THE DEATH INDUSTRY
Discussing the lives of the professional community that deals with Canadians after they've died
Coffee with Kevin Moore
Discussing the culture of grave digging
contributer TAYLOR BERZINS
The smell of coffee permeates the air, I’m sitting beside an electric fireplace in a round leather chair, my project partner Jaclyn Brown sits beside me. All I can think about is how badly I want a croissant and whether or not I will dress up for Halloween tomorrow.
It’s our first official interview for what we’ve coined “the death project,” and I’m nervous. It’s Devil’s Night, and the idea of hashing it out with a gravedigger has never seemed so ominous.
I sip my black coffee, Kevin Moore is running a little late and I’m starting to hope that maybe he’s forgotten about our interview. I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about death.
I’d known Kevin before I’d arranged the interview. He hung around the Chinese Food restaurant I used to work at; he was an old friend of the owner. I knew Kevin as a guy who really loved to bowl and listen to punk rock. I can remember being floored when I found out that Kevin was a gravedigger, I’d never imagined a gravedigger being funny or under the age of fifty.
I felt my stomach sink as Kevin entered Coffee Culture, I waved in his direction so that he could see us sitting near the back of the café.
With the ball now officially rolling, it was time to delve into death and dying.
Kevin began by explaining what a day in the life of a gravedigger looks like.
“We’ve got burials obviously, that’s the first thing. We come in, so my boss, he’s at the front of the office, we’re at the back in like where all of the tools and stuff are, so we go up to the front and we get our orders,” Kevin explained.
“So if there’s like, two burials, then that’s the first thing that we’ve got to do automatically.”
To my surprise, to perform a full burial the casket only needs to be five feet underground, but that’s beside the point. Kevin explains that full burials are less stylish these days.
“The whole field is changing.”
“When I first started, it was probably about 60/40 full burial, which is your full dead body. Now, and it’s only fifteen years between the two, when you think about death it’s a short period of time, I’d say that we’re at about 75 per cent cremation now.”
The holes one digs for a cremation are only required to be about two to three feet deep.
“It depends on what it is, because now what a lot of people are doing now is they’re waiting for the husband and wife to die together, and then they just bury them in one big urn,” Kevin said, pausing for a moment.
“A companion urn.”
Kevin explains that not everyone gets buried in a typical vessel.
“Some people make their own kinds of things too. Like, I’ve buried toolboxes, a Mickey Mouse head, a guitar case,” says Kevin.
Cemetery employees do not exclusively dig graves, although Kevin refers to himself as a gravedigger.
“We do burials and then we get it all dressed, and then we do other stuff,” Kevin says, sipping his coffee.
"Like, I’ve buried toolboxes, a Mickey Mouse head, a guitar case"
“It could be tamping graves, which is just like hitting the dirt down, or putting sod on it, or we can be putting in markers, doing foundations, light tree work, if it’s heavy tree work, there’s a tree crew that comes in. Could be anything, doing flat markers, and then cutting grass late in the fall, leaves obviously. We’re just doing leaves, we’re getting lucky ‘cause it’s so warm and we’re still able to get the leaves. There’s always something to do. And then if it’s a slow day in the winter, we might just be painting garbage cans, or washing the trucks, stuff like that.”
Unlike some other Canadian cities, all three of Brantford's city owned cemeteries dig year round.
“So like, worst case scenario is there’s a lot of frost like last year, and there’s a 10 o’clock funeral on a Monday morning. You bite your nails, ‘cause it’s scary. You’ve got to get all of the snow off, to make it safe, you’ve got to get the entrance ways so they can drive in for the funeral, and then you’ve got to break through the frost- you might have to jackhammer it- and then, dress the grave. So you’re pushing it. It’s a bit much.
Woodstock, which is like pretty much the same as us, they don’t dig in the winter,” Kevin explains.
According to Kevin it’s up to a city’s digression as to whether or not they’ll bury their dead throughout the winter. The risk city’s run by not digging throughout the winter is a backup of bodies, leaving cemetery staff overwhelmed when the grounds thaw due to the steady stream of funerals.
