In the Slender Margin (16 page)

Some of the urns in her care were brought to her by strangers in the community who just happened to find them. One man found an urn in a dryer he bought at a used-appliance store; another found a container of ashes on a city bench. There are others, Lorraine tells me, who ask how much money it would cost to put the ashes in the ground on top of an existing grave, and who balk when they find out there is a minimal fee for someone to lift the sod and place the ashes in the grave. “It’s not unusual,” she says, “to find ashes dumped on top of graves.” What people don’t think about is how leaf blowers or lawn mowers will disperse them in a matter of seconds.

Ashes, it seems, point to the complexities of human relationships and the complications of grief.

There are others, she notes, who are extraordinarily attentive and for whom the cremated remains of their loved ones are precious. On a very basic level, it is about respect.

Having unclaimed remains sitting on a shelf in a funeral
home, to some cultures, would mean their loved one is not at peace. First Nations people have spent decades recovering the bones of their ancestors from museums around the world, and, Lorraine tells me, in recent years a number of Japanese people have approached her about how to go about retrieving the bodies of family members who are interred in graveyards that are now being bulldozed in order to build shopping malls. She will not rest until the ashes in her care are properly buried, and she says that, in the near future, the remains from the forty urns will be placed in an unrecoverable, unmarked grave. She will have a simple ceremony to lay to rest the ashes that nobody wants.

We hedge our bets. If there is an afterlife, we’d best get there well equipped. Early Upper Paleolithic burial sites contained necklaces, bracelets, hunting weapons, and objects made of animal teeth. Some bodies were buried with tools, others with ornaments made of shells and stone beads—grave goods, as they are known.

Oh, build your ship of death
, instructed D. H. Lawrence,
your little ark / and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine / for the dark flight down oblivion.

We filled my mother’s little ark with a fair share of grave goods: letters, books, poems, CDs, Werther’s candies in gold wrappers, a medal on a ribbon, a beaded eagle feather, Shakespeare’s twenty-ninth sonnet, a flask of cognac and other things I have forgotten. All reduced to ash, and all four pounds poured into an urn no bigger than a Venti latte
from Starbucks. Outside the funeral home, steam rose off the horses’ coats; a little farther up the canyon, the river was thundering through the narrow walls. Only later did I realize her casket had been made of cardboard. I hadn’t thought to ask them to put her in a plain one made of pine. I wish I had.

MY BROTHER IS BURIED IN THE NORTH VANCOUVER CEMETERY
not far from a wildlife refuge at the foot of Grouse Mountain. The white wolves who roam there—retirees from the movie industry—can be heard howling in the city on cold nights when sound travels with a sharp clarity. Not long ago, quite by accident, I found out that the husband of a good friend of mine had attended UBC in the early sixties and that not only had he known my brother, but he also knew of a friend who had helped with the funeral arrangements.

There is a genteel, almost a mannered sound to the words
the arrangements.
Take out
the
and put
funeral
in front and one can imagine a kind of hushed solemnity. Think again. The etymology of
arrangement,
from the Old French
arengier
(twelfth century), is “to draw a line of battle,” from
a
“to” and
rangier
“set in a row.” The battle lines were drawn in the living room filled with white lilies while I played horses in the basement.

It wasn’t until I spoke to Gary, the friend, that I understood what the battle lines were.

Dee, he told me, wanted Ian’s body buried and my mother wanted him cremated after a small service at the local parish church. He told me that Dee had called him and asked him to stand with her against my mother. “There will be no service,” she said.

“It was a rainy day,” he recalled. “We all stood around a gaping hole in the ground. Nobody said a word.” There was no mention of God or Allah, Buddha or Krishna. There was no service. “Nobody knew what to do.” When there is no outlet, no way to speak, mourning goes underground. It moves along those same streams that ghosts are said to travel on.

