Funeral directors – Vincenzo Ravina

Trevor Wamboldt owns four suits. I thought he’d have to own more. He says he’s more of a t-shirt and sweatpants kind of guy, anyway. Right now he’s wearing jeans and a sweater, though. His socks are linty, his face is stubbly and his hair is graying. He wears glasses and he’s sitting with his arm over the back of the white sofa in his living room. The cat, named Bobo, comes by. Trevor tickles Bobo under the chin with his toe. Across from the sofa, there’s a rack of Disney movies on VHS by the TV. His daughter just turned 11, so there are balloons all over and a banner that says, ‘Happy Birthday!’

Trevor Wamboldt is the guy who will pick up your dead body, drain your blood and embalm you, dress you up and put you in a box so your family can say goodbye. He’s been in the funeral business for 23 years, starting out as an embalmer and having worked his way up to being a funeral director. For nine years, he’s been working at Atlantic Funeral Homes in Dartmouth.

You might expect people in the funeral business to be creepy, morbid and unsmiling. Trevor doesn’t strike me as any of these things. He says a funeral director takes care of families more than the deceased. He says you “have to be a little bit of a grief counsellor [and] a whole lot of a people person.” He says he doesn’t find his job depressing.

“If you can sit with someone who just lost someone and actually have them smiling and laughing a little bit… [it’s not] depressing at all.”

But every so often, the job will get to him.

“Everything gets to you once in a while. Children are hard. When you have to bury a child. That’s hard. People always ask me that. ‘Do you mind dealing with children?’ I mean, yeah, it’s tough. But I remember once, I buried this little old lady who’d been married for sixty years and her poor husband came in and he was just sitting there devastated. He was crying and his kids were there [and] his grandkids were there. And the only thing I could think was, this poor old man. He wasn’t going down there to look at his wife in a casket. He was going down to look at his whole life, his whole existence. His kids would go back home to their computers and his grandkids would go their soccer games, [but] all of the sudden, his life was over. I felt more sorry for that old man, I think, than anyone else I’ve ever seen go through there.”

And in 23 years, Trevor has seen a lot of people. He’s seen a lot of death. He’s buried stillborns and people who have lived past 100. He’s buried homeless people and the incredibly wealthy (“Five limousines, the whole kit and kaboodle.”)

What makes a person want to do this job? What kind of person wants to do this job?

Trevor says he’s just “always been interested in it.”

He says he’s never had a problem dealing with grieving people because he’s always been a “people person.” When his grandparents died, his father, a photographer, took pictures of the grandparents in their caskets.

“Most kids, when they’re young, they’ve got prom pictures in their photo albums. I have pictures of people lying in caskets. Kind of evolved, I guess.”

In Trevor’s day, you didn’t have to go to school to become an embalmer or a funeral director. He just walked into a funeral home off the street and asked for a job. He was 18.

These days, you’d have to study with a school like the Canadian College of Funeral Service (CCFS). It is a combination of online courses and hands-on experience, like having the opportunity to embalm a body. They offer programs in every province.

Trevor says a lot has changed in 23 years. Not only the schooling, but also who decides to go into the business. It used to be that the funeral home staff was all men, “like the old boys club.” Now, he says, more women are getting involved in the business.

Sonja Goyer is a student at the CCFS. Why is she in the funeral business? “My husband says, because I’m a nut. It’s just something I’ve always been drawn to. I’ve never had an intelligent answer for that. It’s just where I’m supposed to be, it’s just what I’m supposed to be doing.”

When she started out as a funeral attendant, she was incredibly uncomfortable around dead bodies and thought about quitting. But she knew being in the funeral business was her calling and so she powered through.

At CCFS, the students take eight courses, including “Sanitation & Hygiene,” “Funeral Service Ethics” and, of course, “Embalming Theory.”

Sonja says preparing a body takes about two hours. The body is taken out of the body bag and placed on the embalming table, then sprayed with a disinfectant and scrubbed from head to toe. They get rid of rigor mortis by massaging and flexing the arms and legs. Incisions are made on the neck of the body and tubes are inserted into the carotid artery and the jugular vein. The tubes are hooked up to a machine that sucks the blood out and pumps embalming fluid in. Then, a needle called a trocar is put into the abdominal cavity through an incision above the belly button. Blood and other fluids are sucked out and embalming fluid goes in. All the incisions are closed up and then the body is washed again.

There’s a lot more that goes into it (like gluing the eyelids shut), but that’s a basic run-down.

Trevor says, “People think [being a funeral director] is a glamourous job, where you drive the big Cadillacs and you’re the guy front and centre, but there’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff that people don’t see.”

Glamourous? Of course. Sure.

But he’s right about there being a lot going on out of view.