“In the spring you’re busy as hell too,” Kevin explains.
“‘Cause you’ve got to get all of those graves tamped, sodded, ‘cause people complain too, ‘cause they want final closure kind of thing. People get a little nutty when it comes to death too. Everybody’s different. Like my family, they’re fine with it. They’re okay, but some people, they’re crazy.”
Gravediggers are not always simply burying bodies either. In his fifteen years, Kevin can recall performing about ten disinterments.
"People get a little nutty when it comes to death"
“Now, we do, do a lot more cremation disinterments, but they’re not really a big deal, ‘cause they’re just like a box, you know what I mean? It’s just lifting that up, putting that in a new plot. And that’s usually if, like say, you’re from Sault St. Marie, or something like that, and then, you lived here, but your husband died in the Sault, but all of your kids are here and stuff kind of now, so you might dig up dad, and bring him down. Or a lot that we’ve had is, like say you guys, you and your husband have a baby, and it died, like stillborn or like, two months old, like, thirty years ago, then your husband dies of something, they might want to dig the baby up and put them in with the husband. The problem is, if they’re really young, there’s no cartilage, so there’s not a hell of a lot left. A lot of times you just dig until the soil changes, that’s kind of the way it goes,” Kevin explains.
“I wouldn’t recommend it. My thing is, stay where you lay, kind of thing.”
“The worst one we did, was, it was a woman, she was getting divorced, and I think she was catholic, ‘cause that’s where she went. Anyways, her husband, well, almost ex-husband, when she died, it was of cancer too, he still had rights, power of attorney. And so, he put her in our cheap section. Which, it’s like, anybody can go there, so like if you don’t care you just go there, but like, if you don’t have any money, welfare will pay for it, and that’s where you go. But, the family didn’t want her there. They wanted her with a nice upright marker, and in the catholic cemetery. So, it took, probably about ten to fifteen years before they finally got through the courts, and then we had to dig her up,” Kevin said, glancing at his coffee.
Through his experience, Kevin noted that funerals are becoming less formal, explaining that he often sees people wearing beer t-shirts and baseball hats grave side. In passing he’s noticed people sparking up joints at funerals more recently too. Kevin explains that his dying wish is for everyone to wear a suit to his funeral and respect the tradition.
Kevin explained that being a gravedigger was never something he necessarily set out to do, rather it feel into place by chance.
Kevin has worked for the City of Brantford’s public cemeteries for about fifteen years. Beginning his career with the city after pursing a diploma in recreational leadership in 1991, Kevin started off working in the Wayne Gretzky Centre’s sports hall museum.
After about a decade of working in different city departments Kevin explains, “I was waiting for another old guy to retire down at Parks and Rec, ‘cause he had lawn mower and snow removal and stuff like that in winter, but two years earlier, this other guy got promoted to a boss at cemeteries, so his job was open. So, I just put in for it, I had seniority and I had the interview, and I got the job. I’ve been there, just shy of fifteen years.”
“I didn’t get into it because I was really into that stuff. I’ve always liked cemeteries and stuff like that, I like doing genealogy stuff about war and relatives and stuff like that, so it’s always neat, and I’ve been into that since I’ve been older, you know what I mean? But it wasn’t like I was set out to do this.”
As I pack up my notebook and take the last few sips of my coffee, I recognize that I am leaving the inteview with the understanding that a gravedigger isn’t the Crypt Keeper type of character we’ve often been taught to imagine them as, rather a gravedigger is one of our last points of contact our physical body will ever encounter. They are the people who ensure we meet our final resting place, all the while maintaining the grounds for our loved ones who come back and visit us. It’s a tender field of work, with plenty to think about each day as one is immersed in the physical toil of laying a community’s dead to rest.
Humber College's Funeral Studies
Life of a Funeral Director
contributer TAYLOR BERZINS
 |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
 |  |  |  |
Photos by Jaclyn Brown
The heavens split open, hail and freezing rain poured down on us, as Jaclyn and I ran across the Humber campus to figure out where in the world M3 was.
