Things to Do in Vancouver When You’re Dead
Anakana Schofield · At the Final Disposition Forum
A Saturday morning, the first in my 40th year, I’m at the Mountain View Cemetery for ‘The Final Disposition Forum: De-Mystifying Death, Funerals, Cemeteries and Ceremonies’. I’ve come to face my fear of being buried in Vancouver, where I’ve lived for the past decade. I arrive late, the film A Family Undertaking has already started. On screen a set of cold-looking turned-out feet.The acoustics are terrible. But the feet are a good set, the ubiquitous final set. I am reassured, when my moment comes, I too will have a set of absolutely dead feet.
As the home burial movement film continues we watch a man make his father’s coffin and together they brand his initials on it. The father wears an eye patch. They eat eggs and salad. When he dies we see them lovingly plonking him in the coffin. Another woman will go out in cardboard and her dog’s paint-dipped paw is decorating it. When she dies, her husband vacuums the room and they have a merry old gathering around her. I'm already feeling brighter about dying, if it spawns a bit of hoovering.
Another man says he has no intention of being ‘bled and pickled by a funeral home’ (I agree with him, strike off embalming). Cut to a funeral conference in Florida. Excitable sales pitching of death as a product, exploitation of the vulnerable, tips along the lines of ‘don’t even think of putting mama into the ground in a cheap casket.’ The only useful thing on offer: a candle that burns for eleven and a half years.
Film ends: a break for mingling. I ask the woman behind why she’s here. She replies sensibly about dealing with parents. I can’t help scanning faces to see whether anyone is a bit blue about the lips. There’s one very well made-up woman who nods off intermittently. The funeral industry people – all pleasant males – are wearing suits and carrying folders. Except one who’s gone for more of a gravedigger look in baseball cap and T-shirt branded with the name of his crematorium. The eco-burial man wears a pink shirt. There’s no coffee, only tea. I tell a few people I am here because I want to write a book about what it is to die in Vancouver. No one says this is a good idea. One funeral industry type runs off saying nice to meet me but he’s got to get something from his car.
After the break it’s the palliative care presentation. A doctor from the health authority talks us through some slides. She’s bright, engaging, practical. She’s a great advert for dying. I want her to bury me. I want to go tomorrow morning and have a rest in this place she describes. I am struck by the similarities between birth and death, how critical the right level of pain medication is.
Between slides that explain ‘Death is a process not a moment, what tells us death is near? Decreased appetite and thirst are normal, feeding artificially does not change the course of decline,’ I stare out the strip of window. Beyond a cherry tree in blossom, three backs are bent, weeding and attending a grave. It might not be so bad to be buried here. It’s a beautiful day. The woman beside me makes distracting snorty noises, while laboured breathing from a man further back smoothes them out.
Things tense up with our next speaker: a funeral director with a funeral-tuned voice. Barry says he liked the film and then systematically disputes much of what was in it. He’s particularly aggrieved at the presence of a trolley at each home burial, which he says cost three to five grand. How would a family get this trolley? He goes through the costs and the practicalities, how much more complicated it is for families to deal with the logistics than the film suggests. He backs this up with descriptions of the process of dealing with a body, permits and paperwork until…empowered by the film, the war on Barry erupts.
A woman disputes something legal outright. I say the people in the film may have borrowed the trolley. And then up he rises: a man with heart failure and months to live, who has written down his grievances against the regulated business of burial in the back of a blue diary. He lets Barry have them. The woman hosting the forum tries to get the microphone back from him, but he won’t give it up (‘I’m not finished’) and clutches it tighter, readjusts the diary and continues. ‘You’re not permitted to do what you could do when you’d no money in the 1920s and 1930s.’ He says he has been trying to ‘sort out his marker’, he’s been ‘given the runaround’, I think he talks about his wife thirty years ago, at this point he could announce the tennis scores because I just love him for standing up there and giving out because dying is an unfair business and someone should shout about it.
Except poor Barry is really taking it now. To the head, to the ears, to the stomach, like a hockey goalie stripped of his helmet, gloves and blocker. He looks kind of stunned, after all he came to explain how willing he is to work with families. And he is, he’s willing to facilitate whatever, however much involvement they want. I don’t think he planned for burial uprising. The cemetery director has had enough. Up he stands, holding his hands out. ‘I have to interrupt,’ he says. ‘We do not make the regulations, your government do.’
Things calm down once it’s established that it’s all the government’s fault. Barry is released and the amiable cemetery director takes over. ‘It’s not about you, you’re dead, it’s about those left behind.’ He talks about memorialisation, perpetual care (think lawn-mowing), vaults, liners, multiple and additional interments, scattering cremated remains, the need for a bit more effort and thought in the area of headstones.