“People don’t see you missing the kid’s birthday parties or the Christmas dinners or something because you have to be at work. They don’t see all that. Or the holidays, when everyone’s gone to the beach and you think, ‘Well, here I am in a suit in July.’ July first, you know. Thirty degrees and I’m at the funeral home.”

The funeral business is a 24-hour undertaking.

“Just as many people die in the middle of the night as they do in the middle of the day.”

When he’s on call, any calls to the funeral home get forwarded to his house. “If you were to call the funeral home number right now, you’d get me. It would ring here.”

But Trevor has no qualms about the long hours or the phone ringing late at night. After 23 years, he says he’s used to it.

Lindsay Rainingbird, a Dalhousie University student, responds “Tim Burton,” when asked what she thinks a funeral director is like. She goes on to say she pictures someone “dark” and “spooky.”

She seems to be describing the opposite of Trevor.

Jayde Atkinson, another student at CCFS, says, “We’re a lot more normal than you’d think we are… Well, I’ve got dark hair and pale skin, but we’re not all creepy and dark. [Funeral directors are] quite honest and open. They are a good group of people, they are there to help and they are well-educated.”

Trevor acknowledges that there is a certain stigma attached to his career and that people often think of “the morbidness of it.” But most of the people in the funeral business are just normal people who, it just so happens, aren’t creeped out by dead bodies. And they have a much healthier attitude toward death than the average person.

Trevor will pick up your body and embalm it, but he also goes treasure hunting with his metal detector on the weekends (he found a ring on a beach, once). He will deal with your grieving family, but he also brews his own beer. He will glue your eyelids shut, but when he gets home, he just wants to watch a comedy. “Anything with Adam Sandler’s good.”

Trevor says, “I didn’t know whether I was going to buy this house. But we planned on it [and] we saved for it, even though I knew it might not happen. My little girl, I don’t know whether she’s going to go to college or not, but you plan on it, just in case. But, boy, one thing you do know is we’re all going to die. It’s a given… You’re going to die eventually, so live while you can.”

Trevor’s funeral has not been pre-planned.

Smilies – Vincenzo Ravina

Colon, minus sign, parenthesis.

:-)

You know what it is. You’ve either typed it at someone or someone has typed it at you. Smilies. Emoticons. For better or worse, they’re part of the way this generation communicates. With something so widespread and so simple, you forget that someone, somewhere had to do it first.

The New York Times referred to him as “User Zero of the Internet emoticon.” He prefers to be called the originator of smilies.

On September 19, 1982, the following message was posted online by Scott E. Fahlman:

I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use
:-(

‘Originator of smilies’ is not Fahlman’s day job. His eight page CV contains no mention of smilies. Fahlman is a Research Professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh. He works in Artificial Intelligence.

In his emails, he uses a smiley to indicate when he’s joking. Always with a minus sign as a nose. He doesn’t like it when smilies lack noses. “I’m very anti-noseless smiley, because I think they look like little frog faces.”

He has watched smilies spread across the entire Internet, and is no stranger to criticism. Smilies inspire such vitriol in people. Fahlman quotes Penn Jillette, a magician known for being one half of the duo Penn and Teller, as saying that people who use smilies ought to have their “eyes dotted with Drano.”

Olga Constantopoulos might agree. She started the Facebook group ‘Die Emoticons Die.’ She says emoticons and smilies have taken communication and language to new lows. “The huge amount of emoticon use is cutting down on proper grammar [and] proper sentence structure.”

She was inspired to start her Facebook group when she was emailing with a colleague at the retail brokerage office where she is branch manager. She had made a request and the other person would not agree to it.

“And after ripping the request to shreds in a clear, concise paragraph, [the other person] said ‘best regards’ with a little smile and signed off their name… What’s that about? Why are you even using [the smiley] in a business context? Am I supposed to know what this means? And is this now making this OK?”

She says she doesn’t take business personally and she can understand if a request can’t be met. “You don’t have to [sugar-coat] it by tagging a little smiley face on it. Just say what you mean and move on.”

Fahlman largely agrees with Constantopoulos. He says he would not want to see smilies in business writing or “international treaties or Supreme Court judgements.”

He says that many people abuse smilies. New smiley users “tend to go a little bit nuts, just as people who are new to email might have too many fonts on a page or too many colours and certainly, too many smiley faces. And it can be annoying if you’re just hammering people over the head with it. But I think when used judiciously, it has a reasonable place in the world for many of us.”

Constantopoulos says she wouldn’t have a problem with emoticons if they were used more judiciously and strictly in casual communications. But she doesn’t fault Fahlman for the monster he’s created. “You can’t blame the guy for having an idea.”

And what an idea it was. You’d be hard-pressed to find another living person who has so influenced the way an entire generation communicates.

