PAID TO MOURN

"There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear ... which is very interesting. He would make a delightful mute, my love." Oliver Twist

By the age of seven, possibly earlier, I had learned what to do when someone came by the funeral home unexpectedly. I quickly slipped off my father’s lap, wiped the smile off of my face and excused myself with the most somber expression imaginable. Death was not funny or playful, and those who suffered were to be paid the utmost respect. Nor was death to be a curiosity. That was asking too much – nothing could hamper my curiosity.

From the top of the stairs, my unseen perch, my classroom, I observed a steady stream of people as they came to mourn and pay their respects. They spoke in low voices, sometimes weeping or wailing. They smelled of lavender water, Evening in Paris, hairspray, cigars and cigarettes.

By the time I was twelve, just about everyone who lived in our town had darkened our front door several times. It would have been the shock of my young life to learn that in ancient cultures it was deemed a worthy profession to be paid to mourn. There was even a fancy name for such a person: moirologist.

Years later I visited the Tomb of Ramose, Tomb number 55 in the Valley of the Kings, Luxor where I beheld the exquisite painting of the young king’s death scene. It depicts the ancient ritual of hiring professional mourners to follow the dead to their graves. It was predominately women who were charged with mourning and these were painted in the pale cluster you see below.

They would be expected to wail and pat dirt on their heads, a gesture of distress, as also shown in these terracotta statues.

Perhaps the most interesting contributions to proxy mourners are those of the Chinese and Taiwanese, called ‘professional wailers’.

Studies have shown that wailers most often are laid-off workers or those in low paying jobs wishing to supplement their incomes. They weep, sing mournful songs, and crawl during the funeral.

Wailing is considered a performing profession. One wailer was frightened that she would not be able to cry in her first performance, but when the day arrived she thought about how frightened she was of dead people and wept hysterically during the funeral.

For his book, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, author Liao Yiwu interviewed twenty seven people from the margins of Chinese society. One of these was a professional mourner paid to wail at funerals.

“I entered the mourning profession at the age of twelve. My teacher forced me to practice the basic suona (reed instrument) tunes, as well as to learn how to wail and chant. Having a solid foundation in the basics enables a performer to improvise with ease, and to produce an earth-shattering effect. Our wailing sounds more authentic than that of the children or relatives of the deceased.

Most people who have lost their family members burst into tears and begin wailing upon seeing the body of the deceased. But their wailing doesn't last. Soon they are overcome with grief. When grief reaches into their hearts, they either suffer from shock or pass out. But for us, once we get into the mood, we control our emotions and improvise with great ease. We can wail as long as is requested. If it's a grand funeral and the money is good, we do lots of improvisation to please the host.”

"How long can you wail? What was your record?" Asks Liao Yiwu.

“Two days and two nights...Voices are our capital and we know how to protect them...Frankly speaking, the hired mourners are the ones who can stick to the very end.”

Sometimes wailers receive gratuities. After the ceremony the bereaved may physically lift up the wailer and give them a bouquet that contains money, or, in a different area of China, the custom is to place red envelopes at the side of the wailer while the funeral is in progress. The amount varies. In China the profession is becoming so competitive that wailers are reluctant to take on apprentices these days.

I think my father would have been fascinated to learn how differently people mourn and pay respects to the deceased and their families… Perhaps I should have presented him with a monthly invoice.

SKY BURIAL AT MOUNT KAILASH

There was only one after-death experience offered in our small patch of Southern earth and that was to be buried in it. The first time I heard the word ‘cremation’ and asked my father what in the world it was, I could not believe that this disposal by fire actually existed. There was no crematorium in our town and with the custom of burial firmly in place, no one would ever dream of choosing this route. Of course that’s all changed now, and although I’m told the nearest crematorium is miles away, it has fast become a choice of many.

I’ve learned of another burial practice that I don’t think has a hope of catching on in the Western world, not that it should or could. For thousands of years the Tibetans have practiced sky burial. It is simply a means of disposing the deceased by leaving the remains exposed to the elements and the birds of prey, which are considered sacred to Tibetans. The practice is called jhator, which means “giving alms to the birds”. Sky burial evolved as a practical solution to the problem caused by grounds in Tibet being too hard and rocky to dig a grave and in which the scarcity of timber made it difficult to perform cremations.