I don’t know how to think about this—the adamance of it, the intransigence; the pigheadedness of it. All I can think of—the only sense I can make of this—is that it was a time of change, a transition.
You must change your life,
wrote Rilke in “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” Of course, this is true; and yet, when great change happens, when the old order is breaking down and the new one is not yet defined, what do we do in the space between? When the religiosity of the past no longer works at the graveside, when sermons fail to move us and the business of death knows nothing of the spirit, what do we do?

Ian died shortly after Jessica Mitford exposed the funeral industry in
The American Way of Death.
Traditional ceremonies no longer made sense. It was a time of protest: against war, poverty, racism, religion and “the Establishment.” What could theology say about death in an age when the question
Is God Dead?
was about to be emblazoned in large black letters against a red background on the cover of
Time
magazine?

Two weeks after the accident, my sister, Carol, was married. Our mother, barely in this world, put on a black and white polka-dot dress, short white gloves, nylons and heels and took me with her to City Hall. After the brief ceremony, we went back with my sister and her husband to their friend’s house on Fourth Avenue, where the air was thick with the sweet scent of dope and people were sitting around on the floor. Someone gave my sister a joint, inside a roll of Life Savers, which she smoked for breakfast the next morning. The mantra of the sixties, “God is love,” had no answer for tragedy. My mother stayed for a little while and then she excused us and we caught a bus at the corner and went home.

When neither the funeral nor the wedding is recognizable to you—how grieve? how celebrate?

The legacy for my mother was one of pain. The lingering grief of nothing mentioned. The importance of ritual, of pausing to acknowledge the magnitude of death, the small kindnesses that are meant to visit one in times of loss—all were absent. We use the words
grief
and
mourning
interchangeably—thinking they are the same. They are not. Grief is what the bereaved feel inside; mourning is the expression of those thoughts and feelings. The silence we lived with was the silence of the void. There was no healing, no movement. There was no crack like the sound a frozen river makes when it starts to run. We were frozen in grief.

How, I wonder, do we hold on to things of value as we change? It would have been good if someone had spoken that day. A few words. Maybe a few lines from his favourite poem by Shakespeare:

Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone …

All lovers young, all lovers must

Consign to thee, and come to dust.

Maybe someone could have told a story about him and someone else given a drunken toast. Maybe the wolves could have started up, calling out to each other, as the blue casket was lowered slowly into the muddy hole in the ground.

And then it would have been all right to be silent. It would have been just fine.

Gloria Dei

I once attended a funeral at which the mourners got into their cars, turned on their headlights and followed the hearse as it wound through the town carrying the body of a friend. We drove slowly along the streets he had played on as a child, past the house he was born in, over the railway tracks and past his favourite bar. It was a glorious winter day. The sun was out and the late-winter steelhead were on their way upriver. It was his favourite time of year. We drove along ordinary streets in ordinary neighbourhoods. A boy pedalled his bike beside us, people waved; it was as if we were on parade. My friend was having a last look around and we were his eyes.

There were police cars at the main intersections and constables waving the procession through the red lights. Death was passing like a long freight train.
Because I could not stop for death
, wrote Dickinson,
he kindly stopped for me.
Traffic backed up on either side of the road. There was nothing for the drivers to do but sit and wait.

I will teach you my townspeople / how to perform a funeral
, wrote William Carlos Williams in 1916:

See! the hearse leads.

I begin with a design for a hearse.

For Christ’s sake not black—

nor white either—and not polished!

Let it be weathered—like a farm wagon—

with gilt wheels (this could be

applied fresh at small expense)

or no wheels at all:

a rough dray to drag over the ground.

We do not see funeral processions as frequently today as we did in the past. Along with a decline in traditional religious practice, we have fewer rituals with which to express grief; fewer ways to acknowledge death. In small towns it may still be possible to see a procession pass by. However, in cities, where we’re largely anonymous to each other, it is harder to see visible evidence of mourning—the funeral coach or the farm wagon—although sometimes the procession simply takes another form.

