Putting the fun in funeral
Hyfler/Rosner
The Toronto Star
August 28, 2005 Sunday
HEADLINE: Putting the fun in funeral's a new mourning,
people
BYLINE: Catherine Dunphy, Toronto Star
The 1947 Caddy with the gleaming whitewalls and smooth
curves is attracting quite a crowd, which is as it should
be, according to Kimberley Darnell.
"You don't get to see it when you're inside," she says, with
a quick grin and toss of her thick blond hair.
No argument here; it's a hearse, and it's parked alongside
an 1883 funeral wagon still used by some Mennonite sects in
the Kitchener-Waterloo region, a slick 2005 funeral coach,
and a long 'n' low Cadillac Superior that isn't being put
into service till the following weekend.
And Darnell, lovely in a low-cut, long, red dress and dangly
gold earrings, thrusting balloons at passing kids, gaily
exhorting people to have some free popcorn and, please, fill
out a ballot for a free barbecue, well, Darnell is a funeral
director.
"Kim puts the fun in funeral," says Graham Bell. He is and
he isn't kidding. He too is a funeral director and embalmer,
resplendent on this hot, hot Saturday in black waistcoat,
striped pants and shiny black shoes.
Their boss, Michael Lodge, is a showstopper in white tails
and black shirt.
"You ever hear of Four Weddings and a Funeral?" he asks.
"Well, this is Four Funerals and a Wedding."
It's actually the Taste of the Danforth, the annual street
fest put on by the merchants of Toronto's Greektown, which
officially starts two blocks west of here, but the Trull
Funeral Home & Cremation Centre, near Donlands, is close
enough for these funeral folks to step out onto the sidewalk
and party with the people.
"We've always been part of the community. We've had garage
sales in our parking lot and organized food drives," says
Lodge.
"Our outreach has always been more than just belonging to
service clubs," says Bell. "It's nice for people to see
we're not all morbid."
True, there are passers-by who quicken their pace and cross
themselves, and others who shield themselves with jokes.
One guy pulls out his cellphone. "Hey, mom," he says into
it. "I'm at a funeral home and I'm eating popcorn."
But west-end resident Marilyn Harris says she thought she
was in the midst of a real funeral.
"People are personalizing their funerals these days. We saw
the balloons and thought some guy wanted to go out happy,"
she says.
Blame it on a drop in religion in Canada. Statistics Canada
reports that the number of people who say they have "no
religion" jumped from 12.3 per cent in 1991 to 16.2 per cent
in 2001.
Church attendance, meanwhile, has dropped dramatically: only
one in five Canadians now attends church every week. More
than four in 10 don't go to church at all.
Consequently, these days many funerals don't dwell on the
afterlife but, rather, are celebrations of the deceased,
complete with PowerPoint presentations, sound and light
shows, art displays, a hired harpist and/or home movies. In
more and more cases, the lugubrious religious ceremony
delivered by a rented minister is being replaced with
speeches by friends and family - and lots and lots of
laughter.
"(Younger) generations place different values on a funeral,"
says Lee Bingley of Ward Funeral Home. "We want to mark it
as an occasion."
Bingley says 90 per cent of Ward's funerals are still
officiated by a minister - "many people still need to be
told their loved one is in a better place" - but it's not
unusual for the clergy member to act more as an emcee than
the dominant player, now that death and dying have become an
individual's last chance to express himself.
And if that means bringing the old Harley into the funeral
home and playing Dixieland jazz, hip-hop, "My Way" or even
the Doobie Brothers' "Jesus is Just Alright," so be it.
Then there is the funeral of Pittsburgh Steeler fanatic
James Henry Smith.
When he died this summer, his wife asked a Pittsburgh
funeral home to set him up on his recliner in his pyjamas,
robe and slippers, with a pack of cigarettes, a beer and his
Steelers cap at his side, a Steelers blanket across his legs
and the remote in his hand.
Lots of people want their last hurrah to be a blast. The
cremated remains of self-declared gonzo journalist Hunter S.
Thompson were shot out of a cannon amid spectacular
fireworks last weekend; those of psychedelic guru Timothy
Leary and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry were blasted
into space in 1997 in what a company in Houston called its
Founders Flight.
According to its website, Celestis has since launched three
other small rockets containing human remains into space from
a California airbase, and there's another one scheduled to
lift off this year.
More earthbound mortals have decided diamonds really are
forever and have instructed those left behind to contact
LifeGem Memorial, a Chicago company that claims to turn
loved ones into diamonds by harvesting the carbon that is in
us. Eternal Reefs will integrate cremated remains into
artificial coral reefs. Other firms offer paintings,
jewellery, candlesticks, even stuffed teddy bears, as the
final resting place.
And does the funeral director bat an eye at any of this? Not
on your life.
Caskets now come with sliding drawers for photos and last
letters, and panels that can be changed to feature fishing,
golfing or gardening motifs. An American company once
produced a casket that came with markers ready for
autographs and written messages from mourners. The company
is out of business, but obliging funeral directors like
Lodge point out that plain pine boxes are also good for
notes to the hereafter.
Lodge lowers his voice as he describes a visit to the
veterinarian for a client whose family wanted to honour her
last wish to be buried with her cat.
In his 32 years in the funeral business, he has buried
cremated remains in bottles of Blue and Blue Light, elderly
spinsters in pristine wedding dresses, a woman in her mink
hat and full length fur coat - in August - more than one
VCR, and many, many golf clubs.
His colleague Bell, who hates Six Feet Under, the television
series about the dysfunctional Fisher family that runs a
funeral home, because it is "horrible, disrespectful and
unprofessional," has stories of the funeral cortege that
pulled up at the Tim Hortons drive-thru because that's what
the deceased used to do every morning.
