After quitting a comfortable government job, Tom Jokinen takes up a position as an apprentice undertaker. Working in a family run funeral home in Canada, Jokinen begins to feel increasingly perturbed with the way much of the Western world treats death, in particular the evolution of the funeral itself. As more people begin to turn to cremation as a viable option for post-mortem disposal, and secular rituals begin to take place of the religious, what becomes of the humble funeral home? Jokinen uses his own on the job experience, some journalistic investigation and a good sense of humour to explore this idea further in his memoir Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training.
People don’t want to know. There’s a time, from when someone dies to when they magically pop up at the funeral or the cemetery or as a bag of ashes, that remains a black hole, invisible to the rest of the world, and everyone’s happy with that arrangement. We in funeral service cover the gap. People pay us to keep to ourselves what goes on there.
The changing socio-cultural value of the funeral is at the heart of what Jokinen is investigating. Through a look at the funeral business itself, and how it has had to adapt to changing attitudes toward the funeral, he reminds the reader that undertaking is, above all, a business. And that in business, and the commercial world, people will seek value for money, even if it is at the expense of respect and dignity for the dead. The growing trend of personalized memorial services is also being capitalized on by the industry, and it’s not hard to see why. As the popularity of cremation grows the funeral industry loses their profit from embalming, caskets, flowers, services, etc, and so they’ve had to adapts their services in an increasingly secular world that ultimately aims to celebrate the individual.
What Jokinen is really mourning is the loss of communal ritual and tradition. He provides indepth descriptions of how people of different faiths ritualize death, and how the tradition of that is waning in the face of growing religious scepticism. Now, he argues, with no religious links or community to guide our actions and reactions to death, we’re gradually becoming a generation that has lost touch with the inevitability of death, we’re insulated from it to the point of ignorance. We’ve replaced faith and the tribe with an overzealous faith in science and medical technology, which, obviously, cannot prevent death and fails to offer a way to deal with it.
Scatter where you want, bury where you wish, but do something with intent, don’t be passive and follow what commissioned pre-need salesmen consider the norm. Use your imagination, balance your spiritual beliefs with guesswork, but do the work: accept we know nothing about death, take a leap of faith, and have the courage to act anyway.
Through his examination of the various rituals we use, Jokinen comes to a conclusion that could work as an effective market for the environmentally and socially aware or perhaps just an ideal vision of how he would like to be seen off. Either way his conclusion and the progression of his thoughts feels natural, he makes everything he argues for seem so logical, almost obvious. He is able to see the humour in what may be an otherwise dire occupation and weaves many hilarious anecdotes into his discussion. Jokinen’s deft touch stops the memoir from getting too bogged down in the seriousness of the issues he explores, and his consideration of the industry and our cultural relationship with death is thought-provoking and insightful.