Every Tuesday, The duty offers a space to the creators of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in the magazine Freedomissue 341 (winter 2024).
The phone ringing echoes through the sleeping house. Still clinging to sleep, I feel that this is one of those news which cannot wait, and which is rarely good; when I call my aunt back, my presentiment is confirmed. She said to me, moved at the same time as full of the necessary courage: “You no longer have a grandmother. »
“Did you get to see her?” » Lucienne passed away in the night, alone, sitting in the middle of the small impersonal room she occupied in a long-term care center on the South Shore, in the Quebec region. When she was found dead, the care staff immediately contacted, in addition to the family, the company with which my grandmother had made her funeral arrangements.
When my aunt showed up at the center, before seven in the morning, her mother’s remains were already stored in a refrigerated warehouse somewhere in the suburbs, out of sight, in the limbo of the quiet commerce of death.
I later found my aunt at her home, after settling a few obligations and traveling the six hundred kilometers that separate me from my place of birth. It has been three days since Lucienne died, and I decide to contact the funeral home: I would like to see, touch, cry – make a gesture to ward off loneliness.
The receptionist told me that it would only be possible for me to see the remains if it was the subject of an embalming procedure, because of the state of deterioration in which it is given the time that has passed since the death. Offered by the company for a few thousand dollars, this procedure is a service my grandmother didn’t specify she wanted to receive — she didn’t want to be exposed.
End of the story: none of her loved ones will see Lucienne again, or rather her remains, before the urn containing her ashes is presented to the family a few weeks later. No one, moreover, expressed the need or was moved in this case by the fleeting traces of death in our lives. “In Quebec, that’s how we live. » A corpse is not “capable of appropriation” and does not constitute “property”. The goods offered by funeral directors are peripheral services for the corpse of which they have legal possession: transport, storage, embalming, organization of events, etc.
Still according to the Quebec Civil Code, “no one may offer or claim to offer a funeral service unless they hold a funeral services business permit.” The relatives of a deceased person are therefore required, as part of the interpretation of that person’s last wishes, to do business with a funeral company accredited by the State.
Furthermore, as funeral home employees are the only people authorized to practice post-mortem care (with obtaining an embalming permit), any care carried out on a corpse by a person not authorized by the State therefore risks fall under the definition of “harm to the body before its disposal”, a criminal offense punishable by five years of imprisonment. This means that the material and ritual care of remains almost necessarily falls within the commercial domain (even if it is in a cooperative framework).
So, my grandmother’s corpse does not belong to me or to the cooperative with which she did business during her lifetime. However, after his death, the funeral cooperative in question was in legal possession of the remains, and was therefore authorized to decide on the parameters defining the required dignity. In this case, exposing his body to the eyes of a loved one in the state of deterioration in which it was at the time I expressed the desire to see it would potentially have constituted an outrage or indecency.
Basically, despite the brutal break that I felt, my grandmother’s transition from person to corpse took place in accordance with her vision of things, which is, I believe, common to the majority of people in Quebec. . But I cannot help but wonder about the state of our collective relationship not simply to death, which would have become an abstract experience distant from us, but also to the know-how linked to life and death. .
In the current conditions of the organization of our lives, for most of us, thinking that we could take charge of the care of our dead undoubtedly appears unrealistic and incredibly tedious. I’m in. And yet, in the existential gap between a woman speaking to the receptionist of a funeral cooperative from one side of the river and the body of her grandmother resting in a refrigerated warehouse on the other, this choice of a general delegation to the market of dignity and state alienation of the most fundamental know-how are revealed in all their strangeness.