Entering the campus we’d parked in the wrong lot, the ornery parking facilitator forced us to drive back to the front of the campus. As he shooed us away I asked him if he knew where the M building was.
“I do,” he replied. A long silence ensued.
“It’s way over there,” he pointed in the direction in which we had just been parked.
“You’ll have to walk in this horrible, horrible rain.”
It was the kind of day where we hadn’t remembered to wear winter coats, and we were about 40 minutes too early.
Soaking wet, we stood lost in the hallway of M3, which is a labyrinth of desks and offices.
Michelle Clarke is the co-ordinator for Humber College’s Funeral Studies program, a prestigious school for future funeral directors. There is only two of its kind in Ontario; the other program is a French language program in the North.
Meandering down the hall, Clarke’s office is hard to miss. Large photographs of caskets and flowers adorn the walls outside of her office.
Michelle Clarke
Clarke is sitting at her computer, and warmly welcomes us into her space. She is much younger than I expected. It’s an ageist stereotype I’m constantly working to correct, not everyone involved in the formalities of the death industry is a conservative old man.
It’s an interview I had been trying to secure since December, finally being in her office, I’m interested to know who would want to become a funeral director. A friend of mine who had taken the program suggested there are probably a small percentage of people who apply to the program for all of the weird reasons.
“How do you select candidates for the program?”
Clarke explains that the program annually accepts 120 students. During the selection process they look for well-rounded candidates, and all applicants must submit a current resume. Most students apply to the program as a means of pursuing a career change or after trying different fields. Most of their students do not apply directly after high school.
For Clarke, students who have experience, working with at risk populations, have taken up leadership roles and are interested in helping people, often make the best candidates. Clarke explains that the more experience outside of the scope of what one would expect a funeral director to be into, the better.
“There’s this new movement in our field looking for what’s causing burnout. We’re guessing that about 50 per cent of all people who enter the industry are gone in the first five years. So we’re trying to figure out why,” explains Clarke.
“One of the things, if we look at other professions, that could potentially have high burnout rate, like police, fire, first responders, they often have other types of supports in place that we don’t have in this industry. So, we’re hoping that if people are well rounded, then they’ll go for support outside the field.”
Clarke explains that it’s challenging to be a young person working as a funeral director and that the stigma associated to the line of work can be brutal.
“I would say I work in the industry or I’m a funeral director or whatever and people would be freaked right out. Like at a bar, it was the best thing you could say if you wanted somebody to leave you alone, because they were just not interested at all, like ‘that girl’s a freak, I don’t want to be anywhere near her.’ So, I found it really difficult when I was young, because I’m not a freak, and there’s nothing freakish about the funeral industry at all,” explained Clarke.
“I understood why people were put off, because they think about dead, rotting whatever. Like they think about the gross, the potential gross, they don’t realize that that is so uncommon […] So for us, the dead person and the care for the dead is such a small portion of what we do, that life on the job is more about the grieving family and offering care to a community than it is about care for the deceased.”
Clarke wasn’t always confident about her career choice.
“It got so bad at one point in my mid to late twenties that I started lying. People would ask me what I did, ‘cause they would see me in a suit or whatever and I would lie and say that I was a flight attendant, I just didn’t want the reaction, I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to react. And I know, obviously their reactions were not planned and that made it even worse because this was in spite of themselves they’re retreating from me.”
Clarke tells us that she’s married to another funeral director.
For their first Christmas, Clarke and her husband bought each other burial plots.
“That was our gift. Because we both know, that we at some point want to be buried, so we bought our cemetery property for each other. And we visit it. It’s very pretty! It has a beautiful view of Blue Mountain that we’ll never be able to afford in life so we bought it for death.”
Clarke understands that as people get older they begin to become more comfortable discussing their own mortality, whereas young people push out the idea of death altogether.
“Look at the funeral home websites, young people die everyday. It’s just fascinating that people aren’t prepared for it when it happens.”
As a woman, Clarke has never struggled in the industry and believes that speculation that it’s unique for women to be in the field is arcane. Over 70 per cent of students accepted to the program in Clarke’s 12 years at Humber have been women.
