Curtains Read Online Free

pointy-headed university professors and Unitarians, until Jessica Mitford wrote “that book” in the early ’60s and the fad evolved into a social trend. But it wasn’t until twenty-five years ago that Neil finally embraced cremation and became what the mainstream industry calls a “bake-and-shaker, ” a lower-cost provider of a cleaner, more manageable, less Gothic and scatterable end product. Although he still believes in the therapeutic power of a well-embalmed body, you can’t fight a social revolution. Especially now, with the baby boomers idling in their Humvees at the lip of the chasm—76 million of them have already left their muddy tire-tracks in every other intersection of the economy, from pop culture to fashion to the derivative markets (well done there) to yoga and the ovo-lacto frozen dinner-treat industry, and are now facing a guaranteed 100 percent death rate. They’ll want something different from their grandparents’ church services.
    “The traditional funeral is gone,” Neil says, “and it’s never coming back.”

A W AY OF L IFE L IKE A NY O THER
    A
week into the job, I come home at night in the dark (in Winnipeg, in the winter, the sun goes down soon after it comes up, sometimes before). I shower for longer than I need to, and wash my work clothes separately to keep crematorium dust out of the towels and sheets. My wife, Annie, wants to know what it’s like, but in my head it sounds like a fairy tale: the dead come from a magic place called the Silver Doors, from which they’re whisked into boxes or made to drink potions that turn them from yellow to green, then they’re painted pink and purple and powdered, and some are baked in an oven where they are turned into flour by special death-fairies. I am now a death-fairy. Instead of telling her all this, I just use up her hand lotion and watch Werner Herzog movies to cheer myself up.
    Annie and I live in the Wolseley neighbourhood of Winnipeg,known as the “granola belt” for its progressive politics and its high batik-wall-hanging-to-resident ratio. There are two organic grocers at the same intersection, a bakery that sells bread made from grass and spelt muffin-pucks (and awesome whole-wheat cinnamon rolls), and a cobbler who wears an unironic leather apron and fixes Birkenstock after Birkenstock. I came here from Toronto three years ago so Annie and I could live in the same postal code for a change (she’s from Winnipeg), to work at CBC Radio, a government job with a pension. I’d taken a month’s leave to dabble in death-care. Neil and I have an understanding: if I want to stay longer, I can. But that would mean quitting the radio job, and leaning on Annie’s salary (she’s a union lawyer) to keep us fed and watered.
    Winnipeg is a city where neighbours will notice if I park a hearse in front of the house (as opposed to Toronto, where you could park a hearse, set it on fire, and they’ll only complain to the city about the smoke). In February the air is full of ice crystals that you’re expected to breathe. On a map, Winnipeg is the geographical centre of the continent. If North America were an LP record, Winnipeg would be the spindle. It’s also a practical place to die. There are thirty-eight funeral homes here—more funeral homes than Starbucks outlets. Freud would’ve been happy here, as much as Freud ever was. Study the place and you’ll see that as well as being a rusty railway hub, the Chicago of Canada, Winnipeg is a hub for the uncanny return of the repressed, in particular the forgotten-but-never-gone dead.
    From 1918 to 1934, Thomas Glendenning Hamilton, a doctor and member of the Manitoba Legislature, conducted secret scientific experiments into the existence of life after death, by logging and photographing hundreds of seances. The glass-plate pictures he took, of spinning tables and mediums with ectoplasm flying out of theirnoses, are in the archives of the University of Manitoba. The pictures are chilling