Authors: Tom Jokinen
Gary shows me the work-in-progress, a crematorium and reception space, a cement bunker with skylights where they also have a working prep room, although Gary says they’ve only done three embalmings in the last year. They use a trade embalmer from Monte’s Chapel of the Hills in San Anselmo named Dead Ed who rides a bicycle and embalms in his Lycra shorts and likes to charm local women by bringing them to the morgue. “The reason funeral homes can’t make a connection with their community,” Gary says, “is not that the community is scared to talk about death, it’s that the funeral home is scared to talk about death. That’s why funeral homes embalm people, put makeup on them and pretend they’re alive. Here we’re very realistic. Dead people should look dead.”
The crematorium has a kitchenette with an espresso maker. I make a note to tell Neil: a Committal to the Flames with a fresh latte would be a marketing lever even Starbucks can’t claim (yet).
The retorts are spotless. I can see my reflection in the green enamel. Still, there’s an odd tension at Fernwood: the mission is to reclaim the rite of burial by disposing of the earth-unfriendly bric-a-brac and toxic chemicals, but to make it in death-care you’ve got to have a retort, even though the crankiest environmentalists
like to point out that each human cremation uses up the equivalent of 16 gallons of gasoline, which is what an SUV burns over a 186-mile trip.
Then there’s the mercury, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pegs at around 278 pounds a year from retort stacks, based on an average of seven amalgam fillings per baby boomer—peanuts compared to heavy industry, but a factor for anyone who takes her ecological “footprint” seriously. The Germans have been experimenting with a solar crematorium, a concrete contraption with a big concave mirror, like something Wile E. Coyote might build to fry the Roadrunner, but it, too, is a work-in-progress.
Before I leave Gary gives me a price list. An “interment right” (which is what they call a grave) in the green upper meadow, where butterflies live and make more butterflies, costs $7,000—$13,000 if you want a tree. The “Family Grove,” two full-body burials, four cremation spaces and a boulder in among the oak trees, is $68,000. They also do a Jewish
tahara
. I ask Gary how many natural burials they’d had last year. He pauses. “Fifty,” he says, then changes it to forty. Chapel Lawn in Winnipeg probably did forty a month. I pat Owen, who groans, and head back to the city.
Not long ago I spoke with Joe Sehee. Joe had been a partner at Forever Fernwood, and ran public relations for the Hollywood cemetery, but quit to start the Green Burial Council and his own burial ground near Santa Fe, New Mexico. There’d been an ideological split. It came down to the definition of
green
. Joe thought there was more to it than burying people al fresco in shrouds and pine boxes, although that was a good start: he wanted to give Fernwood, the land, to an independent steward to create a conservation easement, a legally binding roadblock against future
development. Then the trust would grant Fernwood interment rights, the way protected lands cede mineral rights, only instead of drilling for ore, they’d be planting dead humans. By buying a plot, you contributed directly to the protection of habitat. But the idea never flew at Fernwood. So Joe went his own way.
There should be standards, Joe said. If you open a cemetery and let it grow wild or plant trees like they do in the United Kingdom, that’s fine, call it cheap burial or natural burial, “but you’re not conserving land. In the U.K. those tree farms look like bad hair transplants.”
In New Mexico he had fifteen acres, tall grass prairie, gnarled juniper and pinyon trees growing out of the rock, managed by a non-profit conservancy for “sustainable burial.” That meant the land wouldn’t be over-corpsed. Marking individual graves was optional: Joe was interested in a different kind of memorial.
“Who says a rock with your name on it is the only way to go? You come to the place, you get to look at this majestic panorama. It invites you in. Half the proceeds go to protecting a thousand acres. That’s the memorial.” In a way it was like the Catholic trick with the casket pall. In life you may be an avid golfer, but in death, you’re part of a bigger whole. “Edward Abbey says the most spiritual thing about the desert is it doesn’t give a shit,” Joe said. “I’ve seen it. Close. People can’t name it. They’re not looking for a wicker casket and a plot, but something more spiritual. It’s like they’re trying to befriend death.”