“It is not at all hard being a woman in this field. What’s hard about it is that it’s extremely physical. I had a personal trainer, you have to build your core strength […] I thought if you go to the gym and if you lift weights and your arms get strong, you’ll be okay, but you won’t be. I weigh 125 pounds, if I’m moving a 400 pound body, I need more than arm strength.”
Clarke explained that women could struggle if they are short, or if they often wear pencil skirts and heels.
“I would just pull up my skirt. Like, there would be a death at home, and the person’s on the floor, and it’s just you, your colleague and a police officer, and I’d say, ‘you know, I’ve got to get my knees further apart so that I can do this lift and not hurt myself.’”
The Obstacles
Clarke hates the stereotypes that plague her industry, and carries a distrust for proponents of alternative funeral movements.
“What happened I think is, for eons, death became so institutionalized and society itself was conservative, so the funeral home sculpted its practices around conservative society, and even though the funeral homes have changed to meet the needs of society, that old image has never gone away.”
To Clarke death midwives are not experienced enough to understand the complexities of arranging a funeral, explaining that the mandatory education and internal memory that exists within the funeral director’s field is a trove of invaluable knowledge.
“Because we’ve shared our missteps over eons of this work, now we’re like, okay, these are the basic things that you’ve got to make sure you’ve done. But, do I fear somebody falling at somebody’s house and getting under the care of a death midwife? I don’t care. I mean, I don’t want anybody to get hurt, but that’s their decision. If they want to do it, have at’er.”
Clarke does not believe that the home funeral movement has to exist without the support of the traditional funeral home, and instead articulates that a funeral director is compelled to do anything a grieving family requires for support.
“So if the family was to say to the funeral director, ‘we want to do something but we definitely don’t want to do it here,’ like, we understand. We live that! In our personal lives, we tell people what we do and they retreat, so we get it. You don’t want to come and play in our sandbox? Fine. Where do you want to play and what do you want to do? We’ll help you figure out what it is you’re going to do and where you’re going to do it,” explains Clarke.
“So, it looks like we’re mean, we’re secretive, we’re gory, like we’re just all of these things that we’re not[…] funeral directors are starting to say more then they ever did before. I’ve even noticed it in my husband who is the most conservative person that you would ever meet in your life, and even he will say, you know people will be sharing things, like something that you did that was really cool, you know, they’ll brag about what they did at work, and you know it will go around the circle of this person’s an engineer, this person’s a police officer, this person’s a whatever, and he used to not contribute. And now, he’ll say things like, ‘yeah, well I made a mom whose three-year-old died smile today and that trumps everything that you did,’ and it’s like yeah dude it really does! Yay!”
“I feel like it’s one of those things you always kind of have to have wanted to do,” said Stephanie Morrison, a current student in Humber’s Funeral Studies program.
Always having an interest in working with and helping people, and a lifelong love for shows like CSI, to Morrison, Funeral Studies is an ideal fit.
“I’ve wanted to do it ever since I was little.”
Morrison explained that she has not faced much adversity in explaining her career dreams to friends and family, although her grandparents were leery at first.
For Morrison the nerves set in when thinking about approaching the lack of supports.
“When you look at other industries that do deal with death, you see a lot of [supports]. You know, they have PTSD counseling they can go to for free, they have psychologists, they have all of that support. Funeral directors don’t have that,” Morrison explained.
“At the end of the day, the paramedic who just picked somebody off of the side of the road, might get a week off of work because they just through some traumatic experience yet you know, they’re bringing [the body] to us and we have to see them, and we have to deal with their family. And we get nothing.”
Funeral Studies Labs
There are three Funeral Studies labs at Humber.
The first is a cozy room filled with caskets, urns and wares in which to perform a funeral. Decorative paperweights filled with the colourful swirls of a loved ones ashes, lockets housing cremated remains or locks of hair, memorial candles, monogramed teddy bears and gems made from pressurized, remains that adorn the room’s encasing shelving units.
A casket marketed as a green alternative sits amongst the other reciprocals. Clarke explains that she’s always liked the unfinished wood of the ‘green’ casket because loved ones can write messages with paint and markers on the casket before it’s put into the ground.