After his talk, I have to bail, missing, alas, green burial. I ask the artist in residence who’s speaking last and was the person I mainly came to hear if she’ll email me her notes. The best thing I learn is that the cemetery is full so I can’t be buried in a casket in Vancouver. Urns only need apply.
Comments
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14 May 2010
at
4:48pm
loxhore
says:
Here's a place to settle something. Is a local more likely to say:
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14 May 2010
at
5:51pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
loxhore
What a fine question! Just surveyed 7 people in a caff. 5 say emphasis on first VANcouver. 1 from Ontario emphasis on second. One bloke says emphasize all three. The French say vancouVER. I think the first VANcuver, but it's VANcoover.
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14 May 2010
at
8:07pm
Bob Beck
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
Odd: I've heard VANcuver/VANcoover rarely, if at all, in about 20 years here. But then it's debatable how many born-and-raised locals I've met. Like me, many (most? no idea, really) came from elsewhere. There are other resemblences to California.
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14 May 2010
at
10:04pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
Bob Beck
I guess most people who live here might simply call it here or refer to their neighbourhood.
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15 May 2010
at
5:10am
Bob Beck
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
Mostly vanCOOver, or -- from a West Van friend -- vanCYOUver.
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15 May 2010
at
6:35pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
The verdict is in. Tall male born, bred and barely budged from here says VANcoover, but there's no big VAN on the VAN more of a gentle exhale.
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14 May 2010
at
4:53pm
A.J.P. Crown
says:
I want to be buried sitting in a chair. I'm not going to spend eternity strap-hanging, but sitting takes up less space than lying down does. Ideally, if I can resolve the condensation problem, I'll have my head above the surface in a glass dome.
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15 May 2010
at
6:24pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
A.J.P. Crown
An active challenge to ALCAR!
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15 May 2010
at
6:39pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
ALCOR even. I think ALCAR may be an aluminium smelting facility.
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15 May 2010
at
7:35pm
A.J.P. Crown
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
I'm no expert, but I believe burial is unexplored territory for conceptual artists. It's a perfect way for someone who wants to extend his/her career past death but can't afford ALCOR.
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15 May 2010
at
7:51pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
A.J.P. Crown
I am beyond thrilled at the prospect of stuffing, something I'd never heard of. Is Jeremy Bentham actively stuffed right now?
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15 May 2010
at
9:13pm
A.J.P. Crown
says:
@
A.J.P. Crown
Jeremy Bentham and the Auto-icon.
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14 May 2010
at
6:29pm
itsnotpunk
says:
My father for years has said that he wish's to have his ash's spread on the street that he grew up on. Now he's thinking some with his mother and some with his father.
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15 May 2010
at
6:20pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
itsnotpunk
Tuesday is a better day for being deposited.
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14 May 2010
at
10:39pm
Phil Edwards
says:
How would I like to be buried? Tidily, unobtrusively, appropriately. None of my business hanging around after I'm dead.
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15 May 2010
at
5:14am
Bob Beck
says:
@
Phil Edwards
I had a friend who'd occasionally say -- sometimes a propos of nothing in particular -- that he expected to die by lighting his cigarette on the third rail of the Moscow subway. *That* was a conversation-stopper.
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15 May 2010
at
6:46pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
The patron (living) Saint of not dying or putting up the fists against mortality lives, I believe, in Cambridge. The bearded punting bloke. On boat, not bike, note.
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15 May 2010
at
7:10pm
Phil Edwards
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
I thought for a moment you were talking about Jeremy Bentham, although it turns out he's in London. Who are you talking about?
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15 May 2010
at
7:35pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
Aubrey de Grey is the dude I am talking about.
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15 May 2010
at
7:51pm
Jenny Diski
says:
@
Anakana Schofield
Aubrey de Grey: SENS: Strategy for Engineered Negligible Senesence.
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15 May 2010
at
7:48pm
Jenny Diski
says:
Could be worse:
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15 May 2010
at
7:55pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
Jenny Diski
I am kinda astonished nobody buried in Vancouver has come out to defend the experience.
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16 May 2010
at
8:36pm
Penny
says:
I'm not buried in Vancouver, but my father, who's buried in Toronto, was very pleased that the cemetery he paid for in advance was very close to Tim Horton's (he had a friendly relationship with their donuts) and also to the grocery store who used to deliver to his apartment. I always stop for a coffee and a donut when I go to visit his grave, and do look around for signs of grocery wrappers.