For an industry that sold glass-front niches in heated indoor mausolea, all this is tough to swallow. Ron Hast, death-care’s elder statesman, and one of the pallbearers at Marilyn Monroe’s funeral, put it this way: look outside any airplane window and see how much land
they say we’re running out of. Saving land isn’t the job of death-care, but remembering a life, marking a permanent spot, is.
Joe thinks the industry is spending more time arguing with the market than listening to it. “Don’t debate whether land needs protecting,” he said. “If someone wants their last act to contribute to acquiring and restoring a natural area, just help them do it.” His mantra, and advice to funeral directors: make green burial available to your families or someone else will.
Underneath the green concept is a rich myth of a secular afterlife. In his book
Darwin’s Worms
, Adam Phillips argues there’s no need to despair just because God is dead and the promise of life everlasting, the whole point of religion, went with Him. So you’re not the apex of creation, but rather some piece of a mystical, probably pointless evolutionary chain: good for you. Nature has a place for you, and all your organic bits and pieces, in perpetuating itself. It may not give a shit, but nature isn’t anarchic, there’s order, all run quietly and damply by worms. Darwin, Phillips says, “replaced a creation myth with a secular maintenance myth.” Destruction and death made more life possible. “What would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously, took the ground beneath our feet rather than the skies above our heads, as the place to look, as well, eventually, as the place to be? It is as though we have been pointed in the wrong direction.” I confess I have not taken earthworms seriously.
As a myth the Christian afterlife has better visuals, Tintoretto and that crowd. But the message is the same for both: the individual is absorbed into the whole. Darwin’s myth is noble enough, a busy, working death. When it comes to evolution and nature’s cycle, we, all of us, control the means of production. It just sounds a bit exhausting—a death ritual with an ideology.
Harsh cornflakes, too, for the vault manufacturer. Wilbert, the leading vault maker, puts a sixty-five-year warranty on its Venetian, with the claim it will “resist” water and worms, or they’ll replace it (which raises the question: how do you check?). Though, the United States and Canada still sell more Wilbert vaults than green graves by a long shot. Why? Because we are permanence junkies. Karen Leonard, a consumer advocate who once ran the Redwood Funeral Society in northern California, says the United States is the only country that still believes in a forever. The myth that the vaulted body lasts forever is hard to shake, and the idea of dissolving into a conservation easement, no matter how beautiful the view, is still too much like going ovo-lacto: only a few have the taste for it.
Will this change? On
Six Feet Under
, Nate, the lead character, was buried in a green cemetery. Once pop culture gets into the debate, anything can happen. Growth may be slow but even the people I talk to in Winnipeg are inherently drawn to the idea: yes, that’s what I want. Availability is the problem. There’s one green cemetery in the works in British Columbia and another planned for Guelph, Ontario, but if you die today and want to go green, you’ll have to buy an airplane ticket.
This idea of post-mortem self-expression brought me to Graton, in Sonoma Country, not far from the ocean and Bodega Bay, where Hitchcock filmed
The Birds
. Graton has the kind of small-town charm that comes only from pride and great heaping wads of cash: flags on the main street, antiques shops, a general store that sells original artworks and Persian rugs and Japanese furniture. I believe the gas station sells art too. The place smells of linseed
oil and apples and real estate agents. The Funeria gallery in Graton deals in “personal memorial artworks,” original works that were also designed to hold the standard 200 cubic inches, or at least a keepsake smidgen of ash: art urns. The owner, Maureen Lomasney, hopes to attract the collector who’d be interested in showcasing a piece at home, before climbing into it for all eternity. I’d seen pictures on her Web site of something called a Zen Spaceship Vessel, a gourd-like jar made of mica clay and bronzed grapevine twigs; the one that grabbed me was the Urn-A-Matic, made from a vintage vacuum cleaner that projected home movies and played a loop of Terry Jacks’s “Seasons in the Sun” over and over and over. I pictured this one in the Aubrey showroom, the music driving Richard bonkers until one day he’d go at it with a baseball bat. If it was art, it was art I thought I could grasp: whimsical, allusive, but dark and ambiguous too. Like a painting of dogs playing poker.