To a Westerner the ritual is quite grotesque, and the risk of offending is great, so I’ll not relay the procedure in detail here. When a Tibetan person dies, monks come to the home and pray for three days. The body is left untouched and at this initial stage, the family consider it inappropriate to display grief or sadness. After this period, the body is wrapped in a white cloth and moved to the site.

The ritual is performed on a specified sky burial site, a large flat rock located on higher ground than its surrounds. Monks trained specifically for this use tools designated for the ritual. Family members are near, but usually do not witness. Should you find yourself in Tibet and happen upon a sky burial in progress you should never photograph the procedures or even stop and watch unless you’re invited. It’s considered extremely disrespectful and rude.

The government of China, which has occupied Tibet since the 1960’s, prohibited sky burials until the 1980’s. They consider the practice barbaric, but probably realized it is the most efficient, fuel saving funerary practice for the region and thus allowed the burials once again.

Four of the most remote and revered sky burial sites lie at the foot of what is known by four religions, Hinduism, Bön, Buddhism and Jainism, as the axis of the world – the majestic Mount Kailash.

Part of the Tibetan Himalayas, located in western Tibet, Mount Kailash is considered so sacred that there are no recorded attempts to climb it and even setting foot on its slopes is considered a sin. It’s claimed that any attempts to do so have resulted in death. In other words, it is off limits to climbers.

Pilgrims have made their way to Kailash for thousands of years, and in the early days they walked for months to reach the foot where they then walked the kora, the 32-mile circuit around the foot of the mountain.

The location is so remote and inhospitable that even today the journey to the foot of Kailash is only slightly easier. Every Tibetan aspires to one day walk the kora to wash away a lifetime of sins. There are pilgrims who perform prostrations around the entire mountain. It takes four weeks when they follow this demanding regime.

Along the way, in a painful climb into ever thinning air, Grachon Ngagye Dorsa is one of four sky burial places around Kailash.

Sky burial site at Mount Kailash

Here pilgrims will pause to simulate their own death. They may spill a drop of their blood, leave a tooth or strand of their hair, or tear a piece of clothing to leave on the site. They lie as if dead on the rock to be reborn to a higher life in their next rebirth.

Tibetans believe that life has completely left the body immediately after death. They consider jhator an act of generosity on the part of the deceased and treat it as important instruction on the impermanence of life.

SANTA’S FUNERAL PARLOUR

“Will Santa Claus still come if someone dies tonight?” This was the kind of thing I worried about when I was a child and lived in the funeral home. We had chimneys, we had fireplaces, but would Santa bother to pop down if he knew that he might land near a dead body? Was Santa frightened of the dead? I was assured that being the kind of man who could travel the world in one night, a corpse would hardly impede him.

Winters in our small Southern town were bitterly cold and icy. This always seemed to surprise people. Nestled in a corner of the upper South, we suffered from winds and frigid temperatures from the North, and in the summer, the swampy heat from the lower South. ‘Twas the worst of both worlds.

One December night an unexpected, furious snowstorm descended upon our town and in a matter of a few hours we were knee deep in the stuff.

Our friends Flo and Billy were having dinner with us that night and no one noticed how serious the blizzard-like conditions had become until it was too late. Even if the roads had been safe, they couldn’t possibly climb the steep driveway that led to their house. They were snowbound at the funeral home. Can you imagine being sequestered in a funeral home if you weren’t used to that sort of thing? Flo woke in the middle of the night disoriented and sleepless; she climbed out of bed to sit by the window to watch the storm. Brave woman stumbled in the dark and broke her toe.

December was a busy month at the funeral home. It wasn’t necessarily that people died more quickly or in larger numbers than any other month, although the elderly and infirm did tend to fade away at the end of the year. Rather, it was that my father made certain that the funeral home performed and offered services beyond the call of duty. This required more than the burial of the dead. December brimmed with giving.

Anyone could stop by the funeral home for Christmas cookies or that god-awful fruitcake and enough steaming hot coffee to float a boat.

