort table, where the remains—shattered bits of bone and whatever else survives two hours at 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit in the retort (casket hinges, pants zippers, artificial knees and hips)—sit to cool before human is separated from non-human. They use a magnet to pick out the metal artifacts and then sort through the pile by hand, chucking out anything that doesn’t look white and bony. Then it all goes into a sturdy blender, which turns everything to powder.

Jon hands me a plastic bag full of a recent customer: it’s about the size and heft of a two-pound bag of cornmeal, clearly labelled
with name and number, since at this point we all look very much the same. I sneeze. It’s dusty at the sort table; there’s a thin white film on everything, on the heavy black vacuum hose that hangs over the table, on a Remembrance Day poppy stuck to a bulletin board, inside the blender. People dust.

To get to Number One I follow Jon down a dark hallway lined with medieval instruments: long-handled iron hooks and brooms with steel bristles, and a winch affair, an upside-down L-shaped bracket with three blue canvas straps for getting a body into a casket without wrenching your back. Number One is in action, and I feel the rumbling of its burners in my chest. Jon explains the routine: body comes in from the hospital, it’s transferred to a cardboard box and stored in the cooler, waiting for its place in the cremation queue. Or, if it’s going to be embalmed or “prepped” for what Jessica Mitford called the full-fig funeral (viewing, visitation, open-casket service at the chapel or church) it goes onto a gurney and into the prep room, the door to which is always locked, to keep civilians and wayward deliverymen from walking in on an embalming-in-progress. This is a full-service operation: some bodies are cremated, some are prepped, some are even prepped
then
cremated, an act, if you’ll forgive me a one-time use of the term, of overkill. It all depends what the family wants. If you want a full-fig funeral followed by cremation, you get it.

If you buy a casket for the service, the casket goes into the retort: the Bardals don’t reuse them. Some funeral homes rent caskets for the funeral–cremation combo. The casket is a shell with a collapsible door at the foot end, through which slides the body in an MDF (medium-density fibreboard) liner: the body goes in for the service, comes out for the cremation. The shell goes back into rotation.
The rental fee is usually the wholesale cost of the casket, so the unit pays for itself after its first outing: factoring in depreciation (nicks and scrapes), the undertaker may get fifteen or twenty uses out of it before the casket is retired. Neil doesn’t carry rentals, he doesn’t like the concept. “Same concept as shoes at a bowling alley,” he says. If you just want to scatter at the lake, the body might go straight into a cardboard box off the van and into the retort, and you can pick up the ashes the next day. Every former soul that comes in through the garage door is assigned a number: it’s written in Sharpie on their cardboard box and the corpse’s wristband, not unlike the wristbands they issue at raves and folk festivals.

We pass another doorway, through which I can see a young woman brushing an older woman’s hair. The older woman is lying on a gurney in a blue dress and clunky black shoes. The younger woman smiles and waves at us, then goes back to work, cradling the older woman’s hair in the palm of her hand, pulling the brush gently so it doesn’t snag. There are two other women on gurneys, both dressed in skirts and cardigans as if they were going out for afternoon tea with the third. One clutches a purse. It’s a quiet, domestic scene. They look so still and benign that there’s no reason my heart should be racing, but it is, and I back away from the doorway. It’s the stillness that scares me. Even sleeping people have some animating spark, you can sense it, and if you watch them for long enough you’ll see it too, a twitch or an itchy earlobe scratched. These women are empty. Well dressed and nicely groomed, but done.

Jon flips the cover off the peephole on Retort One so I can have a peek. The man’s body is on its back in the chamber, hands at its side, feet pointing ten o’clock, two o’clock. The orange and blue fire roars from the roof of the retort like water from a firehose, hitting
the chest, and I can see another jet farther down the chamber, and bits of fly-ash circling in the turbulence. The body is black, and the bones glow in the way a burning piece of firewood glows if you blow on it hard. There’s no smell, but I can feel a draft on my ear as an air current rushes past me, through the porthole, into the chamber.

“The head burns slowly, the heart burns slowly,” Jon says.

Hanging on the wall next to the retort are two iron hooks. When the body no longer looks like a body, when all that’s left are scattered bones and a black mass the size of a pumpkin, Jon feeds the longer of the two hooks through the porthole and rakes everything into a pile under the gas jet, to finish the job. Then he opens the door a crack to let the bones cool, and I can see the stone wall of the retort and the pieces, a hip ball-joint, a jaw, glowing red.

We break for lunch and I scrub my hands and forearms in the bathroom and rinse my mouth with Scope until my gums sting. I tell myself I’ll get used to it, like the others who work here. And I know I’ll lick the primal uneasiness that drove me from a room full of harmless little old dead ladies, but right now I can’t imagine ever getting used to the violence of the retort.

I find Jon and the young woman in the arrangement room having lunch. I have brought a sandwich from home, but my appetite left me somewhere around the baby urn. Jon eats a pizza sub and leafs through
Maxim
magazine. Natalie—I can call her Nat—used to work at Shoppers Drug Mart, where she sold cosmetics before she became a funeral director. Her hometown is St. Claude, a French farming community south of Portage la Prairie, which has both a dairy museum and the world’s second-largest smokable pipe, 20 feet long and weighing 430 pounds. Nat’s lunch is a micro-waved pork chop that she saws with a plastic knife, holding her
fork in her fist the way a child does. She is the chief embalmer. Jon flashes her the
Maxim
centrefold, who wears a leather bikini.