This time last week I was putting another relative in the ground.
It’s a regular occasion with big families, but this one came after a long barren stretch. Family fatalities get scarce once the oldest generation thins out. We probably have a few years to go before my cousins and I all start dropping off, so these days the Simmons clan has been in a bit of a funeral lull. After a while, I can’t help but miss those Urgel Bourgie reunions when everybody gets together for the first time in ages. Well, everybody with one notable exception – whoever’s turn it is to fill the box.
Once again it was time to dress formal and make the trek up the hill to the Mount Royal Cemetery to file someone else among the endless rows of markers no one but the most dedicated headstone hunters bother to read anymore (incidentally, if you’re among these morbid enthusiasts, come and kill a couple afternoons searching for our city’s small collection of Titanic victims, or the final resting place of Anna Leonowens of The King and I fame – it’s fun for the whole family. Pack a picnic).
If you ever get a chance to go to a burial for ashes, I highly recommend the experience. Seeing the teeny-tiny grave is worth the price of admission alone. It sort of reminded me of my childhood visit to Montreal’s now-defunct midget museum where they kept all the teeny-tiny chairs and teeny-tiny cutlery and teeny-tiny toilets. It was all so cute. And, if a grave can indeed be cute, then gosh-darn-it this one was downright precious.
If you’re an environmentalist, you might want to consider cremation as the green option. Sure, you rob the worms of a decent meal, but you take up so much less space. Why, there’s now no fewer than five of my family buried under the same stone. They let you do that with ashes. It’s very cost effective, except for the expense of having a new name chiseled onto the end of the granite list. Each time someone kicks off they just turn up the soil, sprinkle them into the mix, and pat it all down again. It all looks like dirt anyway, so who knows what’s a bit of who? It also makes less work for the city developers when they inevitably bulldoze the cemetery’s prime real estate to make way for the next round of condo construction.
Yes, what was such a shocking revelation in Poltergeist is actually standard operating procedure. It happens all the time, and when they do it they can barely be bothered to remove the stones, let alone the bodies. Remember that the next time you’re strolling through Dorchester Square. You’re actually walking on the heads of those felled by Montreal’s last big cholera epidemic. Enjoy.
Me, I’ll skip the rites and rituals of a standard funeral service, thank you very much. I don’t need a little square of roped-off land, and I don’t want a marker that’s only going to get kicked over, removed, or washed clean by years of rain and wind. Just take me directly from the crematorium and sprinkle me somewhere nice. With a view.
Failing that, I should be in a convenient flushable form, so give me a burial at sea. You can even send me off by teeny-tiny toilet should one be available. Ask a midget.
The big news for Canada was Denys Arcand’s long-awaited foreign language win for The Barbarian Invasions. It was heart warming to see that after three nominations in the same category over the course of seventeen years, the Oscar folks still couldn’t train their cameras on the right person when his name was finally read. Arcand may be a proud Quebecer, but he also proved himself to be a true Canadian by managing to be polite, modest and invisible all at once. It may have been his award, but that never stopped him from letting someone else be shown marching to the podium, and some other person giving the acceptance speech. I thought it might come to blows when one of his producers tried to get him to say something, anything, before they were played off the stage. In the end, she managed to tackle Denys and stick the microphone in his face long enough for him to lie about being out of time. Way to go, Denys, you spotlight hog!
Reaction in Canada has been typically muted, as it always is in these moments of international calamity. Once again, the silent neighbour to the north has refused to step up to the plate and take part in the panic mongering and histrionic overreaction like a good citizen of the world. Instead, Canada spent the entire morning of February 2nd doing little more than debating the merits of Jackson’s choice in nipple ring before returning its attention to self-centred local issues of the day like hockey, Belinda Stronach’s money, hockey, Paul Martin’s money, hockey, and of course, whether the Liberal and the New Conservative parties can settle their differences by playing a game of hockey. For money.
Eyestrain Productions 
