Review
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“You’d hardly expect a book about the disposal of the dead to be funny, but . . . [Jokinen] manages to inject plenty of humour into his examination of a service we’ll all be needing one of these days.”
— Times Colonist
"What [Jokinen] has produced is absorbing, at times cringe-inducing, thought-provoking and illuminating. In other words, a great read."
— Ottawa Citizen
"[A] revealing and respectful book."
— Winnipeg Free Press
"Curtains is a frequently amusing book. The death business requires a sense of humour . . . and Jokinen has a deft comic touch."
— National Post
"Lively and literate. . . . a book about . . . the pleasures of good writing, close observation, a thoughtful voice, a well-told story, a loving if skeptical take on reality, a detailed sense of irony and humour, a thirst for exploration. In all, it is a fine piece of work."
— The Globe and Mail
“Intuitively answers all the questions that you’d never ask aloud. . . . It’s great reading.”
— The Coast (Halifax)
From the Trade Paperback edition.
“You’d hardly expect a book about the disposal of the dead to be funny, but . . . [Jokinen] manages to inject plenty of humour into his examination of a service we’ll all be needing one of these days.”
— Times Colonist
"What [Jokinen] has produced is absorbing, at times cringe-inducing, thought-provoking and illuminating. In other words, a great read."
— Ottawa Citizen
"[A] revealing and respectful book."
— Winnipeg Free Press
"Curtains is a frequently amusing book. The death business requires a sense of humour . . . and Jokinen has a deft comic touch."
— National Post
"Lively and literate. . . . a book about . . . the pleasures of good writing, close observation, a thoughtful voice, a well-told story, a loving if skeptical take on reality, a detailed sense of irony and humour, a thirst for exploration. In all, it is a fine piece of work."
— The Globe and Mail
“Intuitively answers all the questions that you’d never ask aloud. . . . It’s great reading.”
— The Coast (Halifax)
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Product Description
If Bill Bryson were to join a Winnipeg funeral home as an apprentice, and if he searched for the meaning of life and death while he was at it, you'd have Curtains - enlightening, full of life in the midst of death, and very funny.
"There's a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to civilians, and they're happy with that arrangement. My job covers that gap."
At forty-four Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry: is this really the way we want to say our final goodbyes? The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker. Curtainsis about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the heart and head are the last parts to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; funeral directors have been known to dance during the service - out of sight of funeral goers, of course, and with the utmost respect for the dead. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust - or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved - Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century.
"There's a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to civilians, and they're happy with that arrangement. My job covers that gap."
At forty-four Tom Jokinen began to seriously question the secular funeral rites that are taking over the industry: is this really the way we want to say our final goodbyes? The question had such a hard grip on his Finnish soul that he decided to quit his job in order to become an apprentice undertaker. Curtainsis about what he found, from the mundane to the macabre. Among the things he learned: in cremation, the heart and head are the last parts to burn; purple lipstick looks best on a dead man; funeral directors have been known to dance during the service - out of sight of funeral goers, of course, and with the utmost respect for the dead. For anyone who's secretly wondered why they paid $2000 for a 5-lb bag of dust - or questioned whether that dust was really the person they loved - Curtains lifts the veil on the funeral industry in the 21st century.
About the Author
TOM JOKINEN is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. He has also worked as a railroad operator, an editorial cartoonist and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
The Factory
The 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 cham...
The Factory
The 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 cham...