He bought and delivered gift baskets full of fruit that didn’t look quite real for the time of year. Christmas cards were sent to almost everyone in town. Small tokens of potholders, calendars, pencils and pens emblazoned with Mayfield & Son Funeral Home and our phone number were given to anyone he might have overlooked. There was a great deal of toing and froing. For someone who spent so much time with the dead, he was ultimately a people person.

I wasn’t allowed to complain when people died. Tragedies occurred, shock and sadness was accepted, but to complain about a death would be akin to an orthodontist wishing that every child be born with perfect teeth. It was inevitable that over a period of thirteen years the phone would occasionally ring on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, a call that might upset our plans and was sure to take my father away from the tree. On those occasions I retreated to my room and sulked.

There’s no easy way to dig a hole in frozen ground and if the ground is frozen hard enough, it’s impossible without dynamite. We had no dynamite, or sophisticated digging equipment, no morgue and no storage space, so frozen ground was often a worry.

But I had it all figured out. I thought it would be a good idea to appeal to Santa’s kindness and request that he land on empty, frozen plots in the cemetery. If he touched down hard, the sharpness of the sleigh’s blades, the weight of all the toys and the hooves of the reindeer would surely break enough ground for our gravediggers to get a spade going.

I quickly set out to write a letter to Santa Clause requesting a slight detour in his landing plans for our town. My mother mailed it as she did every year, without knowing its contents. For years I was certain that on that year Santa kept everyone alive through the holiday season.

Wishing you a happy, healthy and successful 2011.

THE UNDERTAKER’S ART

I am aware that I walk a fine line. There’s a certain risk of exploitation when writing about death, the funeral business and the funeral home in which I grew up. I could be accused of being too glib, too morbid or disrespectful. So I hope and trust that the needle of my morbid-o-meter stays firmly pointed in the middle.

I didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, although the thought crossed my mind when I was about eight years old. It was then that I first discovered that my father was an artist, though he probably never thought of himself as such.

A funeral director is not necessarily a mortician and a mortician is not necessarily a funeral director. My father was both. On my birth certificate, the answer to the request for the father’s occupation reads ‘undertaker’ and it’s how I’ve always answered the what-does-your-father-do question. The room clears quickly.

One funereal custom prevalent in the South that generates controversy is that of viewing the body. People are divided on whether or not this age old custom is valuable. My father told me that it helps the bereaved to place the idea of death firmly in the mind. Many people understand intellectually that death has occurred, but emotionally they are unable to comprehend. Most people these days have not had much experience with death. The mortality rate is higher, people die outside the home, and many people live far away from their families and haven’t been present for the death itself. Seeing, and even sometimes touching the deceased presents a tactile, visual confirmation that a person is not just gone away, but actually dead and they see exactly how death is different from life.

“Well, he looks real natural, Frank.”

This, probably the highest compliment my father received, was the aim. The bereaved sees their loved one at peace and if the undertaker has done a good job they won’t even notice the makeup or how much work went into making them look natural.

The fear of bad makeup is one of the largest reasons a family would choose not to hold a viewing. A heavy-handed undertaker who creates, on both men and women, a waxy orange glow, garishly rouged cheeks, and enough greasy lipstick to dim a Vegas showgirl are the results of a very bad artist indeed.

Many people think that undertakers search high and low for a cosmetician, but that’s not true in most cases. The undertaker/mortician is well trained and if he performs his or her other duties well, not much makeup is needed.

The Undertaker's Best Friend

The first time I watched my father put the finishing touches on an elderly woman I was mesmerized. He always did this in the chapel where he could check the makeup against the lighting, which was softer and rosier than the prep room. His suit jacket hung on one of the chairs, his sleeves were neatly rolled up and he tucked his tie into his trousers. In one hand he held a palette of lip colours and in the other, a long, thin wooden brush. Slowly, with a steady hand he added a little more coral lipstick to her lips.

“That’s not a very nice colour.” I said.

“It’s okay.” He said while he worked.

“It’s not what the ladies are wearing today. Mother always wears red.”

He stopped and turned to me.

“It’s what the family wanted. It’s the colour she wore everyday of her life. That’s what’s important - that they see her as she was.”

Lesson learned.

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW

It was an ancient ritual in the South for a woman of a certain age and a certain social standing to clock in at the beauty parlor, which my mother did twice a week without fail. The men about town may have owned seats at the coffee counters, but god help any one of them who came between his wife and her beauty parlor appointment.