My friend Claudia, whose brother died in an accident when he was twenty-six, told me the image of my brother crossing the country in a blue casket has merged with the memory of her brother’s coffin being escorted by what seemed like the entire contingent of the Squamish Hells Angels, “a slow motorcycle cavalcade from Gloria Dei along the Upper Levels to the cemetery on the hill.” It was, she said, an odd, deeply reassuring, unexpected and terribly funny moment. “He wasn’t an Angel,” says Claudia. “He had some kind of honorary status—maybe they loved his smartass sense of humour, his fringed leather jacket, his Dayton boots which lent him a couple of much-needed inches.” Her father, who she was sure was going to follow her brother into the grave that day, not only took the presence of this revving multitude well, but felt the magnitude of the honour along with all who had gathered. “The sheer noise, the massed chorus of bikes and the enormous number of ferocious-looking men did, in that moment, and for the rest of our lives, counterbalance
and give voice to the immensity of pain we all felt.” Who amongst us would not want the multitudes assembled and revving their choppers in a massed chorus at our passing?

Funerals serve to separate the dead from the living, and the funeral cortège, starting from a church or funeral home and ending up at the cemetery or crematorium, is visible evidence of this symbolic transition.
Procession
, derived from the Latin
processionem
, means “a marching onward”;
cortège
, a word we use interchangeably with
procession
, comes from the Old French
cortège
and refers to “a train of attendants.” Before there were cars or motorized funeral coaches, the casket was carried in a horse-drawn carriage, behind which the mourners walked. Sometimes it’s even simpler than that. After a formal funeral service is held in St. Paul’s, on the Mission Reserve, the men of the community form a line from the church steps to the cemetery five hundred yards down the road. They carry the coffin a short distance and then hand it over to the next group, who carry it before handing it to the next in line. The rest of the mourners—men, women and children—walk slowly behind the casket as it makes its way to the graveyard. The kind of walk Williams might have taken.

Then briefly as to yourselves:

Walk behind—as they do in France,

seventh class, or if you ride

Hell take curtains! Go with some show

of inconvenience; sit openly—

to the weather as to grief.

Or do you think you can shut grief in?

What—from us? We who have perhaps

nothing to lose? Share with us

share with us—it will be money

in your pockets.

I once made this walk in winter; the wind was howling and snow was shifting in whirlpools along the ground and blowing in my eyes. Trees thrashed all around us, but like the eye of a hurricane, inside the cemetery was completely silent and still. For a short while the world was quiet and then, of course, we all walked back into the raging wind.

Cemeterian and Royal Oak Burial Park client supervisor Lorraine Fracy remembers the day, in the mid-1990s, when she realized respect for the dead was no longer what it had been. It was a warm spring day and she was carrying the body of a nineteen-year-old girl to the burial ground in a long black hearse. She nosed the coach out into the traffic and stopped a few inches into a crosswalk when the light turned yellow. A man in a three-piece suit gave her the finger as he walked around the front of her car. At that moment she thought to herself, Respect for the dead is null and void.

We are poorer in the West for our lack of ritual, for what we have forgotten about a shared grief—for thinking we can shut it in. In the past, priests were our practitioners of loss; we now have celebrants legally authorized to conduct weddings and funerals. Boomers, having written their own wedding vows and birthing ceremonies, are now creating their own funeral traditions. The trend is towards celebrating a life as opposed to mourning a death. It’s as if we fear the rawness of grief, caught between the Latin
celebrare
“to sing someone’s praises” and the Germanic
murnan
“to remember sorrowfully.” Ceremonies are conducted in backyards, yacht clubs, hotels and golf courses. Like the funerals I held in my mother’s garden, these ones too could be confused with weddings. The emphasis on celebration seems far removed from the bewilderment of loss. Do we hope that celebration will spare us? Do we think, in our wildly hopeful hearts, that we can dodge this bullet? We have forgotten what Samuel Johnson knew about human sorrow: that it requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed, that the dead should return, that the past should be recalled. We have, I believe, lost a certain
gravitas
—a weight of sorrow. Not that celebration is a bad thing; the Irish, with their singing and wailing, eating and drinking, seem to have it down just right.