a producer at CBC Radio Winnipeg in 2006 and a search of the Costco web- site revealed that the consumer wholesale company was selling caskets online and at some of its retail outlets. To Jokinen’s disbelief, a little more surfing revealed a multitude of e-tailers selling mail-order coffins. “Imagine buying your giant industrial tub of relish, a flatscreen TV and a
T
16-gauge stainless steel Kentucky Rose casket at Costco,” he says. “Where do you keep it when you get it home?” Jokinen was coming to a startling conclusion: our collective relationship
with death and ritual had radically changed in his life- time. After producing a short radio piece on the modern
funeral industry, Jokinen knew he’d only scratched the surface. “With the impact of cremation and the social shift away from religion and tradition it seemed to me that the so-called ‘deathcare’ sector was ripe for a closer, deeper look.” So he contacted Neil Bardal, a third-generation un-
dertaker he’d interviewed, and by the time he’d talked his way into an eight-month apprenticeship at Bardal’s funeral home, one of the most morbidly fascinating books of the last decade was well on its way to publi- cation. Prepare to be both shocked and amused by Cur- tains: Adventures of an undertaker in training (out now from Random House Canada), a memoir of Jokinen’s experiences with the dead, as well as an in-depth look at the modern funeral business. Besides letting readers in on the nuts and bolts of cremation and prepping bodies for viewing and burial – how do they keep the corpse’s eyes from opening in the middle of the funeral? – Jokinen explores the industry’s embrace of its customers’ non-religious, pro-consumer-choice values. Want your ashes interred in a teddy bear for your loved ones to cuddle?
How about a portrait painted in oils mixed with your cremated remains? Today’s funeral homes can do that for you. Jokinen is quite candid about his immersion in the eerie world of the dead. “Like most plugged-in Westerners I had very little experience with real
OM JOKINEN DIDN’T JUST WAKE UP ONE DAY AND DECIDE TO devote eight months of his life to slogging coffins, corpses and tubs of embalming fluid in a Winnipeg funeral parlour, then write a book about his experience. It started while he was working as
death,” he admits. “It’s true that as a failed med student I had dissected a cadaver to learn anatomy, but that was a very clinical experience. The dead at a funeral home have names, families, dreams unfulfilled, dogs that loved them: personalities. So the first time I saw a woman getting her hair brushed, dressed in her best blue dress and chunky black shoes, I thought I’d walked into a spa, but of course the woman was dead.” Jokinen never quite got used to the stillness or handling of the departed,
either. “The dead are so very still, so empty. You expect people to do some- thing, anything: wink, scratch an ear, but with the dead there’s not even a spark. ... They’re heavier than you’d expect and very difficult to dress; putting a shirt and suit jacket on a dead man is like trying to put a sweater on a tree.” He says folks should ignore the negative images of
funeral directors fed to us by Hollywood. In Curtains he puts a more human, and more practical, face on those in the industry, portraying them as “regular folks with unusual careers” – many of whom see the job as a way to help people in times of turmoil and vulnerability. Jokinen’s experience also taught him that the funeral
industry will survive society’s shift away from more tra- ditional, expensive burial rites. He sees simpler funer- als in the future, ones that celebrate spiritual and personal beliefs such as eco-consciousness. “Tradition and ritual based on faith have lost their
grip, and commerce is rushing in to fill the gap, as al- ways,” he notes. “More people will want to go out ‘green,’ cremate rather than take up space in a ceme- tery or opt for burial in a natural forest.” Finally, given his matter-of-fact approach to the subject
of the death industry, one can’t help but ask Jokinen if he had any “Boo!” moments while on the job. While he doesn’t have any himself, he does offer up one that happened to a co-worker who encountered the body of a suicide victim. Jokinen relates, “This co-worker couldn’t keep his opinion to himself –
he thought suicide was selfish, and he said so, out loud, with no one else in the building but this dead body. Suddenly, he felt a pair of hands push him, hard, from behind. From then on he decided to keep a cap on his hubris and offer the dead appropriate awe and respect.”
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