Es el segundo dia de los muertos. (It's the second Day of the Dead.) With that in mind, I bring you this:
A few years ago, my father insisted that I write a will. Of course, I didn't want to, but I'm glad I did. What interested me more, however, than what would happen to my, shall we say modest, wealth is what will happen to me. To wit: I've specified that I don't want a funeral and that I want to donate my body for medical research.
But whatever happens, my body will have to be transported. I didn't mention that, but now I know how I want it to be brought from wherever to whichever research facility. For that, I have Isabelle Plumereau to thank.
She runs "The Sky and the Earth," a small funeral home in Paris. Her brainchild is the "corbicyclette." The name says it all: It's a portmanteau of "corbillard" and "bicyclette," the French words for "hearse" and "bicycle." Essentially, it's a cargo bicycle designed to carry full-size coffins.
Plumereau says she is trying to bring environmentally sustainable practices to the funeral industry. She also had, however, other motivations when she created her vehicle for the "final journey." For one thing, it "allows for a slow, silent, quiet procession, to the rhythm of the steps of the people who walk behind and who make the procession."
That comment reminded me of a conversation with a neighbor who's studying to be a funeral director. As he described some aspects of the job, I realized why they're called "directors:" a funeral is as much a performance and a production as anything staged in the Globe or on Broadway--or done in the classroom. Plumereau seems to understand that; if anything, from the comment I quoted, I'd liken her to a choreographer.
Another motivation for her was the aesthetics of the vehicle itself. "I am as attached to the form as I am to the content," she explained. "For me, it is very important to accompany the families by proposing to put meaning in the ceremony, but also by proposing to put beauty. Because beauty is also what will bring comfort."
I wonder whether she feels the way I do about typical funeral hearses: They disturb me, not only because they carry dead people, but because they're just so ostentatiously intimidating in their appearance.
While Isabelle Plumereau's "corbicyclette" is the first of its kind in France; it's not the first in the world: A few similar bicycle-hearses exist in Denmark and the United States. But a funeral home, however small, using such a vehicle in a city as prominent as Paris--and in a country like France which, like other European countries, has an aging population--may well influence others, in her own city and country and others.
Oh, by the way, the corbicyclette has an electric assist to help its operator up hills. Still, I have to give Ms. Plumereau and anyone else using such a vehicle "props." (I was going to say that I'd be "eternally grateful" but that's, well, somewhere I felt I couldn't go if I'm going to continue calling this blog "Midlife Cycling!")