“We usually put the quote unquote green option in a section with cremation options because usually they want burial or cremation with a casket or container that doesn’t have dyes, doesn’t have glues, doesn’t have whatever. They want it to be an all natural, so all of the casket companies make them.”
Clarke explains that she is amused when she meets people who believe green funerals are a modern concept.
“Like, this is so old school, like it’s just absolutely ridiculous. Truthfully, the green movement is simply rooted in the Jewish tradition. That’s all it is. They’re copying what the Jewish are doing and have been doing for thousands of years and they’re calling it new. Like I talk to my friends that run the Jewish funeral home and I’m like aren’t you offended? You should be offended! Like they’re saying this is new wave, and I’m going what?”
The second lab is a jarringly sterile room with humming vents and large TVs. Each station is home to a horrifyingly lifelike skull covered in a waxy face.
Most students enter funeral studies with an interest in science; Clarke explains that it takes practice and lots of molding to groom them into ideal funeral directors.
Students at Humber College’s program get to practice restorative arts in a state of the art facility that just opened this year. Each student spends 15 weeks learning cosmetic application and hairstyling and then another 15 weeks reconstructing faces on skulls with wax.
Clarke explains that before the new lab opened this year, restorative techniques were all described in writing to students and they would try to perform the techniques onto the skulls. Now students follow along with an instructor, as the process is being magnified and projected onto flat screen TVs in real time.
Students eventually practice performing incisions and sutures on a fetal pig and then have to make the marks disappear through the application of cosmetics.
Clarke holds a bright yellow ear up. She explains that they made the ear with a 3D printer and that 3D printing will revolutionize restorative arts in the funeral industry. The reality is that most funeral homes in Ontario cannot afford the technology right now.
The last lab is an embalming station.
Students work with one instructor to learn how to embalm bodies, each instructor will support a team of four students at a time.
The bodies that students practice embalming on, come from busy local funeral homes and are not medical cadavers.
Clarke picks up a bottle of bright orange fluid and holds it by my face.
“This is your colour,” she explains. Clarke tells us that she and her husband sometimes play a game where they guess what colour embalming fluid a stranger would require.
Clarke finds it problematic that green funeral advocates maintain such staunch opinions against embalming.
“I don’t judge somebody that elects to smoke cigarettes and think that it’s a bad thing, that’s their choice. I personally prefer not to, but I don’t care if you do, that’s your business. I mean don’t do it around your children! I don’t bring my children to the embalming room and embalm next to them because I don’t want to subject them to the potential carcinogen that I’m using.
“Like, as if they really care as to whether or not the embalmer is going to get cancer.”
Clarke explains that embalming is necessary for the bodies of loved ones that need to be preserved to be transported back to homelands, or for families that are waiting for loved ones from abroad to attend a funeral.
“They say put them in refrigeration, and sure, we do put them in refrigeration, but refrigeration causes bodies to desiccate over time. So you want them to be dehydrated? Sure! I mean, if that’s what you want, fine. If that’s what the family wants, fine. We will do it. But, if that’s not what they want, then they need to have an alternative to doing it.”
A death denying culture
Before I made the drive from Brantford to Humber, I had I explained to a coworker that I was going to be hanging out at the Funeral Studies program.
“Oh god,” he said, “I bet they’re all going to be like weird Lurch-like people.”
Taking care of the details that surround death is job that has to be performed in society, but those in the death industry often find themselves ostracized and judged. The people rising up to take on the of caring for the dead are often left struggling to access necessary mental health supports and burnout in less than five years.
“It bothers me that our society is death denying, it really does,” Clarke explained.
Similarly to the advocates for alternative funerals we have talked to throughout this project, Clarke hopes that her work will tackle society’s death-phobia. Clarke believes that death denial is impacting the level of stress that people carry, and in turn limiting people’s inability find joy in the simple things.
“We don’t face the inevitable every single day of our lives. We put it away where we don’t have to think about it, and we do everything we can to be young. I think it’s brutal.”