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May
07
Book Review—Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training by Tom Jokinen
2010 at 9am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published March 2010 by Da Capo Press (an imprint of Perseus Books Group)
Before I picked up Tom Jokinen’s Curtains, which is part stunt memoir, part immersion journalism, everything I knew about the funeral industry was something I learned watching Six Feet Under. It should come as no surprise that the daily reality of life in the funeral industry is far less dramatic than HBO wanted us to think, but I’m pleased to say that it is also much more complex and interesting than I’d have guessed.
Now why, you ask, would someone quit his day job to become an apprentice at a funeral home in Winnipeg, Canada? Jokinen did it to try to make some sense of how we respond to death.
To figure out if the screwball rituals we perform and the industry that’s evolved to support them are part of the Lysol, or if in fact the way we handle death, with caskets and trinkets and stone markers, is our way of facing up, finally, to the smell.
Jokinen’s account of his funeral home apprenticeship is everything you’d expect such a memoir to be. There are the awkward-funny moments (he drops not one but TWO corpses in one day when he triggers the wrong set of collapsing legs on a gurney), the painfully poignant ones, and the behind-the-scenes details that demystify the process and remind readers that funeral industry professionals are people too, and they have all the petty arguments and mundane concerns to prove it.
And that’s all fine and good, but if it had been the primary focus of Curtains, it would have lost me pretty quickly. Jokinen is often funny, but he doesn’t quite live up to the Bill Bryson comparison made in the blurbs (and really, it’s not fair to compare anyone to Bill Bryson), and one can only have so many humorous funeral home experiences.
Luckily, Jokinen’s look at the inner workings of the funeral industry and his examination of it as a kind of theater, performance, or managed experience (like what you get in Vegas or Disney World) are fascinating and thoughtful. Jokinen identifies cemeteries and funerals as “social constructs to keep nature, the hostile world of worms and decay, separate from a civilized life of flat-screen TVs and microwave chapatis,” and he recognizes that “life is chaos, but the funeral narrative makes sense of it.” And it is this—the examination of how and why funerals attempt to help us make sense of death—that is at the heart of Curtains.
Jokinen discusses plenty of the technical details (embalming, interment, what it looks like when a body is cremated, etc.), and make no mistake, those are fascinating, but it is his ability to put them in context and make larger meaning out of our responses to death that makes Curtains so worthwhile. During his apprenticeship, Jokinen observes just about every religious funeral tradition under the sun, but he observes almost as many funerals that lack any sense of or reference to the divine or sacred. It is out of this apparent lack of religion that Jokinen believes the trend of “celebrations of life” has grown.
The big, fat-sucking spiritual void that death creates used to be filled by the redemptive magi of religion, through ritual: pray over the body, sing the body into the ground, mark the casket with the sign of the cross or place a stone on the grave marker, light candles, burn the body on a riverside ghat and scatter the ashes to the water. All the sacred customs were ways to signal to one another that we’re not alone…Death was rendered powerless. God had a plan, even if His blueprints were impossible to read.
Take God out of the picture. What’s left? The sucking void is still there. How do we fill it? With new sacred customs, or by picking and choosing the best from the lot and adapting them for the occasion…
Much of Curtains focuses on the many ways in which the cultural shift away from embalming and burial and toward cremation (as well documented in Jessica Mitford’s oft-cited The American Way of Death) has forced old school funeral directors to change the way they play the game. More cremation means fewer expensive caskets, and that means that it is becoming increasingly difficult for traditional funeral homes to pay the bills. So what do they do?
They innovate. They offer families the opportunity to plan a “celebration of life” that often involves catering, performance artists, and “a kind of pop ritual…you can be moved to something approaching an actual human emotion.” And that doesn’t come cheap. But people pay for it because, after all, the funeral is about grieving people trying to make sense of who and what they have lost. It is about crafting a narrative, telling a story, remembering a person as we want to remember him (often with little regard for accuracy), and that’s valuable. Also valuable is the “illusion of permanence” that embalming and burial offer, so they try to sell us bigger, better caskets because “the idea of forever works as a sales tool,” and few of us want to face the reality that it is just that, an illusion.
Though Curtains wasn’t quite what I was expecting—it is more Mary Roach than Bill Bryson, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing—I thoroughly enjoyed it. Yes, it’s pretty dark, but how can a book about death and funerals not be? And yes, there are nitty-gritty details that might be a bit too much for the faint of heart. But this is an interesting, engaging read that lifts the veil on an industry and the attendant social and cultural phenomena that few of us think about. Curtains is insightful, informative, occasionally philosophical, and a solid step in the right direction of changing “how people understand death. Like religion used to do.” 4 out of 5.
Hey, FTC: I received a copy of this book from the publisher.
I am an IndieBound affiliate and will receive a small commission if you purchase Curtains through a link in this review.
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Very intriguing. I’m a fan of Mary Roach’s work so I’ll be sure to check this one out.
Have you seen the Japanese film Departures? It won the 2009 Academy Award for best foreign film. It is really good and I highly recommend it!
This makes me think back on my high school years. Someone found out that the local funeral home would pay groups if they would get people to tour their parlor. I think every single club I was in did it for a fund raiser. I think I’d probably enjoy this book.
Kathy, that is so bizarre and interesting. I love the mental image of high school students bringing tours into a funeral home for fundraising. So much more exciting than door-to-door sales.
No….but I will be now!
Great review! I read this one too and loved it. Winnipeg is my home town, so I got a kick out of the references to the city, but it worried me a little that others might think that it was too area specific. It’s nice to know that you enjoyed it.
Sounds interesting, if not something I’ll be rushing out to buy. Can’t say I have any interest in the topic but I can see how it would be an interesting read anyway! For now I had better keep the focus on that ever growing tbr pile
I like the reference to Mary Roach’s Spook. Did you find the book to be more anthropological than a memoir? If not, do you think that could have made it better? It sounds like the author began with the focus of “studying” death in our culture and then switched to his own experience.
I’m not faint of heart, and I am pretty open-minded, but I’m really not sure what to think about this. Maybe I have too much baggage. Do I want to know all of this?
It’s a mix throughout. The cultural exploration is stronger than the memoir piece, in my opinion, but it’s still a good read. (In fact, I liked it much better than SPOOK, which I think is the weakest of Mary Roach’s titles.)
I agree .. if you are going to compare someone to Bryson, you better be able to back it up.
I love the term “stunt memoir.” I have a weakness for those.
I loved the look into the funeral world provided by Six Feet Under, but that was more because of the series as a whole than the particular topic of funeral undertakers. This does sound like an interesting read, but I’m not sure reading about corpses being dropped is for me.
You know I’ve wanted to read this one ever since I saw you tweeting about it. After reading your review I REALLY can’t wait to get my hands on it.
I like Mary Roach’s books, so will probably enjoy this one since the topic sounds interesting (for a lack of better word!)
[...] two fabulous memoirs—Piper Kerman’s Orange is the New Black and Tom Jokinen’s Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training—and revealed what I look for in a review pitch. I also shared a fundraising effort by the [...]
Loved the comparison of your funeral home knowledge to Six Feet Under – that’s exactly where I would peg my expertise level too! This book sounds really interesting. It’s not an area that I would normally read about, but your review makes it sound like it has a human touch to balance the subject.
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