Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is a dark and moving, if somewhat unsteady, young adult novel by Cherie Dimaline, acclaimed Métis author of the award-winning The Marrow Thieves. This story of loss and longing is part ghost story, part coming-of-age tale, part healing journey, and, as such, it covers much thematic ground. Poignant and, at times, gritty explorations of grief, love, identity, sexuality, storytelling, and home will resonate with adolescent readers. Readers will also appreciate Dimaline’s prose style which is hauntingly crisp and evocative. Fresh similes, original turns-of-phrase, and innovative characterization make for a vivid telling of a young girl’s journey to find her place in this world and help to create a cast of quirky and compelling supporting characters while she does so.

Funeral Songs of Dying Girls is a good book, and, while it does not maintain the narrative steadiness and cohesion that some young readers might need, it is well-written and offers a hopeful message that life includes death, but it need not be defined by it—that living includes remembering the past while simultaneously letting it go.

The story features 16-year-old Winifred Blight who lives a loner life in an apartment above the administrative offices at Winterson Cemetery with her father, Thomas Blight, the cemetery’s crematory operator. Mary Bax Kalder, Winifred’s mother, “a mixed-blood woman from the Georgian Bay” (p. 7), passed away during childbirth, leaving Mr. Blight to raise their daughter on his own. It is here in the Winterson Cemetery that Winifred’s mother’s ashes remain—some are buried in the graveyard and some are kept in a small case under Winifred’s father’s bed.
Winterson Cemetery is also where Winifred has grown up and where her father has grown farther away. The cemetery is a place of loss and longing, but, for Winifred, it is also a place of connection—the only place she knows as home and the only place she almost has her mother. The problem is, the cemetery is facing financial hardship, and so Mr. Ferguson, the manager, is considering cutting costs by outsourcing cremations, which would leave Mr. Blight without a job and the small family without their home.

Thus, the central conflict of the story is established. Underneath this tension, however, are a host of other issues including OCD tendencies, boy trouble, sexual curiosity, and feeling like an outsider. Some readers may find these minor conflicts interesting and effective at fleshing out Winifred’s character, but other readers may find that their inclusion feels obligatory, like there is a checklist of teenage issues that YA literature should include. Herein lies some of the book’s unsteadiness—it feels like it is trying to do too much given its brevity and its other, weightier thematic concerns. Nonetheless, the reader will certainly want to read on to find out whether Winifred and her father will be able to hold on to their home and the loss and love associated with it.

As the house crisis continues, talk of ghost sightings at Winterson Cemetery emerges. This talk catches the interest of the shady, ghost sighting tour owner-operator Chess Isaacs. Spotting a chance for easy money, Isaacs approaches Ferguson to establish a business partnership. Given the difficult financial situation the cemetery is facing, Ferguson agrees to let Isaacs add Winterson to their “Toronto Haunted Ghost Tour”. Of significance, and unknown to Winifred at this time, is the fact that the two previous ghost sightings were actually Winifred wandering the grounds—once when she was younger wearing a costume and more recently wearing her mother’s old dress.

While the business negotiations are taking place, Winifred visits the ‘Peak’—an area of the cemetery grounds that overlooks a ravine—to contemplate the ghost sightings. While there, she calls out to her dead mother:

“Mom, if you are here, really here, can you let me know?” I looked around. Maybe I should close my eyes for this. I snapped them shut and tried again.

“Because if you’re here, you need to let me know, please. There’s this man and he wants to bring tourists through. I don’t want to sell you out or anything, but there’s a chance it could mean me and Dad can stay. With you, at Winterson.” (p. 78)

Despite her cries, Winifred’s mother does not come; however, someone else does, and “whoever this was, they were not alive” (p. 80). Dimaline’s powers of description at this moment are at full force. As the apparition advances, so too does the reader’s feeling of dread and terror. The pacing of the approach is terrifyingly perfect, and the explanation of Winifred’s fear is horrifically evocative:

A fear like that lets you know we are all just a pair of pants and a utensil away from being feral. If I could have scratched through the wall I would have. I lost even the understanding of language in that moment, the soft mechanics of syllable and hard r. Panic rolled over the floors of my linguistic factory like acid, eating everything, corroding the rest. All I had was the scream. (p. 87)

