A Coffin, A Casket

The summer I was nine or ten, my mother and I flew back east to Erie, Pennsylvania to visit family there-my cousin Leo and his mother, my mother’s sister in law. Given I was so young, my memory is somewhat unreliable, but I do know that somehow or other during our visit my aunt’s relations came to town. I believe this was a sibling of hers, a man whose name I don’t remember in the slightest, and his children, who were a little younger than Leo and myself.

In any case, the most pertinent and memorable detail about this man was that he was a funeral director. I had some vague notions about the concept of death, and I understood enough to feel generally uneasy around this man, who had a very austere attitude and didn’t seem to find any humour whatsoever in his occupation. I do recall asking his daughter, my cousin’s cousin, if she had ever seen a dead body.

“Yeah,” she had replied, unfazed. She was clearly bored by the question.

The purpose for their visit, I gathered, was a funeral director’s convention being held at the Rainbow Gardens ballroom space at Waldameer, an Erie amusement park. It’s beyond me why the adults decided that this would make an entertaining diversion for the children (it’s possible controlled substances were involved) but somehow we all found ourselves piling out of a car in front of the convention centre entrance.

Spit shined black hearses were parked outside, with suited sales people attached. There was also a display of granite memorial stones. My thoughts about the whole enterprise prior to arrival had not led me to this particular conclusion, but I was beginning to cotton on to the inevitable theme: dead people. Clothes for dead people to wear, boxes for dead people to lie in, cars to drive dead people around, and stones to place over dead people.

To say the event was formative might be an exaggeration, but it’s safe to say it had a lasting effect on the way I think about life after death. As I walked into the vast space and looked around, I realized with a morbid thrill, that I had been ushered into a world rarely seen by those outside the trade. A show room had been erected in the centre of the convention and stocked with a large and well-appointed selection of caskets, lids flipped open to reveal the satin upholstery inside. After I vocalized a nervous observation about the coffins, I was given a stern, unsmiling lecture by our funeral director relative about the difference between a casket and a coffin. Coffins were wider at the head and narrow at the feet. Nobody used coffins any more, he explained, and the rectangular boxes used now were referred to as caskets. At the age of ten I was given to understand that “coffin” both as a term and a receptacle was considered passé by the industry insiders. I have not made the mistake since.

We did the rounds, inspecting “eternity wear”, suits that zipped up the back, and dresses of chintzy gauzy pastel covered fabric that invariably reminded me of fluffy old night dresses. There was also makeup, embalming chemicals, and more headstones, looking quite strange on their plastic grass display. It’s disconcerting, seeing a grave stone out of its native grave yard, the “here lies” truncated, standing guard over Astro Turf and a cement floor.

Perhaps the strangest detail was the convention’s theme. It was the decision of those managing the event that it should be “Mexican” theme, the resulting bad Mariachi music and sublimely racist “Mexican” card board cut out decorations (sombrero, burro and maracas) coming together to create a pitiful and impotent effort to inject some “family fun” into the surreal landscape. They even included a scavenger hunt, by virtue of which the young children –of which there were a surprising number- could visit each of the exhibitions in turn and receive candy and prizes from the sales people. At one of the stands, I got a small bottle of embalmer’s disinfectant.

The most surreal aspect of the entire event was not the overwhelming attention being paid to death, but of the carefully concealed reality. That is, of course, the entire purpose behind the funeral industry- to insulate people from the reality of what is happening to their loved one. Underneath the glaring lights of the Rainbow Gardens, it’s easy to forget the entire purpose of each display is to add some kind of tangible, material quality to death in order to make it more integrated in our ideas of ourselves. It’s not until you look at the labels on the brightly coloured chemical bottles do you realize that the process behind making a dead body fit for viewing before its internment is a messy, undignified process, involving the draining of fluids and the use of plastic molds to restore sunken eyes or caved in faces. Every single thing I saw during that strange day was conceived to try and restore some idea of dignity to the person departed, and distract from the biological process of decay.

I don’t know if it was the result of this experience or if it would’ve happened anyway, but I have a healthy fascination with death. I’ve had death in my family. My father died several years ago, and while it was my step mother’s wish to hold a viewing, I did not set foot in that funeral home. It could be that I simply knew the façade was just that, or that I had last seen my father alive and that was the memory I preferred. While I was in film school, a group of students shot a documentary on the process of embalming and cremation, and at this juncture I am probably more informed about mortuary practices than anyone really ought to be.

The unsettling feeling that struck my ten year old self, upon reflection, seems to me now to be a reaction to the artifice and commodification of death rather than the fear of death itself. A coffin by any other name is still a box in the ground, and the idea of storing my chemically preserved remains in something that can be viewed in last month’s catalog just seems like the ultimate act of consumer denial. Now you now purchase caskets at Costco- there’s a display with sample casket corners bolted into the wall. The Mexican one is a muted pink, with cameos of Our Lady of Guadalupe fixed on the corners.

Having a realistic sense of my own mortality, I’ve considered what I might want for myself after death, and I’m adamant on cremation, preferably the old Roman way. I want to be cremated on a pyre, wrapped in a shroud, with a coin in my teeth for the ferryman. It might strike some as primitive, or even barbaric, but for my part, I simply prefer to think of it as cutting out the middle man.