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17 May 2010
at
8:38am
Mike Killingworth
says:
@
Penny
I'm not buried in Vancouver either but my father was cremated on Vancouver Island. His ashes were then flown back to the UK and interred in a churchyard in the Lake District (he'd been churchwarden there before he emigrated). He had an unexpected bath last year when the Derwent burst its banks; the Church authorities assure me he's still there. However a post mortem trip to the coast (as though he were some sort of salmon) would've appealed to his sense of humour.
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17 May 2010
at
8:49pm
Anakana Schofield
says:
@
Mike Killingworth
Mike,
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18 May 2010
at
12:15am
Bob Beck
says:
@
Mike Killingworth
A similar experience here would have required your father to be buried in Richmond or Delta. But no-one is buried in Richmond, at least. The water table's only four feet down or so, depending on the tide.
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23 May 2010
at
3:35am
marinaroy
says:
AK, I think Mountainview is the cemetery where Jeff Wall shot his photograph Flooded Grave. Well, one of the places. He shot part of it in one cemetery and then stitched it with another, and then shots in the studio: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/infocus/section5/img2.shtm
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28 July 2013
at
5:01pm
Pam Nixon
says:
Regarding Jeremy Bentham - His stuffed body is somewhere in University College London - once known as 'The godless institution on Gower Street. My daughter was a student there back in the 80s but she never found out where he was kept
Read moreVANcuver
or
vanKUVer?
I recall hearing both when there.
Also, and offtopic:who would I really like to read on this week's political japes? Perry Anderson -- in light especially of his dismissiveness about Britain's recent political history. Is the Larbie on the case? I know it's reader requests day.
And now to settle thatnaphobia or thanaphobia: fear of dying, which is it?
On topic, sort of: many years ago I read that when overcrowding in New York cemeteries became a problem, it was proposed that coffins be buried vertically -- but that so many people protested, finding this idea creepy, that it was dropped. But I've never been able to confirm the truth or otherwise of this story.
What have you heard it called in past 20 years Bob I am curious?
I shall survey my two local born males at supper for pronunciations. AK
I can't recall how my late father-in-law said it, though he maintained pronunciations -- capiLYno, for example, instead of the more common capiLAno -- that otherwise seem to have gone out of usage.
Though I hesitate to ask: is a fear of being buried, or a fear of being buried in Vancouver particularly, that you've been confronting?
Small male will only say the words Green Day.
Bob Beck re: your question below...
In contrast to Becker's Denial of Death I am indefatigably preoccupied with it! But specifically burial here sends me into a conniption, so decided to uncover what it is die here.
What about the double-wide glass dome, then you'd have someone to look at and have an eyebrow twitching chat to?
If you don't like the idea of being buried in Vancouver, have you considered the advantages of being stuffed, like Jeremy Bentham? It makes your remains more portable; there are some really lightweight materials these days, I don't think they use straw anymore. Otherwise, you could be put in a planter on the roof of a skyscraper with a view out to sea.
I quite fancy having Keats's inscription on my gravestone, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water", there's a chance it might egg people on to research biographies.
I would be very cheap to stuff as there's not much of me.
Alcor are offering freezing heads only these days. No frills (or thrills) approach?
I want to be buried in a cask. Or perhaps mummified. As long as it's not on a Sunday.
Then I'm all good.
What was the street like that your father grew up on? Am trying to visualize the distribution of ashes on standard council paving slabs. It's not inviting. I keep seeing the soles of trainers and bike tyres.
One of those ubiquitous newspaper questionnaires used to ask people "How would you like to die?" This always struck me as a silly question, and it got a lot of silly (or staringly obvious) answers - quickly, peacefully, at a great age, surrounded by my family, etc. I used to wish I was eminent enough to be questionnaired; I would have said, I should like to be executed by drowning. This was on the logic that I wouldn't actually like to die at all, but better an important and dramatic unthinkable thing than a ordinary everyday unthinkable thing.
In retrospect, perhaps he was a closet surrealist.
Who wouldn't want that strategy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence
W. C. Fields epitaph: All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia
You are right. It is actively worse. I have made a complete balls of planting beans and truly deserve stuffing for this offence. Who screws up planting beans?
Thanks for this story, I confess I rather share your dad's sense of humour and found your description v funny.
Thanks for sharing this experience. I especially like the guy with the blue diary--I was cheering him on as i read your piece. We're completely at the mercy of a market that preys on grief and guilty consciences. Real estate for the dead in Vancouver. To match the insanity of real estate for the living in Vancouver.