SALON DE LA MORT
Changing how we think about death
When her adoptive grandmother died in a Montreal hospital, it fell to Phoudsady Vanny, only 24 at the time, to plan her funeral.
The end had been swift and, thrown headlong into a role for which she was unprepared, she felt vulnerable, rushed and inadequately advised as she made decisions in a haze of grief.
She selected the funeral home only because it was near the hospital. Her grandmother had left no instructions beyond not wishing to be exposed and wanting a simple funeral. The rest was up to her.
She chose an expensive casket because it was, after all, to be her grandmother’s final resting place.
“I had an unlimited budget because my love for her was limitless,” Vanny, now 45, said in an interview this month. “And it was the last thing I could do for her.”
But ultimately the event was not the celebration she would have liked to mark the departure from this world of someone who had meant so much to her.
The experience stayed with her and was a factor in her decision two decades later to organize Quebec’s first Salon de la mort “to help people be ready for something that will happen to all of us.”
The event, taking place Saturday and Sunday at the Palais des Congrès de Montréal, brings together more than 80 exhibitors; it includes speakers, a space for contemplation and an area in which rituals around death in different cultures are described — intended “as a way of opening people to death and to talking about it.”
Many procrastinate about planning what comes when they die.
“They say they won’t be there or that it’s up to their kids to do the planning,” Vanny said. “But if we shirk the responsibility, it’s because we’re in denial.”
As someone who calls herself “passionate about death,” she has always spoken of the subject with her five children, ages five to 19, as her parents did with her.
“Living with a conscious awareness that you can die any day leads one to remember gratitude so that you are less likely to hurt those around you,” she said.
By organizing the Salon de la mort, “I want people to find a place to talk about the sadness and the fear so many feel about death and if they have questions about what steps to take to ask them. I want them to know there are many choices.”
Vanny believes people want events marking the end of their lives to say something about themselves.
People are becoming “a bit more daring ” in planning end-of-life celebrations, said Bridget Fetterly of Kane & Fetterly, a family-owned funeral home in Montreal.
“It’s a trend starting to happen in our industry,” she said.
As a funeral director, “I have always had a love of being with people and trying to help people,” she said. But she observed some people would come for cremation services, then ask for the ashes, saying they would “take care of the rest themselves.
“And so we said, ‘Let’s start an events division for people who want to do something a little different, but don’t want to step into a funeral home and deal with a funeral director.’”
AlaVida, as it is known, launched in September 2017 with a team of freelance event planners she assembled who do not work in the funeral industry.
Fetterly, 51, is accustomed to helping others in their grief. But when her mother died that August, she needed help. Lise Fetterly had devoted her life to figure skating and coaching; her daughter, an only child, knew she wanted to celebrate her mother’s figure-skating life, but in her grief “it was difficult to put my thoughts together.”
So she turned to the AlaVida team. The event planner rented the indoor rink at 1000 de la Gauchetière, brought in sleds, a park bench and a lamppost and set up a memorial table with the urn containing her mother’s ashes and photos of her in her figure-skating years. Family and friends skated together to her mother’s favourite waltzes and watched a dazzling routine by a professional skater. Her teenage son’s friends were there. “To me, they are part of the family.”
The event was catered and there were Christmas decorations for guests in the form of a pair of small skates. A photographer captured scenes, including a quiet moment of her seated with her husband and their son. “I am going to treasure that for life,” she said.
When the master of ceremonies announced Bridget would take one last skate with her mother, she took the urn and slowly skated around the rink; whoever wished to skate skated behind her. Usually “kind of shaky” on skates, “for some reason that day I was so solid on my skates,” she said. “I was so grounded.”
She said guests, who hadn’t known what to expect, “left feeling joy.” They’d been participants, not spectators. “It was all very comforting. The next day, I woke up with a smile on my face. I was peaceful and happy that I was able to pay tribute to her the way I did. I felt I had really honoured her.”
AlaVida events can take place anywhere, from a garden to an art gallery, and can also celebrate the life of someone who is still alive. It’s not necessary they be planned in a rush, Fetterly said, “but what is important is having the conversation.”
A series of short videos called The Conversation, in which people speak with loved ones about how they wish to celebrate the end of their life, accompanied the AlaVida launch. Such a conversation, she said, can eliminate disagreements between family members after a death, when people feel fragile and emotional.
“I want to encourage the conversation between family members — talking about it in advance. You have the conversation and then you go on living and you’re more at peace with living because it’s out of the way.
“We want to get people comfortable talking about it. We are all going to die. We just don’t know when.”