I park in front of an old wooden warehouse. There are sawdust drifts on the street, and a wild turkey steps out from behind an SUV and coughs. At the far end of the building, over a door, hangs a banner of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of embalming and the underworld. Maureen Lomasney meets me, dressed in black: art school black, not funeral black. The space, she says, was an apple-drying warehouse and a martial arts dojo before she hung track lights and turned it into a gallery.
It’s unlike any funeral home showroom I’ve seen, far from Gothic, cheery in fact: there are curious bowls made out of maplewood that look like African drums, a lidded vessel with a finish like a dry, cracked lakebed. “I had a woman,” Maureen says, “her husband and daughter died. Separate times, but sadly they
died. She said this one felt like coral, which was perfect, because he was very crusty and she was a wild child.” I look for the Urn-A-Matic, but no luck. Maureen has shipped it back to the artist in Seattle after a big show in New York. To me, this is like going to Disneyland and finding Mickey is away on stress leave. Still, I find lots to play with, including an oversized pop-arty cigar propped on its ash end, with a band that said
La Vida Buena
. “It’s a functional humidor,” Maureen says, lifting off the top half, “lined with Spanish cedar, so you can use it to store cigars … prior.” People like to look inside her urns, she says, “because they’re curious about the view, which is sweet.”
“I’ve become much more comfortable with death in the last few years,” she says. “We all die, but art lasts well beyond us. Why not have something beautiful that stands in for us?” At home she had two pieces of her own, shaped like boats. “No one else needs to know what they are but me.” Like Victorian memento mori and hair brooches, they’re happy daily reminders of her own mortality.
Maureen’s been working with funeral providers to market her artists, “but I can’t say it’s been comfortable.” The undertakers see themselves as the keepers of the ritual, and their version of “personalization” comes in the form of laser-etched fly fishermen, very literal. And funeral directors don’t trust their own taste. They rely on manufacturers’ taste, and their market research.
At Aubrey, Richard stocked classic cloisonné urns but not brass dolphins, because people bought cloisonnés and not brass dolphins. It was that simple. It didn’t matter if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the funeral world I knew, aesthetics and economics were like two mathematical dimensions that never met.
“I’d like to see funeral homes transform themselves into event centres and art galleries,” she says. “I’d like to see them get rid of anything that is ugly and manufactured, tacky stuff.” Ever since Martha Stewart entered Kmart, design had progressed. Architects were now designing teapots.
It’s one of my weaknesses to want the thing called “taste” while still wearing, as I did more than once at Aubrey, a brown belt with black shoes. A tasteful death feels like another opportunity for me to underachieve, not that the coral bowl wasn’t pretty. But how would it hold up sixty years from now, when I’m still dead but the aesthetic goal-posts have shifted, compared to a Harpswell slate urn with a lighthouse on it, which may end up with the same kitsch appeal as a Monkees lunch pail? It’s a gamble, betting on taste when eternity’s in play.
Two women come into the gallery. They flip through a brochure, whispering.
Maureen introduces herself. She shows them a few showcase pieces, a delicate glass jar, “too small for an adult, maybe for a child or a cat,” and something that looks like a Sumerian wick lantern. They’re curious about a sculpted puppy’s head hanging on the wall near the entrance.
“What’s this about?”
“It’s an urn,” Maureen says.
“You’re kidding.”
“No, you can suspend the ashes inside his head in a velvet bag. The artist does wonderful figurative work. She does these rolling playful dachshunds.”
“Totally nice.”
There’s a clay piece they like, inlaid with leaves and little white
figures dancing in a circle. Maureen turns a knob on top and it spins. “It’s a Tibetan prayer wheel. The prayers and wishes go inside and get shared with the universe.”
She lets them browse.
“See,” she whispers to me, “they’re cheerful. There’s nothing glum about it, it’s a shopping trip.”
One of the browsers spins the prayer wheel again.
Maureen leads me behind a room divider to her office, to show me a sketch for an outdoor installation by an artist who’d done large-scale land art. It was going to be a bunker made of unglazed clay boxes that would hold cremated remains as well as messages written on bits of paper, personal histories and prayers crammed into holes like in the Wailing Wall. The whole piece is designed to fall apart over time, to dissolve in the rain. The ashes would get blown or washed away. Deliberate impermanence. The art isn’t finished when the artist is done building it, it’s finished when it’s ruined by time and the elements.