But on his web site, he refers to the idea as “simple and obvious” and responds to the criticism that someone probably came up with the idea before he ever did, saying “The independent invention of this idea by multiple people would not be implausible.”

However, he says that his “1982 suggestion was the one that finally took hold, spread around the world, and spawned thousands of variations. My colleagues and I have been able to watch the idea spread out through the world’s computer networks from that original post.”

And how does he feel about it now, 27 years after the fact?

“It’s been a challenge my whole career to come up with something that will be more famous than the thing I spent five minutes doing in 1982.”

He’s hopeful that some day he’ll get there.

“I think I know what the first line of my obituary is going to be,” he says. “I hope there’s a second and third line.”

Germs – Vincenzo Ravina

It happened that Mallory MacLeod’s hands burst into flames. She was eager to avoid a virus going around her high school and had disinfected her hands “like five times” with alcohol-based Purell hand sanitizer before going to a chemistry class. It was her turn to light the Bunsen burner for the group. PHOOM.

“It just burned away the hand sanitizer and stopped, but my teacher was very concerned.”

MacLeod is now in her first year at Carleton University in Ottawa, studying Public Affairs and Policy Management. She has about five containers of Purell, one of which she carries in her bag wherever she goes. In her dorm, she disinfects her doorknobs with Lysol, “and I’ll go around disinfecting the doorknobs of anyone’s room I hang out in.”

MacLeod, and many others like her, do their level best to keep the germs away. There are Purell dispensers at the mall, disposable toilet seat covers in public washrooms and disinfecting wipes for your cart at Sobeys. Antibacterial soaps are as ubiquitous as the germs they kill. But is cleaner really better?

Let’s ask a science guy.

David Evans is a virologist in the Medical Microbiology & Immunology Department at the University of Alberta and he’s a really nice science guy. He was the only person in his field who deigned to respond to an interview request and he didn’t even get angry at me when I screwed up my time zone math and called him at 5 AM.

He says, “There’s this impression being created that somehow we have to sterilize the environment around us because that’s good for us.”

It isn’t, necessarily.

It seems that 99.99% of bacteria on every surface you touch is totally harmless – and some of it is actually good for you.

“Fecal material, contaminated poultry, someone going around sneezing… Those are all things that yes, you should be concerned about.” But you might not need that antibacterial stuff. “The major thing that you need to prevent transmission of a lot of these different things is to wash your hands and to clean down counters with regular hot and soapy water… [Antibacterial products have] no real advantages over just regular hygiene.”

Evans says all these cleaning products are “breeding paranoia amongst the general public and [getting] profits for the companies, quite frankly.”

MacLeod says, “Every time I touch something that’s not mine, every time I touch a door handle, I have to wash my hands or sanitize them.”

But, MacLeod insists she’s not a germaphobe, “I just like to keep everything clean.”

Paul Freeman is a professor of psychology at Saint Mary’s University. “Mysophobia” is the actual word for what everyone means when they say “germaphobia.” It is the fear of contamination or illness or germs. But in order for something to be considered a phobia, it has to be actively detrimental and affect your ability to function.

“The person who’s got the bottle of Purell in their purse and they’re washing their hands fourteen times a day with it, it’s probably no big deal for them to do that… they just feel that they’re being cautious. They’re able to function perfectly normally, but they may be more preoccupied than their neighbour.”

However, Freeman, like Evans, has concerns about the ever-spreading germ paranoia. Freeman says companies like Purell, in order to create and maintain a market for their products, create fear, which has resulted in a very germ paranoid culture.

“All of those messages get out there in more subtle ways. It’s not just fear mongering in advertising, but it’s the more subtle: ‘We’re telling you, here’s the paper towel dispenser with the motion sensor, here’s the sink that you don’t have to touch. There’s something to be afraid of here.’”

Not to mention that making the world so clean might be making us all soft like eggs.

“Why is there so much peanut allergy amongst children now?” asks Evans. “It didn’t exist when I was a child… You will never see Crohn’s disease or asthma or peanut allergies in central Africa… What we have done in the Western world is we have created an environment that is so clean that our immune system is twiddling its thumbs, saying ‘What in the world can I do?’”

Evans stresses that the “hygiene hypothesis” is unproven, but it sounds logical to him. The idea is, without exposure to a fun battery of bacteria, our immune systems are overreacting. We may be over-cleaning and it may be doing us harm.

“Some germs are not bad for you,” says Evans, “and a little exposure, in the long run, might actually be good for your immune system.”

It’s working out for Mallory MacLeod, however. She’s only been sick once this year. It was when she forgot her disinfecting wipes upon going home to Cape Breton for Christmas and she says she wasn’t able to sanitize everything.

She says her habits are becoming more common. “A lot of people ask me for hand sanitizer and not a lot of people seem to find it as weird [anymore], if I’m disinfecting their doorknobs.”