Mildred Bond washed and rolled my mother’s hair, then sat her under the dryer until her face turned pink and her ears heated up to bright prickly red.

Out came the rollers, at which point Mildred went to work teasing my mother’s hair and arranging it into, ahem, a style. Think Country & Western without the glamour. The beauty parlor was always thick with hairspray, half of which seemed to land on my mother’s do. She didn’t rise from the chair until her hair was absolutely immovable.

No, not really.

Although there may have been a few steel magnolia customers at Mildred’s place, she was no Dolly Parton. A farmer’s wife who spoke in a soft country twang, Mildred moved calmly from head to head in her plain white uniform and white shoes. Her own hair, the color of a young doe, seemed less important in height and not quite as stiff as her customers'. Constantly she pushed her glasses up her powdered nose and was the kind of woman who looked as if she’d been sixty all her life. Strange then to see her with her husband, who was the spitting image of Superman in overalls.

I learned quite by accident that Mildred was guilty of moonlighting. One evening my mother told me to find my father and tell him dinner was ready. He wasn’t in the office, nor in the casket room, so I knew I was going to have to check the embalming room. I was as skittish about the embalming room as anyone might be, but I had developed a grin and bear it attitude over the years. I knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing.

I heard strange sounds, stranger than usual, through the heavy wooden door, so I slowly cracked it open a bit. My father said, “Come on in!" as if inviting me to a party. There stood my father with a horrible thick hose in his hand. There stood his employee by a shiny white machine. And good god, there stood Mildred Bond with a strange contraption in her hand. She waved the noisy thing around the head of a woman who lay on the table draped in a sheet. It was a blow dryer, the first I’d ever seen. I felt I was on the set of a science fiction movie.

Very early blow dryer

Mildred looked up at me and smiled her easy smile. “Hi,” she drawled, “how are you this evening?”

Oh just great.

Some doors are best left closed.

HALLOWEEN AT THE FUNERAL HOME

My father’s funeral home sat in the middle of the residential section of Main Street. Ours was an odd little stretch of the street. On one side of us there lived a chiropractor who practised out of an old Victorian house. At that time, our town’s citizens looked upon the field of chiropractic as suspect and related to sorcery. People occasionally knocked on his door and from my seat on the veranda I did my best to be certain they got out alive by monitoring their exit.

On the other side lived two widowed sisters who I never saw in the flesh in the thirteen years we lived there. I heard dishes clattering from their kitchen window, the smell of their burnt toast and coffee wafted past and I could just make out their shadows as they walked to and fro in front of the dark mesh screen that protected their window.

Across the street was another Victorian house brimming with a family of Holy Rollers. You just never knew what might be going on in there.

Every day was Halloween in our neighborhood.

On October 31, my father spent a small fortune on CANDY – the panacea for all life’s scary, icky moments and childhood hurts.

Children will do almost anything to get their hands on it, including knocking on the door of a funeral home on Halloween night.

One might think that the funeral home’s would be the last doorstep trick-or-treaters would darken on a Halloween night. Might be just a bit too real - a dead body, a casket or funereal accoutrement. God knows we had enough odd-looking stuff stashed away in old cupboards.

The children were not at all frightened by my father - he was the friendly sort. An undertaker who realized the best advertising and marketing campaign was based on one in which you are remembered as a giver, not a taker. So there he stood in his perfectly tailored and fashionable suit, (I always thought he must have made some Faustian pact with Pierre Cardin) threw open the door to the goblins and filled their bags with candy. We had hundreds of little visitors, all dressed in crazy costumes, excited to be at the funeral home. The undertaker gave good candy.

I wanted to decorate.

I preferred to hang cobwebs, make the kids walk through the funeral home with the lights off to find their candy secreted behind coffins, or piled up on a gurney, put my stamp on a haunted house installation, bob for apples, sell tickets.

But nooooo, the most my father would allow was a couple of freshly carved jack-o-lanterns on the front stoop.

One year, my father loaned one of his less expensive caskets to the school for a special Halloween event. Oh for a photo of THAT.