Kim Hunter of Humphrey's Funeral Homes thinks Six Feet
Under, the finale of which aired last weekend, taught people
that funerals can be much more "relaxed affairs" and that
the family can be involved in every aspect of it, starting
with scrapping the hymnal and selecting Celine Dion and
Sinatra for the music, and ending with bringing the mainsail
of the deceased's boat into the funeral home.
"What's going on now is very much what it should be," he
says.
At Cardinal Funeral Home, owner Jim Cardinal recalls one
family bringing in six carloads of antique dolls collected
by the dearly departed. There was no room for flowers.
Friends and family of an Indian man cleared away all the
chairs, brought in bear rugs, and buried him in his
favourite fishing vest with his rod and reel, line and
tackle box.
"Why not?" asks Cardinal, an ebullient 45-year-old who used
to be a rock drummer before joining the family business. "I
always tell my wife to bury me with my drumsticks."
In fact, he thinks it's the funeral director's job to
encourage the family to express themselves. "A good funeral
is when people gather and there's meaning and they walk off
feeling it was a good send-off," he says. "It's really just
the start of the grief journey."
Stephen Fleming is a York University professor and
psychologist who teaches a very popular course on the
psychology of death and dying.
Among the lessons he teaches is this: mourning is a
society-dictated set of rituals that is supposed to help
people come to terms with their grief but rarely does.
"We tend to have funerals at a time when the people closest
to the person who died can least appreciate it," he says,
although they can comfort those with strong religious faith.
"If you're more of a tepid believer, you've got a problem,"
he says.
Fleming notes that funerals for fallen police officers and
firefighters are often splendid occasions of secular
ritual - the pomp and circumstance provided by solemn but
resplendent rows of fellow officers.
Better, then, that funerals celebrate and acknowledge a life
to make it meaningful, and for $200, Peter Skilleter says he
will do just that. The 57-year-old retired teacher from
Mississauga is a professional eulogist who is willing to
meet with the family for as long as it takes to come up with
the measure of the deceased, frame it within a literary or
philosophical context gleaned from his private collection of
10,000 books, and then shape an intimate service in which he
will deliver the eulogy and everyone else is encouraged to
stand up and say something as well.
"Look, 80 per cent of people at funerals aren't affiliated
with a church, synagogue or mosque, and they don't want a
minister. They don't want bromides and platitudes and the
23rd Psalm. They want a celebration of life," Skilleter
says. "They don't want a stranger doing some kind of rote
exercise. They want to be active participants rather than
passive observers."
For almost 20 years Skilleter worked full- and part-time as
a funeral director and embalmer. Too many ministers or
priests would arrive five minutes before the funeral and
never meet the family, he says. He even witnessed priests
getting the name of the deceased wrong, and it wasn't until
he led a service as a eulogist that he heard laughter at a
funeral.
"It was a wonderful conflagration of tears and laughter," he
recalls.
And it has been a long time coming. It was only at the AIDS
funerals of the late 1980s and 1990s when things began to
change.
"These young men in that community banded together," says
Jim Cardinal. "Their lifestyle wasn't like their parents,
and they weren't (going) to do funerals their way."
Otherwise, there have been few major changes in the way
society deals with death since the U.S. Civil War, when a
Brooklyn doctor invented embalming so the bodies of soldiers
could be shipped home.
For close to a century after that, funeral directors would
embalm the deceased in the home, bring the casket there, set
it up in the living or dining room for visitation, hang the
house with crepe - white for a child, purple or a dark
colour for an adult - and make service calls to the home
with flowers three times a day.
"When we got air conditioning in the funeral home, I started
talking people into having it all at the home," recalls
Harold Morden, owner of Bates & Dodds funeral home for 42
years until 1984.
These days funeral homes are reinventing themselves. They
have to, what with the growing popularity of the so-called
eco, or green, funerals - which eschew embalming and promote
the use of all-natural shrouds or caskets made of
bio-degradable material - and the fact that some people
would rather send their condolences online than show up for
a visitation at a funeral home.
And so they will arrange with a race track to spread the
remains of a man who went to the track every day, or order a
casket with racing stripes, or smile gamely when 100
motorcycles bearing members of the Hells Angels show up to
accompany their comrade to the cemetery.
Some are going even further. Last month, when the Bay Garden
Cremation, Funeral & Memorial Centre Inc. opened its doors
across the road from Hamilton's Royal Botanical Gardens, 540
of the best-dressed types showed up.
Owner Jan Nicholls and his staff wore pink ties, and
everybody oohed at the sheer luxury of the place. Those
tasteful reception rooms are designed to hold bridal
showers, anniversary parties, baby showers, and perhaps even
weddings, as well as funerals.
Back on the Danforth, Kimberley Darnell is tying a balloon
onto a child's stroller when four kids, none older than 10,
approach her.
"What are you celebrating?" the tallest one asks.
"We're celebrating life," she says.
The kids squint through the sun at her, not convinced.
"You know what we are?" she continues, handing each of them
a balloon on a string. "We're a funeral home where we take
care of people when they die."
Half a block away, the four boys stop and release their
balloons. They soar into the cloudless blue sky and, for a
few moments, everyone and everything in front of the Trull
Funeral Home stops and watches them disappear.
GRAPHIC: Vince Talotta toronto star Definitely not morbid
anymore: Graham Bell, an embalmer and funeral director at
Trull Funeral Home, hams it up during Taste of the Danforth
earlier this month. courtesy hbo Eco-friendly: A character
is buried unembalmed, wrapped in a shroud and in a meadow in
a scene from Six Feet Under.courtesy hbo Eco-friendly: A
character is buried unembalmed, wrapped in a shroud and in a
meadow in a scene from Six Feet Under.