Turns out, the apparition is Philomene Elliot (Phil), characterized with Dimaline’s combination of harsh realism and whimsy as possessing eyes “dark as dead stars” and a “half smile that was both defiant and comforting in its humanity” (p. 98). When alive, Phil was a young indigenous girl with a loving family, who got caught up in the wrong crowd when she tried to make her own way in Toronto. Just as she was ready to return to her family home, she met her fateful end—here in the ravine, at the bottom of the Peak at the Winterson Cemetery where she first appears to Winifred. Winifred is shaken by this meeting but also quickly considers that Phil might be the answer to her troubles: “Then a thought occurred to me—that maybe my dad’s job and our home were safe for now. With a real ghost around the tours could actually work…Now all I needed was for her to show up when Chess’s tours came by…” (p. 100). Recognizing the difficulty of “train[ing] a ghost to appear on schedule” (p. 100), she reaches out to her less than reliable, less than honest cousin, Penny. Penny fancies herself a clairvoyant, but she is also unscrupulous. Winifred knows of this duality but is willing to do whatever is necessary to stay at Winterson. However, after initially reaching out to Penny, Winifred and Phil forge a bond which causes Winifred to second guess the possibility of using Phil.

The bond between the girls is built through the sharing of stories of death, pain, desire, and love. In these sections, told via flashbacks, Dimaline’s focus falters somewhat. Though Phil is a fascinating character, creatively rendered as fully ghost and fully teenage girl, her stories about her struggles in Toronto feel slightly superfluous. While reading them, some younger readers may feel impatient to get back to the story proper and may wrestle to recognize their significance in relation to Winifred’s situation. Nonetheless, Phil’s stories do serve a narrative purpose, for through them and through the act of storytelling, Winifred begins to understand longing and living in new ways. Most importantly, her longing for the freedom to feel alive in a world made up of death and loss and grief is awakened. Over the course of the summer, Phil regularly visits Winifred, and their bond, no matter how unbelievable, is real. Though, as Winifred’s relationship with Phil intensifies, so too does her desire to put an end to the plan for Penny to use Phil.

However, it is too late. When the first tour bus arrives, Penny—dressed in a “borrowed buckskin dress” and banging a “shop-bought drum” (p. 216)—has already set up her show in the cemetery and is summoning Phil. This invocation causes Phil pain, and when Phil learns about Winifred’s role in the plan to use her, she is devastated. That night, Phil visits Winifred and reveals the suffering her actions have caused:

It was Phil and her grief, her betrayal, her zero-to-sixty dead-girl rage. I covered my face with both my arms and tried to offer her tantrum haunt a clothesline of apology draped between my isolation and hers—

I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry

But she offered no ears with which to hear me. (p. 217)

Desperate to make things right with Phil, Winifred devises a plan to expose Penny and Chess Isaacs as frauds. Winifred once again acts as ghost—this time purposefully, as she dons her mother’s clothes and hides near the bottom of the ravine prior to the bus tour’s arrival. At this point, the reader is in the know, which deflates the tension before it has a chance to grab hold—another moment of unsteadiness on Dimaline’s part as the climax of the story falls a little flat. Predictably, Penny begins her invocation, and Winifred jumps into action, ringing bells, illuminating herself with a flashlight, and running into the tourists’ full view. Just then, Winifred’s father emerges, and, seeing the figure of his late wife, lets out a cry of hope: “Oh, Mary. Mary!” (p. 247). As the cry echoes off the ravine walls, he closes in on the figure who is, of course, Winifred. With this discovery, the whole charade comes undone and, with it, Mr. Blight’s and Winifred’s pain of living with and living like the dead is finally laid to rest.
Though the pacing of the conclusion is too fast, Dimaline wraps up the various narrative threads neatly. In the end, Mr. Blight decides it time to move on, Winifred grows excited to join the land of the living, and Phil returns to say goodbye. Together, Winifred and her father pack up their apartment and head to a small plot of land in British Columbia, but not before they make a brief stop at Georgian Bay to scatter the ashes of her dead, but never forgotten, mother.

Funeral Songs for Dying Girls is not perfect in its narrative construction, but readers will certainly find the characters engaging and the central conflict compelling. With beautiful, biting prose, Dimaline’s tale of loss and love will challenge its readers to consider how the past can haunt the present if we let it. The book’s dark, mature themes make this a serious young adult novel that adults will also appreciate.