If we happened to be “busy” on Halloween night we hoped that the string of cars outside the funeral home and the number of plainly dressed adults entering would be a sign for the children to pass us by. You’d be surprised how many couldn’t take a hint. To ward off pint sized witches and devils and to prevent them from screaming “trick or treat” to a grieving widow, one of the funeral home’s employees was stationed outside where he cheerfully steered them away.

“Ya’ll come back next year, ya hear.”

RUMBELOW’S RIPPER WALK

Internationally recognized as the leading authority on Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow is said to run the best Ripper walking tour in London.

I emailed London Walks, London’s premiere walking tour firm, three times to make sure the Donald would actually be present on the early autumn evening my friend and I chose to take the tour. “Arrive early. It gets crowded,” she said. No kidding. Over one hundred people converge outside Tower Hill tube station on a balmy, soon to turn nippy night. Fortunately, half of the unknowing throng trail after another guide.

With the energy of a much younger man, he carries a canvas trolley full of brochures, books, water bottles and a little plastic stool upon which he stands surrounded by the crowd. His voice, something like a lion’s, penetrates the faithful. He’s also a crowd control expert; we relax at his assurance that he will always be seen and heard as he employs a step right up, no-one-left-behind attitude.

Here’s a man who is passionate about his subject. He’s an author, has been interviewed countless times whenever a Ripper expert is needed and he tells us he spent two glorious hours alone with Johnny Depp walking this same route when Mr. Depp was conducting research for his role in FROM HELL. Okay, so now we know with whom we’re dealing.

Donald is a talented storyteller. He paints the scenes of 1888 London by reminding us of our romanticized images donated by film and television, of which he tells us are only a paltry two percent accurate, and then smacks us with the reality of what life was really like for an East End London prostitute. His description of a toothless, men’s boot-wearing woman who has piled all of her clothes on her person because she has no home in which to hang a skirt, is gruesome and dire indeed. Though miserable her existence is, she still would rather live in the stench of the rookeries, filthy city slums, than to meet such a sudden and certain death.

The Ripper walking tours are quite famous, and indeed, our small army of Rumbelow converts fly past four other groups like a swarm of bees in the night. The cringe factor is high when we pass a young man wearing a headset who is vigorously, and badly, acting out a scene for his group. My friend and I lock eyes. Ha! We think. We are with the best and you, my friends, are clearly not.

Donald tells us “things may happen” during our winding walk through the cobblestones streets and abandoned squares.

For example, a man who particularly dislikes walking tour groups routinely rides down the street on his bicycle while shouting a string of curses. He is nicknamed ‘Old Bollocks’ by consensus of the guides. Donald warns of drunks who might want to replace his guiding expertise, and an unaware naked man or two who might appear in a window of one of the flats. Anything, it seems, may happen.

To cross a single street is to cross an invisible line that separates the heady richness of the original Square Mile in the City of London where one can easily feel swallowed by the concrete, from Petticoat Lane and Middlesex Street where the odour of a long simmering curry hits the nostrils and the abandoned market stalls leave a ghostly impression.

After hundreds of years the difference is still blatantly apparent.

The Rumbelow Effect is in full force as he describes the scenes of the murders and the state of the victims in detective-like detail.

And here lies the difference in Donald and the other guides. He is an investigator, and in fact, an ex-City policeman. Once, as he swept up his little stool and trolley and scurried to the next stopping point, I ran along beside him and asked about his research. “Police records, police records,” he told me. “ And I’m still investigating.” As if I needed telling.

At the last stop on our Ripper ramble we gather around him once again. My friend and I, caught on the edge of the group, are probably the first to see Rumbelow’s eyes look past us to a fellow lurking about. Not just any fellow demands his attention; he is this group’s “things may happen” moment. Dressed in a black frock coat, a bowler hat and smoking a meerschaum, a young man stalks our group. Under the bowler sprouts insane black tufts of hair, and a touch of smeared black hollowing makeup surrounds his eyes. He keeps his distance as if he knows that Rumbelow won’t tolerate any infringement upon his show.

Our visitor circles us for a few minutes and then points his finger at his chest and mouths silently. “I’m Jack the Ripper.”

If only he’d resisted making that claim before he slowly disappeared. It would have been the perfect end to a perfect evening.

The Suspects